Australia will not change style, says Michael Cheika despite England defeats

　　Australia’s ball-in-hand rugby was trumped by the guile and defensive grit of a counter-punching England in Melbourne but the Wallabies head coach, Michael Cheika, said he has no plans to alter his team’s playing style.

　　Australia lost the second Test 23-7 on Saturday and surrendered their first series to England on home soil with a game to spare, plunging the team into a bout of soul-searching eight months after reaching the World Cup final.

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　　The Wallabies were edged 39-28 in the Brisbane opener despite scoring four tries to three. In Melbourne they passed up all their chances to score from penalties in pursuit of tries but were kept scoreless for the last 45 minutes as their attacking forays washed harmlessly against England’s defensive wall.

　　With former players and pundits lamenting Australia’s lack of northern hemisphere reserve on Sunday, a defiant Cheika said his team would not divert from their playing style.

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　　“The temptation’s always [to] kick more,” Cheika said in Sydney, the final stop in the series. “And there will always be the concept of [we’re] naive not kicking more or playing to the way we want to play the game and backing ourselves.

　　“We’ll decide how we want to go from here, but we’re a team that has a really clear identity of how we want to play the game and we’ve just got to step up and do it better.”

　　Eddie Jones, the England head coach, has demanded his team sweep the series 3-0 with a ruthlessness befitting the world champions New Zealand. Now riding an eight-match winning sequence under the Australian, the confident Six Nations champions have leapfrogged the Wallabies to second in the world rankings.

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　　Cheika said he was “banking” on his players to lift themselves for the dead rubber in Sydney and deny his former Randwick team-mate further bragging rights.

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　　The 49-year-old has experience lifting the Wallabies out of a slump, having taken over a side in disarray both on and off the field at the end of 2014. The team endured their worst European tour in a decade in the early months of his tenure before they clicked last year to win the Rugby Championship and reach the World Cup final.

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　　“The hard times will give you the good times,” he said. “I know in 2014, when I first came in, we had that tour [of New Zealand and Europe] where we lost a few games and we got so much out of that for the next season. Now, guys are learning the hardship or the pain of this.

　　“They’ve got to make sure those scars are going to be healed only by ourselves, by playing better this weekend and for the rest of the season.”