Energysaving plan put to the test
It was in Paris last year, in their final game of the 2016 season, that the All Blacks hit the wall. They looked drained almost from as early as the second quarter of the first half and it was only one magical, opportunistic play by Beauden Barrett that enabled them to hang on to victory.
With the French almost certain to score two minutes after the break to go three points ahead, Barrett shot out of the line and intercepted Camille Lopez’s pass and charged 80 metres to score at the other end. It was a huge moment and had Barrett not got his timing right, the All Blacks may well never have won that test.
The All Blacks coaching staff could see their players were flat, devoid of energy and a shadow of the team they could be in that test at Stade de France. Steve Hansen came home and told the New Zealand Rugby board that his team “crawled over the line” and that there would have to be a major rethink about how they handled workloads in 2017.
They could not risk reaching November so short of gas in the tank again. They rode their luck in 2016 but might not get away with it again and one of the key goals for this year has been to end with three memorable performances in November against France, Scotland and Wales.
“Last year, I felt — actually we all did, the coaching and management group — that we were just hanging on,” Hansen told the Herald on Sunday earlier. “And a lot of that was because of the experience we had lost [in 2015]. If you look at it in a simple way, we lost four or five A-plus-plus guys after the World Cup.
“So our B-plus guys stepped in and that is not too big a jump. But you need your C guys to jump up to being B guys and that can be difficult. Our leaders shouldered a lot more responsibility than they normally would because we had Conrad [Smith], Ma'a [Nonu], Kevvy [Mealamu] on the off-field stuff in particular, Richie [McCaw] and Dan [Carter] not there.
“I think mentally that was taxing. I think we will be in better shape because we have had 12 months of getting those new guys more confident and settled. The big banana skin is nine weeks, seven tests and round the world twice with 10 time changes.
“So if we are going to do anything, that is the area we have to be smarter. We’ve got some ideas. How do we deal with the travel? How do we have some guys fresh? Can we do that by not making them go all the way around the world?”
Hansen felt that this season, with an extra test before the Lions series and two additional games on the end of year tour, was just too long to get through without actively restricting the game time of some of the senior players in particular.
A year on and the All Blacks are returning to Stade de France and Hansen’s strategy can be judged. His big hope is that the team he sends out for this test play with significantly more energy and dynamism than the one that was so jaded 12 months ago.
The difference this year is that the All Blacks were willing to rest and to some extent rotate players during the Rugby Championship. Argentina’s fall in quality created the opportunity for the All Blacks to mix things up selection-wise through September.
A handful of key men such as Sam Whitelock, Sam Cane, Aaron Smith, Ryan Crotty and Liam Squire were able to sit out those games against the Pumas and maybe the added bonus was that they didn’t even travel to Argentina. As much as it is time on the track that drains the legs, so too does the endless travel.
All this group, plus Kieran Read, Sonny Bill Williams, Rieko Ioane and Damian McKenzie who weren’t involved against the Barbarians, are expected to be in the team to play France and take the game to them for 80 minutes.
There will be no tolerance of anything passive or reactive from the All Blacks — the plan will be to be aggressive, energetic and get on the front foot early. They didn’t do that in Paris last year and almost paid the price. It is a mistake they don’t want to repeat.