Reckless abandon
The Chiefs first-five was reckless when the game required some restraint.
Why McKenzie must be reined in
Cometh the hour, cometh the mistakes from Damian McKenzie and the inevitable sense that for every game he wins, there will be another he throws away.
He probably gets a little tired of feeling he is so readily blamed when things don’t go right but that is probably forever going to be his lot.
It is certainly going to be his fate if he starts a game with a mistake that costs his side seven points.
The Chiefs will locate multiple areas where they failed to deliver against the Hurricanes on Friday: Their lineout wobbled too often, their scrum couldn’t find the dominance it was after, Gareth Evans and Ricky Riccitelli cleaned up at the breakdown, and the backline lacked a sharpness in their passing.
But many of their issues seemed to be tied up in McKenzie’s cavalier approach and more specifically the intercept pass he threw in the first minute that led to Julian Savea’s try.
That one pass told not only the story of the night but to some extent the story of McKenzie’s career to date. These long, inaccurate passes have become a feature of his game.
He threw a shocker against the Wallabies last year in Dunedin that led to Israel Folau scoring. He had another bad one against the Crusaders in Christchurch this year and it was a little alarming that he threw one more in Wellington.
Alarming because McKenzie, it seems, can’t find the ability to adjust — to find even a modicum of restraint to ensure his attacking instincts don’t become as much a weakness as a strength. And that is the problem with his game — there is no sense of him having accepted that he might need to dial back a touch.
He was rightly lauded for the way he played in the third test against France, but in truth, he didn’t show a lot of variation in his game that night. All-out attack worked and there was no need for him to hold back.
The Chiefs, on Fiday night, wanted to play at pace and use McKenzie’s attacking instincts to stretch what they knew would be a fast-moving Hurricanes defensive line.
They wanted him to be adventurous. They didn’t want him to be reckless, though, and it seems McKenzie has difficulty differentiating between the two.
He also appears to have a view that he will double down — take a huge risk to try to make amends for another huge risk that has gone wrong.
Every now and again, that works, but it is only every now and again and with a strong wind at his back in the first half of the quarter-final, maybe he could have atoned for giving away seven early points by continuously driving the Hurricanes into that bottom left corner of the field they found so difficult to escape the few occasions they were put there.
There is no middle ground with McKenzie. He’s never able to sit back and bide his time and it’s his relentless desire to attack that makes him the most compelling and endearing player in New Zealand, yet also the most frustrating. The quarter-final was a big chance for him to display the right balance in his game; to prove he can resist the temptation to try to make something happen every time he has the ball.
Knockout football isn’t so different to test rugby in that mistakes are that bit harder to recover from and there needs to be a greater degree of control and patience to break opponents.