The Wallabies improved last year. We can’t say that about the last three weeks

July 19, 2026 — 5:33pm

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Rugby Australia (RA) has made some dubious claims of improvement, especially when high-performance director Peter Horne told this masthead at the start of July: “I’ve described last year as a good year, but a bad month.”

Using that metric, the Wallabies have just had a stellar July – apart from the two weeks against Ireland and France.

That just doesn’t wash, and the Wallabies needed two wins out of three to plausibly claim they improved during July.

There is no doubt that Joe Schmidt improved the Wallabies when he arrived, albeit off a historically low base following the Rugby World Cup shambles.

He is a quality coach, and he inherited a squad in disrepair. But that doesn’t give RA free rein to sympathetically mark its own homework when the punters know the Wallabies needed to beat an Ireland side at........

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