HEAD STRONG
FOR THE FIRST DECADE OF THE PROFESSIONAL ERA THE ALL BLACKS DIDN’T HAVE THE MENTAL RESILIENCE THEY NEEDED TO BE CHAMPIONS. BUT FROM 2004, THEY SET ABOUT FIXING THAT AND HAVE BECOME ONE OF THE MOST PSYCHOLOGICALLY ROBUST TEAMS THE WORLD OF SPORT HAS KNOWN.
The All Blacks have spent as much time working on their mental skills as they have their physical.
We educated ourselves about how the mind functions when it is working well and how it functions when it is under pressure. Just to understand the difference between those two things is very helpful.’ GRAHAM HENRY
Looking back now, the All Blacks can be honest that there was a major hole in their set-up prior to 2004. They thought they had all the boxes ticked, but it turned out they hadn’t. They had the tactical stuff sorted. They knew how to build a gameplan that was all about them maximising their strengths and finding their opponents’ weaknesses. They had the technical work down pat. Their basic skills were sharp and never taken for granted. And their conditioning, their basic strength, speed and power was good. Maybe better than good.
But they didn’t have much in the way of psychological skills. They didn’t really have any to be honest and that was because they simply didn’t realise the need for it. Mental strength was the missing piece in the All Blacks’ armoury in the first decade of the professional age. Prior to that they arguably had it through natural means. It wasn’t necessarily a deliberate policy as such, but during the amateur period the sorts of players who made it into the All Blacks arrived with life skills acquired through the workforce. There were no player development pathways back then and individuals had to find their own way to the top of the game while balancing their need to build a career. The double challenge meant most players had a strong sense of personal responsibility and an ability to analyse situations and make reasonable astute judgements. There was, then, considerable mental resilience and leadership naturally built into the team.
But come the professional age, that organic system collapsed because suddenly young men were arriving in the All Blacks without having had any exposure to the ‘real’ world. They hadn’t been required to balance their lives – all they had done was play rugby and come through a development system that did much of the thinking and organising for them. No one quite realised the consequences of that. The system was all about giving the players high performance benefits – top coaching, training facilities and access to the technical, tactical and conditioning aspects that would make them better players.
No one noticed the flaw in the plan because so rarely was it exposed. The All Blacks had three legs of the stool so solidly planted that they were able to win most of the time as they always had. It was only when they were put into pressure-ridden situations – particularly the World Cup – that the flaw became apparent. What everyone could see following the 1999 World Cup was that the All Blacks didn’t have the skills to think clearly under pressure. On those rare occasions when an opponent was able to twist and turn the All Blacks and force them into having to claw their way out of trouble, the world’s best team wasn’t always able to respond.
If the All Blacks had to rethink their strategy, or change what they were doing on the field, there was an obvious inability to do so. They lacked strong decision makers and clarity. They weren’t good at staying composed and the feeling the All Blacks coaches had was that under pressure, the players began to play as individuals and come out of the team patterns. There was no trust in the system or each other when the All Blacks were behind on the scoreboard.
That was proved in 1999 when they imploded in the second half of the World Cup semifinal against France. It was proven when they lost Bledisloe Cup tests in 2000 and 2001. It was proven again at the 2003 World Cup when they were beaten by an inferior Wallabies side in the semifinal, and spectacularly so in 2007 when the French, again, got the better of them in Cardiff.
By 2008, the All Blacks coaching team of Graham Henry, Wayne Smith and Steve Hansen decided that mental skills had to be one of the highest priorities to fix. If they were going to win the 2011 World Cup, they needed a team full of strong decision-makers and bold leaders who cold stay composed to the point where they could calmly guide those around them into the same calm mindset.
“Psychology is a difficult area. People sort of avoid it because they don’t know anything about it,” Henry said after the All Blacks had won the 2011 World Cup. “But after you’ve been through that situation, and found you couldn’t handle the pressure, then you have to dive into it, dissect it and get expertise in to assist with it.
“We educated ourselves about how the mind functions when it is working well and how it functions when it is under pressure. Just to understand the difference between those two things is very helpful.”
Henry managed to condense the approach to a couple of lines, but that’s only because the All Blacks don’t like divulging too much about how they went around strengthening themselves mentally. Of all the improvements they strive for, their work on their mental skills is where they have made the most gains and is probably the area where they lead the world by the biggest margin.
There is, then, understandably an element of secrecy about how they have built such calm and resolve into the players. Whatever the All Blacks may have thought about their mental strength prior to 2007, they had to re-evaluate in the wake of yet another bombed World Cup campaign. The five-month review into their failure kept coming back to an inability to make good decisions under pressure. The All Blacks had the skills, the players, the gameplan – just not the intangible psychological strength to bring the full power of all those component parts together.
If they were going to break the pattern of failing at critical times,
the All Blacks had to pay more attention to their mental skills. The biggest thing was to first accept that there was a genuine need to embrace the importance of being mentally strong.
Too easily modern players scoffed at the concept of sports psychology. They saw it as mumbo-jumbo, a science for those who had problems rather than a legitimate means to improve performance. It was vital that the senior players accepted the legitimate role mental skills played in their environment and the need for them to be both taken seriously and practised.
Things changed in that regard. The typical test week had to be jiggled around to include time for mental skills to be part of the preparation. That was important – it was a way of saying the preparation stool had four legs and not three. Just as it was vital for All Blacks to work on their passing and catching, so too did they need to get their heads clear and understand how pressure would affect them on game day.
They already had a full-time mental skills coach in Gilbert Enoka, who was then empowered to bring in a specialist consultancy group, Gazing Performance Systems [GPS], that included his mentor, former All White Ceri Evans.
GPS were brought in to help the All Blacks widen their understanding of what pressure actually is, how it manifests and what strategies can be employed to beat it. They came up with a number of terms such as red head, which is characterised by feelings of anxiety and doubt, the sensation of being overwhelmed and desperate, when focus on the task at hand is slipping away and the possible outcome is causing inhibition.
Blue head, in contrast, sees the beholder clearly concentrating on the process – calm, certain of their job, and living in the moment. “Typically, we talk about pressure coming from three critical areas – expectation, scrutiny and consequences,” said Martin Fairn, one of Gazing’s directors and a himself a former player.
“The expectations placed on you in terms of your performance – that can come from your coach, your fellow players, the media, the crowd, your family, not least of which there will be the pressure you put on yourself. We also think that scrutiny is another one. That’s people watching you, looking at you and focusing on how well you’re doing what it is you’re doing. That adds pressure to it.
“The last sort of pressure is the consequences of your performance. In sporting terms, it’s almost entirely connected to the quality of your performance linked to the result.
“If you imagine that nobody wants to lose a match or a game or a point. Certainly when it comes to something as high profile as a World Cup, elite athletes wouldn’t want to lose that. The implications of winning or losing that, because they come in equal measure, are a significant source of pressure.”
To keep living in the moment, various All Blacks developed certain traits to pull them back mentally. If they felt they were drifting into the wrong place mentally, they had a behaviour to get them back into the now. Richie McCaw’s method was to stamp his feet on the ground, while Kieran Read will gaze into the distance.
It may sound gimmicky, but no one could doubt its effectiveness. The breakthrough moment was the 2011 World Cup final when the All Blacks, under the most intense pressure, found a way to win. Maybe four years earlier they wouldn’t have. The French were in control at Eden Park and they had the All Blacks scrambling. Yet there was no collapse this time.
Typically, we talk about pressure coming from three critical areas – expectation, scrutiny and consequences.’ MARTIN FAIRN
The All Blacks managed to find a way to stay in the contest. They made enough good decisions to thwart the French and keep themselves one point ahead. It wasn’t a perfect game by any means. There were times when the All Blacks were loose and a bit wild but they didn’t let the wheels come off completely.
They were able to do enough and achieve the only thing that mattered – winning. Finally, they had the most definitive proof they knew how to win under pressure. Winning the World Cup in 2011 was just as big a catalyst for mental skills preparation as the failure in 2007. Winning was vindication that the All Blacks were right to see mental skills as a huge part of the puzzle.
Just like all their other skills, they felt the need to keep working relentlessly to get better and stronger at decision making and staying calm. More players spent more time on this facet and the collective strength was apparent. From 2012, the All Blacks became the masters at winning games late in the piece. They became expert at staying calm no matter what was happening on the scoreboard or how little hope it appeared they could have of salvaging the victory. Almost overnight they became miracle workers.
Time and again they won tests they would have probably lost 10 years earlier. They continually found a way to stay calm and believe in themselves. They continually found a way to conjure up tries late in the game and play their way out of trouble. If the game was balanced in the last 10 minutes, the All Blacks became, almost, a sure bet to win it. They no longer cracked. They no longer did anything silly under pressure and instead of wilting down the home stretch, they could be virtually guaranteed to finish fast and hard.
That composure saw them beat England at Twickenham in 2013 and then miraculously escape against Ireland a few weeks later. In 2014, they beat the Wallabies in Brisbane by scoring two tries in the last seven minutes, and if ever there was an example of their composure it came in the 2015 World Cup semifinal.
They were only two points ahead of the Boks in the last 10 minutes and the rain was steadily falling in London. The stage was set for the Boks to grind their way into penalty territory and sneak the win. And they would have, but for the fact the All Blacks recognised the need to play deep in South Africa’s territory.
It was smart rugby. The All Blacks gave up possession for territory – choosing instead to back their defence to keep the Boks pinned in their own half. The clarity of purpose was obvious and the Boks spent 10 unproductive minutes trying to escape.
A week later and the All Blacks were again able to stay calm when the Wallabies scored two quick tries to roar back into contention with 12 minutes remaining of the final. The All Blacks were wobbling and the nation was suddenly jittery. Then Dan Carter landed a huge drop goal and penalty in quick succession and inspired his teammates to get their blue heads back and go on to win 34-17.
“I’ve got a lot of faith in our composure,” head coach Steve Hansen said after the 2015 World Cup. “We’ve been in tight spots a lot over the last four years, and the years before that, and when you’ve got the experience that we’ve got. A lot of people have made noises about guys being too old, but they’re in good form, and if they’ve been around a long time they bring a lot of experience. Most of our experiences are positive ones, therefore you get a lot of inner self-belief with that.”