Rugby World Cup 2015: If All Blacks fails against South Africa, let Australia win

Australian fans react to their team's win over Scotland. Photo / Getty Images

I know the All Blacks are going to win because I've had the vision.

It came to me recently and I witnessed it after the quarter-final again as I replayed the experience of seeing Julian Savea ruin the French defence like they did atolls in the Pacific.

So here's the thing. If it isn't them, if it goes pear-shaped for them on the weekend or in the final, I want, with the risk of upsetting the Herald's Dylan Cleaver, Australia to win it.

Argentina would be a weird kind of fairytale story, the kind they make TV movies about, and South Africa don't play rugby the way we like to think we want them to play all the time.

Michael Cheika's self-confidence has found its way into the fibre of the Wallabies squad.

Australia do and they deserve it. I spent Monday travelling to The Lensbury, where the Wallabies are based this week ahead of their tricky semifinal against the Argentines.

It was barely 12 hours after they escaped Scotland's challenge and coach Michael Cheika was on fire.

Bullish, honest and self-aware, the Wallabies coach has transformed this team simply by being himself. You can see it in the way they play but also how they are off the field.

There isn't an air of arrogance like there might have been in previous seasons, they're not number one in Australia - hell, they're probably lucky to be number four behind the NRL, A League, AFL and then there's swimming, cricket and Jarryd Hayne.

The financial health of the game in Australia has been struggling and the profile-generating win of the World Cup would be a shot in the arm that it needs and, indirectly, what the Rugby Championship and Bledisloe Cup could do with for the next four years.

Nothing like having a crowing Wallabies fan reminding you that they're the world champions to fire up for a fourth Bledisloe Cup test in Shanghai/Denver/Boston in 2018.

Cheika has cracked the code of unlocking their tools of pace and skill. He is a source of confidence that players know he is prepared to talk about them, defend and deflect attention for them. James O'Connor isn't there, Kurtley Beale is on his best behaviour and Quade Cooper's role has been marginalised.

Physically they've adapted to the loss of Will Skelton and to a lesser extent Wycliff Palu, and look at their scrum. Wow. Their much heralded scrum reclamation has been the find of the tournament, second only to the fact that not one Six Nations team managed to make the semifinals. They showed the blueprint of their winning style back in August in Sydney, a game so peculiar from the All Blacks and so impressive from the Wallabies it has many New Zealand fans still wondering what on earth was going on in that Bledisloe match.

Now the one that is interesting is that the Wallabies and the All Blacks apparently don't really get on, and the All Blacks certainly don't speak with the same kind of respect they do for the Springboks.

But you can understand that when a team beats you regularly like the All Blacks have you just would get sick of seeing them win and have to keep them at a distance to motivate you just a little more.

Having said all that I really want to them to get beaten by Argentina and we beat the South Americans a week later so you can sit down next to a Wallabies fan in New York/London/Beijing for Bledisloe VII in 2018 and remind them that we're the first team to go back-to-back in World Cups, and that they lost to the Pumas in a World Cup semifinal.