Argentina vs Austalia: Marcos Ayerza trusts Pumas’ speed to give Wallabies runaround in Rugby World Cup semi-final

We’re not scared to play with width, insists Argentina No 1

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Anyone with a legitimate claim to being the world’s best prop is, almost as much by definition as tradition, suspicious of the phrase “expansive rugby”. Front-row forwards were put on this earth to engage in the “battle beyond the scoreboard”, as the Argentine maestro Marcos Ayerza put it, not race around after the bright young things in the back division.

Yet Ayerza, who has been the number one No 1 at international level since succeeding Rodrigo Roncero on the loose-head side of the Puma scrum after the last global gathering in New Zealand in 2011, is completely at home with his country’s new approach to the attacking game: a flexible, multidimensional brand of rugby rooted in high skill levels and played at pace across the wide open prairies, as Ireland found to their astonishment in last weekend’s quarter-final at the Millennium Stadium.

“You have to do a lot of running,” said the man from Buenos Aires with a slight roll of the eyes, “but it’s nice to find yourself running forward in support of people in front of you, rather than backwards to clean out a ruck. Traditionally, we have played a hard, strong, committed and confrontational style, but it is true that we are now capable of playing more expansively and with great skill. We are trying to find equilibrium, because I think a combination of the two will show us at our best.”

All of which begged the obvious question: having befuddled the Irish with the freedom of their rugby in Cardiff, might the Pumas be tempted to rein themselves in against Australia in Sunday’s semi-final at Twickenham? After all, the Wallabies are as comfortable as any side in the world when it comes to a runaround.

“We’re not scared to play with width,” Ayerza responded. “If we want to play to our strengths, we have to use our quick backs and get everyone involved in a dynamic, open style of rugby. We trust ourselves to do that now, to be competitive even against sides like Australia and the All Blacks. We have a lot of improving still to do, but this is definitely the start of something for us.”

Ayerza is a man of surprises: there cannot be too many scrummagers of his calibre who spend their downtime playing Bach and Chopin on the piano. But in some respects, he is a front-rower to the core. Like all the great Puma sharp-enders, he finds eternal truths in the darkened recesses of the set piece.

“The Wallabies have had a big change of mindset at the scrum,” he said, laying this transformation firmly at the door of his old Puma colleague Mario Ledesma, the revered hooker who left a coaching job in French club rugby to help the Australians in their area of greatest need. “Instead of the set piece being simply a platform to put the ball in play, Mario has made it a platform of psychological domination from which to attack. You could see that in the way they scrummaged against England.

“I like the scrum to be a proper battle, with two teams trying to test themselves rather than just neutralise things. Teams should come to the scrum to play, not just to get away with it. We will certainly do that because this is a World Cup semi-final. I just hope our passion and mindset don’t work against us and leave us drained. We approach every game emotionally and that can be mentally consuming. It is a big moment for us, but we can’t afford to be over-stressed.”