Australia's World Cup-winning scrum-half George Gregan joined Joe Molloy and Keith Wood on Off the Ball for Wednesday Night Rugby.
The two former players were looking back on the great Australian team that won the 1999 World Cup and beat the touring Lions side of 2001.
George Gregan laid out some of the aspects of what he felt made that particular Australia side so good.
"If you want to be a great team, you have to be able to win away from where you are comfortable, so if you can win away from your back yard where you are not comfortable, you are well and truly on the path to being potentially a great team."
Gregan also says the appetite of the team for 'pressure moments' helped make them great.
"We won a lot of test matches in that time by very small margins, and that is not because we were more skilful but because we were more consistent in those pressure moments, and you looked forward to them - the pressure moments.
"That was a hallmark of that team was how consistent we were and how we went about things."
Never felt as much pressure
The memories for Gregan are fond, for Wood they are anything but, playing Australia at the turn of the century was a far from pleasant experience.
"I found playing against that particular Australia team, 1998, 1999 2000, 2001," recalls Wood. "I played a few tests and lost all of them apart from the first Lions test in 2001.
"I’ve never felt as much pressure in a game as I did in those games because I felt ye (to Gregan) knew, I’m not saying ye knew everything we knew, but ye seemed to be a step ahead an awful lot of the time.
"From a forward's perspective ye didn’t have a good scrummaging pack. I mean ye were a poor scrummaging pack, but ye were magnificent cheaters in the scrum and your ability to drop a scrum and tie your shoelaces was a throwback.
"It was amazing because ye had get hammered in the scrum then for some reason you’d get totally on top for one or two scrums in the whole game. It was like the pack knew they could only focus on a couple."
The scrums were bad, but as hooker, the lineouts were far worse according to Wood.
"In the lineouts, I found for me it was horrendous. Eales in the second row, and a lot of the time he wasn’t even being lifted he would jump on his own.
"So they would lift the other two guys at the front and the back so it was like threading a needle trying to find your man.
"Psychologically for me that was where I was at my most vulnerable, it was against Australia trying to thread that needle.
"I thought you were really well-coached in that period of time but as a group of players, they seemed to be incredibly focused all the time.
"Australia played so simplistically so consistently well all the time, You (Gregan) referred to that consistency but I just felt like you just didn’t make many mistakes.
"I remember I lost three line outs in the World Cup in 1999 against Australia, I could have lost twelve. They were an inch away from every single ball into the lineout and I was just thinking to myself at every lineout, 'this is not where I want to be.'
"I just felt the amount of pressure you were putting on players individually and as a team was extraordinary."
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