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'It's like the British and Irish Lions': Brumbies coach reacts to historic victory over Blues
By Henry Lee at Eden Park, Auckland
Wins at Eden Park for the Brumbies don’t come around often, every 12 years in fact, after Stephen Larkham’s side broke a long losing drought on Friday evening.
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Ryan Lonergan’s winning penalty was the difference for the Brumbies, who only led for just 44 seconds in the match in Auckland.
The Brumbies last won at Eden Park in 2013, making this victory even more special for Larkham’s side.
Larkham was more than pleased with his team’s resilience in the second half, keeping the Blues scoreless in the second 40.
“We’ve had a tough start to the season with our travel and to beat the Blues in Eden Park is very rare for us, it’s like the British and Irish Lions, it comes around every 12 years,” Larkham told media post-match.
“2001 and 2013, now 2025 so we knew there was an opportunity for us at halftime, the way that we were playing in the first half and we knew that the Blues were a little bit wounded coming into this game.
“Then Beauden (Barrett) didn’t come back out for the second half and a few other changes there.”
The Brumbies head coach explained that their set game plan didn’t change at halftime despite being down ten points, saying that the message was clear.
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“We sort of had a pretty clear plan on how we were going to come out of our own half. We actually struggled for large parts of that second half, just getting out of our sort of area, just inside our 50.
“It was sort of a bit of a ding-dong battle there. For a while, we knew that we didn’t want to give them access inside our half, and we worked really hard at trying to keep them down here.”
Larkham said that as most of the Brumbies squad were part of the team that lost last year’s Super Rugby Pacific semi-final at Eden Park, they were going to celebrate tonight.
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“We’re going to celebrate.
“Obviously, we’ve got Fiji Drua next week back in Canberra on a seven-day turnaround and we know how difficult they are, and we’ve got a few players back this weekend, so sort of back to full strength there.
“So it’s not a game that we can take lightly, but like I said, every 12 years is something special, and we’ll certainly celebrate this and make sure we recover really well tonight.
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That’s a high number of turnovers, maybe that was a key to the game.
Oh dear, like the B & I Lions? Seriously? Trauma worse than we all thought lol.
You didn’t get it? 2001… 2013… 2025!
If it was a big game his line would go down in history as something like “a win at Eden Park is as rare as playing against the BIL”.. as it is I don’t think the game has much relevance being an expected tight game but that just highlights how tough a repeat fixture later in the competition will be.