Succumbing to their first loss in Super W history, Waratahs wing Mahalia Murphy has described her team as a wounded beast as they prepare to play rivals the Queensland Reds in their final regular season game on Saturday.
Falling to newcomers Fijiana Drua 29-10, Murphy believes the loss is good for her team, who were on a 21-game win streak prior to the clash and had yet to be truly threatened by opposition throughout the season.
"We needed that loss," Murphy told ESPN. "We've been so dominant for four years straight, so it's been good for us and it's only going to help us get better as well.
"Obviously no one wants to lose, but we all needed a really good challenge and we knew it was bound to come. A loss isn't really a loss for us, it's more for us to learn really, so we'll go back to training and pretty much go over the review and talk about what we could do better and hopefully we can fix all that up and walk away as the winners on Saturday."
Already booked in to face each other a week later in the semifinal, Saturday's game will give both sides a feel of the younger squads, a taste of what's to come and for the Tahs the opportunity to right their course ahead of the do-or-die clash.
"Definitely a wounded beast. It's always good playing against Queensland because they're a very experienced team as well and we come across them at the grand final. We haven't played them yet this year so it will be exciting to see where we are since both squads have fairly new girls."
With the Waratahs ready to bounce back even stronger following the loss, Reds captain Shannon Parry says her team are ready to face an even more determined opposition than they have previously.
"They'll definitely be coming back harder this week and it's a massive challenge for us to come down to Sydney and play them in the day," Parry told ESPN. "But that's what women's rugby is about, we want to play against the best and they've been the benchmark in Australian rugby for a number of years now.
"I think after a little blip in their radar or speed bump in their road last week. we will definitely see them come out firing this weekend."
Unwilling to unveil all that the team learnt from Fijiana's dismantling of the Tahs last week, Parry acknowledged there were several uncharacteristic errors from the Tahs that they hope to exploit this weekend as they look to book a home semifinal.
"I definitely think there's things that I guess were uncharacteristic of the Waratahs that we probably didn't expect them to do, but I guess for us that's down to our analysis and how we're actually going to go about meeting this weekend.
"Looking forward to this weekend, it's going to be a massive challenge for us to come down here to Sydney and tackle them."