Finally, the night the Cup came home
It’s been 10 years since the All Blacks ended a 24-year drought by winning the 2011 Rugby World Cup. In a three-part series, Stuff is looking back at each of their playoff triumphs from that momentous, nerve-racking tournament on home soil. Aaron Goile co
The All Blacks are early in their Kapa o Pango haka and all of a sudden the noise inside Auckland’s Eden Park goes to another level.
The French, here in this momentous World Cup final, have faced up to the challenge in a unique Flying V formation, and have now advanced to, and, for what they will later be fined for, past halfway.
A team written off from all quarters all of a sudden get hairs standing on end as they indeed look up for the contest. And don’t the crowd know it.
Richard Kahui, still pinching himself he is actually playing in the tournament, let alone starting a final out of position on the wing, recalls it was ‘‘deafening’’.
‘‘I was up the front row on the left-hand side and Piri [Weepu] was in the middle leading the haka, and literally you could not hear a word he was saying,’’ he reflects to
‘‘It was the most incredible atmosphere.’’
After losing to New Zealand by 20 in pool play, France had then suffered a huge upset at the hands of Tonga and prevailed just 9-8 against a 14-man Wales in their semifinal. Coach Marc Lievremont had reportedly lost the dressing room and instead senior players were in charge.
But, a team who had knocked the All Blacks out of two of the past three World Cups are clearly up for the role of spoilers, on what virtually everyone felt would merely be a boxticking night for the men in black to finally end a nation’s 24 years of pain.
Of course, it proved nowhere near that sort of cakewalk.
Though, despite all the tension and drama of the 8-7 result, All Blacks captain Richie McCaw would not have had it any other way than going right down to the wire.
‘‘I’m bloody glad it did, because it tested us, we got to see if we could handle that moment,’’ he told
‘‘The fact that we got through, that changed the outlook on the All Blacks – that they may be the best team but can’t win a World Cup.’’
CHANGE IN MENTALITY Because, four years earlier, that most certainly rang true, following that infamous quarterfinal defeat to the French in Cardiff.
That had brought about big changes in their mental game, says All Blacks coach Sir Graham Henry, the man who had been controversially reappointed to the position following the team’s inglorious 2007 exit.
‘‘We went into 2011 and said the unexpected will happen at some stage in the tournament, we’ve just got to handle it,’’ Henry told
Having already had to deal with major first five-eighth injury dramas, the way the French responded here to the haka – having done similarly in 2007 – was never going to rattle the All Blacks psychologically.
However, for all their mental fortitude in dealing with the massive pressure of this home tournament – McCaw notes ‘‘we wanted to try and be excited about the opportunity rather than scared of what might happen’’ – it was still tough for them to get their heads in the best place possible after, in Henry’s words, they had ‘‘peaked’’ in the semifinal against Australia.
‘‘When you’ve had a great performance like we did the week before, to do that again, that was the hardest part,’’ McCaw says.
‘‘From within there was no complacency, but the old mind plays some funny few tricks on you when you’ve beaten them convincingly a few weeks earlier, and you hope it’s going to be the same.
‘‘There’s always that subconscious. All of us know, with a rational mind, that that doesn’t mean anything, really.
‘‘You’ve got to be really disciplined and deliberate around making sure you get yourself into that right frame of mind. And I just don’t think we were quite where we were the week before.’’
THE FOOT
For the skipper, there’s also the notso-small factor, both physically and mentally, of a broken foot to factor in. Having powered on the past couple of weeks after issues with the screw that had been inserted earlier in the year, and confident he wouldn’t be a detriment to the team, there was no stopping him now.
‘‘I had to keep in mind there was just 80 minutes of rugby, there was an end point,’’ McCaw says. ‘‘When you’ve got one game, as long as you weren’t going to have any things that were going to affect you down the track, you can deal with that.
‘‘Once I knew that I was going to be good enough to play, I made sure that no-one else worried about it.’’
So much so that captain and coach never even spoke about it that week, when McCaw was, like for the past month, again not taking part in training.
‘‘It was a negative, and I didn’t want to deal with negatives,’’ Henry quips, adding that the way doctor Deb Robinson and her team dealt with the injury was ‘‘astronomical’’.
‘‘So I just left it to their professionalism. And I thought, ‘Well, if Richie and I get into a discussion about it, what’s the result of that discussion going to be?’ So we didn’t go down there, thank goodness.’’
Four days later, Henry got a much more vivid picture of what his star pupil had endured, though.
‘‘We went fishing on the Thursday out in the Waitemata¯ , and we were having a couple of beers, and I looked down at Richie’s foot and the one foot was twice as big as the other,’’ Henry remembers. ‘‘I just couldn’t believe how bad it was, just black and blue, just a massive bruise. I just found it unbelievable that he’d have the endurance, the tenacity and the will to just keep on doing the business.
‘‘I can’t imagine too many other people who would’ve gone through what he did to play.’’
But play he most certainly did, the skipper not wasting any time in making himself the usual menace at the breakdown, on his way to making a game-high 18 tackles.
It’s a nervy start from both sides. In the first minute France halfback Dimitri Yachvili kicks out on the full, but then New Zealand overthrow their lineout.
Six minutes in comes the first chance for points, through a tough shot at goal for Piri Weepu – but the tournament cult hero shanks it.
However, soon after a great Ma’a Nonu touchfinder and another misfired lineout, Weepu gets over the ball to win a ruck penalty from referee Craig Joubert, then sends the resulting kick brilliantly to seven metres from the French line.
THAT TRY
And then it’s ‘‘Teabag’’ time. The 15th minute try to prop Tony Woodcock is a work of art from the All Blacks, and of course proves to be their only five-pointer of the game. The set move had been placed back in the kit bag for a while, but forwards coach Sir Steve Hansen wants to bring it out for the final because of the way the French always compete at the lineout. It hasn’t gone smoothly in training. But Kieran Read duly calls the special play.
‘‘I remember when the ball came in, I was one of the lifters, and seeing their guys go up, I was like, ‘Geez, this might work’,’’ McCaw recalls.
Indeed, it comes up an absolute treat on the biggest of stages, as two separate pods go up and Keven Mealamu nails his Jerome Kaino target at the back, with the blindside flanker then popping the ball down for Woodcock to run into an acre of space and dive over. ‘‘You’ve still got to execute it, but it all sort of happened easy,’’ McCaw says. ‘‘Well, it looked easy, but everyone had to do their roles.’’
France are dealt a further blow when No 10 Morgan Parra, having already been off for a blood bin, is forced from the field injured just after the quarter mark.
New Zealand have a chance to extend their lead but a shocking Weepu penalty strike keeps the margin at five. And then comes the 34th minute. Just what is it with the All Blacks’ first-fives? First Dan Carter, then Colin Slade, now Aaron Cruden, who was so good in the semifinal as a late call-up, has to limp off with a knee injury.
Enter one Stephen Donald – the first player ever to make a World Cup debut in a final – the man of course so ridiculed after his Hong Kong horror show the year before, who had been called up the week before while whitebaiting on the Waikato River.
‘‘He was always highly thought of by the rest of the guys in the team, he was always a hell of a good team man,’’ Henry says. ‘‘So when he came on, the boys walked towards him and welcomed him on the field. And that’s an unusual thing to happen.’’
Even despite his wee jersey faux pas, which had him revealing a little more skin than he had hoped, with good mate Kahui knowing exactly how that came about.
‘‘Adidas had come out with their seamless jersey,’’ he recalls. ‘‘You have jersey size numbers, and Beaver always wore his tight, like a seven or eight. But when Sonny [Bill Williams] ripped his [against Tonga], Adidas took away all the jerseys and put a ridge of webbing through the inside, so you ended up being two sizes smaller than what you normally were. So when Shandy [All Blacks manager Darren Shand] said, ‘Hey, look, you’ve got to come try the jersey on’, he’s like, ‘Nah, mate, I’m a seven’.
‘‘In the shed, obviously biggest game of my life, I’m reading through my game notes, and then I get a tap on the shoulder and there’s Steve Donald, whose jersey is wedged between both elbows and under his arm pits and he can’t get it over his head, and he’s sort of clapping together with his hands to try and get his jersey on.
‘‘It was actually good, it lightened the mood for me a little bit just before I went out on the field, because I was a little bit tense.’’
THAT KICK
It wasn’t long before Donald would have his monumental moment. After a missed drop goal by Francois Trinh-Duc, then a crucial ankle tap by Weepu on the flying replacement French playmaker, the All Blacks take their 5-0 lead to halftime.
Early in the second half France have the chance to close the gap but Yachvili misses from a tough angle. Then in the 45th minute the All Blacks have a penalty, around 33 metres out, in front of the sticks.
With Weepu struggling with a leg injury the call has been made at halftime that he would relinquish the goalkicking duties.
So step up Donald. And quite literally he does. ‘‘He just walked up and said, ‘I’ll have a shot’,’’ McCaw recalls. ‘‘And to be fair, that’s, as a captain, what you want from your kicker, to have that confidence to say I’m going to have a crack. And he drilled it, which I’m pretty bloody thankful about.’’
Indeed, Henry noted Donald ‘‘went from zero to hero’’ in a game where he also made the All Blacks’ only other clean break aside from Woodcock’s and was their only player to beat more than one defender (two).
‘‘It wasn’t easy for him, and he just showed a huge amount of character to come in and do the job,’’ Henry says. ‘‘That was obviously a very important goal, but a highpressure kick. I remember riding it all the way to the inside of that righthand upright.’’
Kahui, who had played his whole career alongside Donald, had been a man he’d confided in during his tough times, and knew just how hard he’d fallen.
‘‘It was just relentless for him, and I really felt for him,’’ he says. ‘‘I know if he wrote a script, he’d probably take a little bit of the s. . . out of the middle, but it’s pretty special to see somebody that’s been through a lot of hardship and questioned a lot about what he was doing, to get to the World Cup final, kick the winning goal and now become a cult hero. I think he’s someone that really deserves everything that he got.’’
But, of course, there was plenty to do before that became a reality.
CLINGING ON
The All Blacks enjoy their eightpoint advantage for all of a couple of minutes, as France captain Thierry Dusautoir goes in to score a try that really shifts the momentum.
With Aurelien Rougerie disrupting at a ruck with a boot to ball through Nonu’s legs, Weepu then tries a cute stab at the ball with his boot, only for it to pop up for Trinh-Duc to break away. The left side attack swings back to the middle and blindside flanker Dusautoir bursts through to score beside the right upright.
‘‘Once they scored that try, that’s when we knew for sure, ‘this is game on’,’’ Kahui says.
And from there, aside from one 16-phase attack that in any case is met by solid French resistance, New Zealand are left defending for the majority of the remainder, enjoying just 40 per cent possession and 36 per cent territory in the second half.
With quarter of an hour left Trinh-Duc misses a penalty from long-range which would have had the underdogs in front for the first time, but they are pushing hard and the All Blacks have to just keep getting up and making tackles, holding their nerve.
‘‘Jesus, it was bloody stressful,’’ says Henry, who has the game recorded but has never watched it back, and admits he did consider where he might end up if all this doesn’t finish well.
‘‘It did flash through my mind. I thought maybe the south of France, it’s not a bad part of the world.
‘‘I’ve gone through 140 test matches . . . but there’s no greater tension, I would’ve thought, in those 140 tests than the second half of that game. But you remain as focused as humanly possible and you’re just trying to think of ways that you can assist the team to get the result.’’
Ironically, though, as things are really tightening up inside the final 10 minutes, the coaches send a message down for the troops to kick to play the field position game – kick corners, put on a good chase line and force a mistake – only for it to be met with disagreement.
‘‘Richie just wanted to keep control of the ball and run down the clock,’’ Henry says. ‘‘I just had a huge amount of respect for that decision. He was there at the time, and that’s his job, he went with his gut, how it felt out there.’’ With the All Blacks’ reserves playing a crucial role, with some experienced campaigners able to be injected, it was a real time for cool heads without the ball.
‘‘You didn’t want to roll the dice for a referee to make it easy for them. And I always feel like a good referee in those situations is not going to make a way out there call, it needs to be obvious.
‘‘The pressure was on them [France], too, because they were behind, so they needed to make some plays. And to be fair they did it pretty well. But we stuck to not trying to be a hero and make a big turnover. We defended bloody well.’’
In the 77th minute, France knock on 15 metres into New Zealand’s half and there are big sighs of relief all round. But then there’s the sight of McCaw down on his haunches, getting medical attention, before slowly rising to his feet.
It later turns out he was eyegouged. ‘‘That gave me a bit of a fright,’’ he says. ‘‘The doc came out and she said, ‘Do you want to come off? I said, ‘What, are you silly?’’’
So, a captain with a broken foot and hindered vision packs for another scrum, and the All Blacks go about expertly winding the clock down for three minutes.
‘‘When you’re actually playing, it was nerve-racking and it was on the edge and all that, but it was nothing like what it would have been watching, not being able to do anything about it. Watching later, man I can see what people were saying about how on edge it was.
‘‘We had to execute some really basic skills that you could do any other time no trouble, but can you do it when it really counts?’’
The home side are helped further by a penalty with 90 seconds left after France went off their feet at ruck time. Donald bangs it into touch, nearly 10 metres past halfway, which, crucially, should get them out of a Frenchman’s goalkicking range. Brad Thorn takes the ball at the front and New Zealand maul. Andrew Hore is with the ball at the back, then it goes to ground. The clock ticks past the 80 minutes and Read is shouting at Andy Ellis that time’s up.
The halfback eventually digs it out, is tackled, but the French are offside. Then, as players and fans are jumping for joy, McCaw is in Ellis’ ear to make sure he somehow can’t mess up the easiest of kicks to touch. Later he’d find the ball is caught (and he thinks pocketed) by one of McCaw’s mates in the crowd.
RELIEF ALL-ROUND
Then all the weight of the country is suddenly yanked from his shoulders. ‘‘It was sheer relief,’’ McCaw says of that feeling at fulltime.
It’s echoed by Henry, in what he knows is his final test before retirement. ‘‘The relief afterwards was immense,’’ he says. ‘‘Like, I’ve never felt so peaceful. Just total relaxation that the guys had done the business, and the feeling of pride in what they had done. I feel very grateful to have had that experience. It changed my life.’’
For McCaw, he’s also realistic that had his team not prevailed, that would probably have been his last game as captain, after two failed campaigns as leader. ‘‘If you only ever got to play one game of rugby, it’d be a World Cup final at Eden Park,’’ he says. ‘‘And we got to play that, and win there. So we really made sure we savoured that.’’
The 9pm Sunday kickoff made for an already late night, and a nation partied into Labour Day, as the All Blacks paraded in front of a massive turnout in central Auckland with the Webb Ellis Cup they had waited so long to get their hands back on.
‘‘My first thought was, ‘Jeepers, I’d hate to think what it would have been like if we hadn’t have won it’,’’ McCaw said. ‘‘That’s where it really hit home how significant that we won was for the country.’’