Davidson’s physical presence and damaging defence will be vital as the Blacks take on the well-structured Wanderers who can easily dominate possession.

“They’re very well organised, very structured in what the do, so there is not a lot of opportunities through mistakes,” Blacks co-coach Mick Hickling said of the Wanderers ahead of Saturday’s match at Newcastle No.2 Oval.

“They don’t drop much ball, they don’t turn over the ball very much. They hold onto the pill well, they dominate possession for long periods of games and they’ve got speed on the edges.

“We’ve got to look for a way to disrupt their continuity of ball and stop them from holding onto the ball for long periods of time which is what they are good at.

“We need to put pressure on with our defensive speed and the physicality of contact, rather than being able to steal ball at the breakdowns or cause disruptions once the tackle has been made.”

Last week’s bye round has enabled the Blacks to freshen up with the only injury cloud surrounding centre Chris Logan.

“We’re expecting Chris to play. He had an issue with his knee after the Hamilton game. It’s worked out a lot better than we initially thought. it was looking like he might need three or four weeks to recover,” he said.

Dave Curry, who has been in good form, was the unlucky player to make way for Davidson in the only change to personnel from the round 13 team which lost by 30 points to Hamilton.

Hickling said the Blacks had worked on their line-out and work at the breakdown over the extended break.

“The line-out has caused some troubles, so we worked on speed of executions of the ball into the line-out and working on a few variations,” he said. 

“We’re looking at moving the line up a little as to who stands where and the shape of formation.

“We also worked on a few things with the forwards, with the breakdown just providing nice clean ball for our halfbacks.

“We gave away a few penalties last game when we really couldn’t afford to, so we’ll work on our discipline in the breakdown too.”