Bledisloe Cup: Wallabies coach Joe Schmidt rues yellow cards and fatigue after 28-14 loss to New Zealand

‘Frustration’ was the word of the night for Wallabies coach Joe Schmidt, who rued costly yellow cards at vital times as they lost a record 11th-straight Bledisloe Cup Test.

New Zealand’s unbeaten run over their trans-Tasman rivals will stretch into a sixth year after their 28-14 win over the Wallabies at Optus Stadium.

The margin did not quite tell the full tale of the tape, with the Wallabies in the fight for most of the game, and when Len Ikitau’s try made it a six-point game with less than 15 minutes to go, it felt like game on.

But ultimately, the scoreboard does not lie at the end of the day and on a night when the penalty count was 14-14, Australia’s two yellow cards took their toll over the course of the 80 minutes — even if they did win those 20 shorthanded minutes 3-0 thanks to a Tane Edmed penalty.

Tom Hooper and Ikitau’s sin-binnings were compounded by Will Skelton’s failed head injury assessment in the opening quarter of an hour, which cost the Wallabies one of their best forwards.

Hooper’s yellow card in particular was particularly gut-wrenching, as it saw Allan Alaalatoa’s go-ahead try scrubbed out.

“It’s frustrating not to get the result. It’s frustrating to get back into the game again with 10 to go. Two yellow cards, the first one was really costly, we’d engineered a try, worked really hard to get it,” Schmidt said.

“We lost Tom Hooper to a yellow card. We lost Will Skelton, it was very early in the game. I felt the team were gritty again. We won that yellow card period 3-0, at the time we were 7-6 down; we could have been 13-7 up.

“We just didn’t get a whole lot of luck, but at the same time, I’ve been doing this for a long time — you’ve got to earn your luck, you’ve got to make your luck and we didn’t quite make enough.”

The New Zealand Test in Perth was the Wallabies’ 10th since early July and Schmidt felt fatigue caught up with his team in the second half.

“A lot goes into a game like that with your mental preparation and your emotional energy, so it is fatiguing and I think for players on the back of that 10-match block, they’ve hung in really well,” he said.

“They’ve still brought a lot of energy to training and into the game. Maybe not the accuracy we were looking for tonight, but it’s probably frustrating. It didn’t feel like we were that far away, even though it’s 28-14.

“We made as many line breaks, if not more, than they did. It certainly didn’t, didn’t look like we got beaten in terms of our effort at all, but just a few times our accuracy — and part of that accuracy cost us two yellow cards.

“They take a toll, because they then you’re using more energy than you want to be in those periods and certainly the second one with Len Ikitau, that was at a crucial time in the game and and it made it very tough.”