30 Sept 2021
Recent Form
The Rugby Championship is done and dusted and although New Zealand are on course to take a Grand Slam victory, it’s the Wallabies that may be the happiest team to come out of the competition, provided they pick up another win here.
It was a relatively poor 2019 World Cup by Australian standards, and the rebuild for 2023 had shown very few signs of momentum until this month.
Back-to-back victories over World Champions South Africa followed by a convincing win over Los Pumas has reinstalled some faith in the side, and one man is largely to thank for that upturn in form.
Quade Cooper has returned at five-eighth and has been a far more secure and reliable player than ever, while the return of James O’Connor to the bench has seen Dave Rennie roll back the years slightly.
O’Connor’s Reds teammate Jordan Petaia returns to the starting line-up to complete a back line that is beginning to jell nicely and cause their visitors numerous problems.
Australia -16 Point Handicap
Things go from bad to worse for Argentina as not only have they now lost five consecutive test matches, scoring just three tries in that time, but they will now have to cope without six of their players and two of their coaching staff for this battle in Queensland after they made an unauthorised trip across the state boarder to New South Wales just days before this game.
Sebastián Cancelliere, Joaquín Díaz Bonilla, Felipe Ezcurra, Pablo Matera, Santiago Medrano and Santiago Socino will all miss out, and that lack of depth is the last thing this visiting squad needed.
Australia have won 15 of the 19 tests on home soil against Argentina, and while they’ve drawn two of their last three, they’ve proven over the course of this month that they are much more developed team than they were at the time of those stalemates last year.
The Wallabies looked a class above last week and with Los Pumas looking even weaker this time round on the Gold Coast, it’s hard to envisage anything other than a comfortable home victory, so the handicap line looks to be the strategy here.
PREDICTION:
AUSTRALIA -16 POINT HANDICAP
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