Fail. Drawn Lions series embarrassing
The All Blacks only had one job this year and couldn’t do it. On that basis their season was a failure. Never mind the Rugby Championship or the players blooded on the end-of-season tour. Beating the British and Irish Lions was the only meaningful task the All Blacks had in 2017 and a drawn series amounts to an embarrassment.
The Lions tour was a referendum on rugby. Are box kicks, rush defence and scrummaging for penalties sufficient or do you have to make an attempt to play?
Partly it’s a moral high ground thing and partly it’s cutting your cloth to suit the strengths of your athletes, but we favour a particular brand of football here. The Lions were content to deny the All Blacks the opportunity to play that and to ultimately emerge with a share of the spoils was an endorsement of those negative tactics.
How satisfying it must’ve been for Lions head coach Warren Gatland. Lampooned and lambasted, Gatland at least got the last laugh.
For All Blacks head coach Steve Hansen, it’s surely a result that will niggle. Hansen doesn’t have many blemishes on his record but, having gone 1-0 up in this three-match series, not closing it out would have to rank as one.
Ben Smith didn’t play a full part, but other big guns such as Owen Franks, Joe Moody, Charlie Faumuina, Brodie Retallick and Israel Dagg were still on deck and yet the team couldn’t get it done.
As the season wore on, the absence of that quintet and the, perhaps, terminal decline of Jerome Kaino told.
There’s no such thing as a bad All Black and people such as Nepo Laulala, Kane Hames, Waisake Naholo, Damian McKenzie and Liam Squire were able to come into the side and perform well or, in a couple of cases, very well.
But by the time the All Blacks got to Cape Town in early October they were out of gas. They hung on to win 25-24, but were then tipped over by Australia in Brisbane and did well not to be beaten on the subsequent tour to Britain and France.
New players bring enthusiasm. But they often battle to summon the intensity required to back up week after week in international sport and it was no coincidence that the more inexperienced the squad became, the more peaks and troughs emerged in their performances.
Overall, you’d say the team played well against a poor Samoa team and then in the first Lions test and against South Africa at Albany. Beyond that, there were good halves in Sydney, Buenos Aires and Paris and not a great deal else.
Potential’s only worth anything if it’s eventually realised. So the fact Hansen exposed 45 players to test rugby this year means nothing in itself.
But at least players such as Retallick, Smith, Franks, Moody and Dagg won’t inherit a shambles when they return next year. From there Hansen’s task is to compile a 2019 Rugby World Cup squad with the necessary combination of youth and proven performers.
They reckon you take more from failure than success, so hopefully that Lions series has taught them all plenty.