Wallabies fear the Gray factor

South Africa's Scottish import, Richie Gray, is the biggest fear factor for Australia ahead of Saturday's Rugby Championship Test.

In the build-up to the Newlands showdown between the Springboks and the Wallabies, the mind-games have included accusations of line-out trickery, illegal maul tactics and blatant cheating at scrum time.

However, the Wallabies have made no secret of the fact that South Africa's most improved facet has been their breakdown game.

And that transformation has come as a result of the Scotsman, Gray, who has been working with the Boks as a breakdown specialist for the past two years.

Wallabies forwards coach Andrew Blades suggested Saturday's encounter in Cape Town could be the "biggest physical challenge of the year" for the Aussies.

Where once an Australian team could expect a back row dependent on size and brute force, the influence of the Scottish breakdown guru has turned the Boks into a very different beast.

"It really presents a lot more problems and it's a big change they've made in their game, how much pressure they put on at the breakdown," Blades said.

"It's probably the biggest change they've made in the last two years.

"I think they got 11 turnovers against the All Blacks [in Wellington a fortnight ago] around that area of the game, so it's a big focus now when you're playing them."

Although the All Blacks won 14-10, the Boks showed enough to ensure the Wallabies focused a lot more on the breakdown in the build-up to the Newlands showdown.

"Traditionally you would always say South Africa played with big back rows, so you would run them around and generally stretch yourselves and get a little isolated with the ball," Blades said.

"When you've had success against them in the past, it's been around those sorts of things, and the change of profile has created a major rethink about the way you play them."

A neck injury to Francois Louw - which will ruled him out for the rest of the Championship - will not lessen the threat.

Gray's influence means the Wallabies will have to deal with players attacking the ball at the breakdown all over the park this weekend.

"[Marcell] Coetzee is still there and [Duane] Vermeulen is getting better and better. Both their hookers are very good on the ball at the breakdown," Blades said, adding that wing Bryan Habana and centre Jan Serfontein were also developing reputations for their work over the ball.

"They've had Richie Gray there working intensively at that area and they see that. I think they identified it as a major area they could improve to get a point of difference."

Blades said the downside of the newfound-upside was "living on the edge" of the penalty count.

"When you're doing that you're living on the edge often, so you often give away a lot of penalties for not releasing the tackled player," he said.

"And when you really go hard at the ball, often you can get penalised heavily as well, and I guess that's one of the weaknesses from that point of view. Also when you're all going hard on the ball you can over-commit in rucks and leave the next defensive line short."

In the past, the Wallabies have thrown the ball wider to tire the big Bok forwards, but Blades says the answer now is to be more adept, and better equipped, to think on their feet.

"Because we want to run the ball teams play 14 [defenders] against us in the front line," the former Test prop said.

"So we're trying to work out the balance of when to run and when to kick.

"We want to be a very dangerous ball-in-hand team but also recognising when teams look to shut that down and leave a weakness somewhere else."

Sources: Sydney Morning Herald & AAP