News

Henry focuses on hard work

August 12 2009

New Zealand face two must-win games if they are to sneak the Tri-Nations crown - with a bonus point requirement in one of them a virtual must - one of those games being against the Springboks who gave them two heavy beatings in South Africa.

While New Zealand did beat Australia in the opening match, it was a far from convincing performance, as were the two victories and the defeat at home to France in the June Tests.

With only two years to go until the Rugby World Cup, the knives are being sharpened in New Zealand for the long-serving coach, statistically the most successful in rugby history over such a long period of time.

But New Zealand are out of nothing yet, and Henry is still convinced he and his side can turn things round.

"We've done it before, we've just got to be positive and work hard and understand why we're in this situation," he said to Sportal.

"I'm pleased with where we're at but we're not going to be pleased until we perform.

"We've got to get it right today and we've got to do it right next week and play to a standard that we're happy with.

"The next one is always the pivotal game and in this case we're in a situation where we've lost two in a row, like we did last year, and it turns this into a pretty critical Test match."

It was under a hailstorm of high kicks that New Zealand eventually floundered in South Africa, but while there has been some work done on that this week, Henry has already turned to coaching specifically against the Wallabies' threats.

"It'll be different to what it was in South Africa," he said.

"We're playing a different opposition and they've got different strengths and weaknesses.

"We're always tinkering with it a wee bit and we'll tinker with it again in Sydney.

"We've been working on line-outs, high ball, a bit of scrum channelling and the clean out. They were the things that we thought were our major challenges on the South African tour.

Australia, having lost the first two of their scheduled six matches, were bullied into submission in the rainbow nation just as much as New Zealand were, despite scoring two tries to South Africa's one.

"I didn't think they got the bounce of the ball which made it difficult," said Henry about Australia's defeat in Cape Town.

"But I thought they were pretty competitive.

"At this level of the game, when you're playing the best opposition in the world, you are going to have some challenges, and we've got some challenges.

"We've got a tight five at the moment with two guys playing in their first season of international rugby and they're finding it challenging. We haven't got the dominance up front as we'd hoped and hopefully we can rectify that.

"It's always challenging."