Under-fire New Zealand coach Graham Henry has admitted that his team faces a long road and lots of hard work, following back-to-back defeats — with the latest being the 19-34 loss to Australia in Sydney on Saturday.

The All Blacks, despite dominating possession and winning more than 70 percent of the ball at the ANZ Stadium, failed to turn their massive advantage into points.

An extraordinary high error rate — 23 turnovers and 18 handling errors — saw the Wallabies outscore the Kiwis by four tries to three.

"Australia played very well and they should be congratulated," a gracious Henry said.

But he felt missed opportunities and mistakes were the big contributing factors.

"We did well to get back to 19-17 with 30 to go," he said of his team scoring two tries — on just before and one after the half-time break — to take the lead after trailing 5-17.

"However, we just couldn't maintain the tempo.

"We just kept turning the ball over," he said, adding that they "should have scored more points in the first half", when they totally dominated the game.

"We had some opportunities we didn't complete," Henry said.

"They (Australia) played well in their kicking game and we just kept turning the ball over. Maybe we underestimated their defence," he said of the hard-tackling Wallabies.

"But as I said, there we opportunities there and we didn't take them - so there are obviously things to work on.

"The main thing is to retain the ball, because at the breakdown we dropped a lot of ball and that wasn't good."

He said that this coming week, ahead of the return match against Australia in Auckland next Saturday, they will look at all the things which went wrong in Sydney.

"We'll try hard, but there's a lot of work to be done," Henry said.

365