If we have to lose, we can learn

The anguish of this past week has been dimmed by pride in the men who now leave centre-stage.

At the beginning of the Rugby World Cup, when I quoted Charlie Brown’s maxim that ‘‘winning isn’t everything and losing isn’t anything’’, I didn’t actually expect the All Blacks wouldn’t win the damn thing.

It was happiness insurance in case the unthinkable happened. Then, at least, the synapses in my brain had preprepared pathways that would help me cope.

This week it’s like I’ve been living the opening lines of my favourite John Keats poem, Ode to a Nightingale: ‘‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk.’’

And yet, this time feels a bit different.

As if hemlock, rather than being a highly poisonous biennial herbaceous flowering plant in the carrot family, is more of a bitter pill that tastes yuck, but isn’t fatal.

For more than a century New Zealanders have been spoilt by having the All Blacks as our national team.

Their winning has almost become like the sun rising. A fixed and regular event and a sign that all was normal and well in the universe.

International rugby had become like a box-ticking exercise. Games would finish and our one feeling would be relief, before we carried on with the rest of our day, content in the knowledge that our country’s one bastion of superiority over the rest of the world was still safe.

This can seem arrogant, but it’s also what naturally happens when your team is the most dominant of any side in world sport, with an overall winning record of over 75 per cent.

During Steve Hansen’s eightyear tenure as head coach, the All Blacks had an 87 per cent winning ratio. Out of the 93 games he’s been in charge, there have been four draws and only 10 losses.

That loss in the semifinal against England would have been the toughest, since the stakes were so high.

Hopefully over time the size of the rock under Hansen’s beach towel will get smaller as he reflects on having been part of a group who took the All Blacks to new heights.

To my mind, in sport, winning and losing are equally important.

During my anguish this week, I turned to Google and discovered that losing ‘‘teaches you humility and strengthens your ability to handle adversities’’.

‘‘There is more to learn from losing than there is in winning.’’

The late, great Nelson Mandela once said: ‘‘I never lose. I either win or I learn.’’

As All Blacks supporters, we get precious few chances for those learning moments and opportunities for growth, because our team so rarely loses.

Of the last 93 tests, we’ve had only 10 losses, so we should embrace them when they happen.

There seemed to be way less gnashing of teeth than normal when the All Blacks get knocked out of World Cups. Perhaps we really have learned this time.

The All Blacks may think, why should one have to lose to learn? Can’t you also learn by winning?

Maybe an essential teaching ingredient is the humility of not getting what you want so badly.

Still, it’s also true that it’s not the getting knocked down that counts, but how you get back up. I’m looking forward to seeing how the All Blacks set about doing that over the next four years leading up to the next tournament.

They will be without legends like Kieran Read, Ben Smith and Sonny Bill Williams.

Malo lava to those champion human beings, and new legends will fill those jerseys.

Along with grace in the face of defeat, it’s the All Black way.

‘In sport, winning and losing are equally important.’