Wales beached without much depth
The All Blacks have clearly mastered the art of the 23-man game.
Despite a massive shift in the game in the last 20 years, with the ability to make tactical substitutions, only the All Blacks have really embraced the change.
Why? Because most other test teams aren’t good enough to play an international as a 23-man game.
Last night there was an All Blacks performance that will draw criticism.
That’s basically fair, because, totally out of character, there was a drop in concentration in the last hectic 10 minutes. What was threatening to be a blow-out narrowed down to 14 points.
But the fact remains that although Wales played with grit and courage to be tied at halftime, an All Blacks victory was inevitable.
There just isn’t the depth of talent in this Welsh squad to maintain the fury they played with in the first 40 for the whole game.
We saw how limited the reserves were in the embarrassing defeat at the hands of the Chiefs in Hamilton.
When your coach, Warren Gatland, says players need to have a good look at themselves (coach speak for ‘‘you were gutless’’) you know you haven’t played well. You also know he doesn’t have great alternatives in his reserves.
There may well be calls now for changes amongst the players who started for the All Blacks last night, but in most cases they would be naive.
The plain reality is that the All Blacks who came off the bench with fresh legs were facing players who had almost exhausted themselves in the first half.
The bonus for the All Blacks, which will be dulled in memory by the lapses late in the match, is that when they run on the new players they’re generally a step ahead of any opposing replacements.
Look at how much talent there was riding the bench at the start of the game.
When poor Aaron Cruden was basically crushed under 127kg Welsh lock Luke Charteris, New Zealand could run on Beauden Barrett, fresh from a sparkling cameo in the 2015 World Cup final. On cue Barrett, so electric you start to look for blue sparks coming off his boots, set up a try and then scored one.
Sam Cane was more involved than he had been in Auckland but prowling the sideline, much like a hungry shark cruising the shallows of an Australian beach, was local hero Ardie Savea, whose try was a measure of the blistering speed the man has, the speed that made him such a brilliant sevens player.
In the disappointment of the ending too, let’s not forget that Waisake Naholo, often twitchy in Auckland took his try with the cool and accuracy of a man on a training field.
All Blacks teams are never fully content, even after a good win, and last night was too disjointed for them to be even remotely satisfied.
But we did see enough to know that if they can put together a potent first half in Dunedin, then it could be a very nasty night for the Welsh.
They’ll want total commitment for 80 minutes next week but I wouldn’t expect that process to be marked by a great many changes.
Footnote: My apologies to Jaco Peyper, who last week, when he was the television match official, I incorrectly blamed for an incorrect forward pass call that denied the All Blacks a try. Too late to change the story I discovered the call had, of course, been made by referee Wayne Barnes. Let’s not even go down the path of Barnes, the All Blacks, and forward passes, except to say the history is now officially weird.