Lockdown sure to shut the door on AB prospects
Some players will not have fared well training alone
This morning, it will become apparent which Super Rugby players have been sitting on the couch these past six weeks eating chips and watching box sets. Quite a few will have been half-hearted in their attempts to maintain their conditioning, mentally destroyed by the uncertainty of the lockdown. They will report back for duty heavier, slower and lacking the general fitness expected.
The lockdown for some will be an Everest they couldn’t climb and it will leave them tainted — a black mark against their name to indicate they didn’t have the resilience to stay the course during self-isolation.
The lockdown, as curious as this may sound, will have put players under as much, if not more pressure than a World Cup. It will have challenged their self-discipline, commitment and motivation, and how well they coped will become apparent.
The toughest will have found a means to plot their way through the last seven weeks and emerge physically and emotionally ready for Super Rugby’s return on June 13.
Others will be mentally drained and in urgent need of remedial conditioning work which will delay their return to action.
The last seven weeks have been a hiatus like no other. A mid-season pre-season, but with the added problem that for much of it, no one knew when it would end.
Professional athletes are highly calibrated creatures and their worlds need certainty, structure and routine to function. They haven’t had that for almost two months and the experience will have broken quite a few, and it will be fascinating to see who thrived and who didn’t in lockdown.
The findings may be surprising and new All Blacks coach Ian Foster will be the most intrigued observer to see what intel he can glean as he restarts the process of determining who will make his squad when test football resumes later this year.
Seeing how players have dealt with the lockdown will be a handy guide to determining how well equipped they are to deal with the pressures of test football.
Almost certainly there will be some highly promising players who return to Super
Rugby and go splat. Whatever form they were in before the lockdown, they won’t get anywhere near recovering it.
There will be others who we never imagined had much to offer who are suddenly reinventing themselves as possible test players.
Foster is going to have to be prepared to redraw his selection plans. It may be that some prospects he was hoping to pick this year don’t emerge the way he hoped postlockdown.
He would have been starting to piece together his selection plans when Super Rugby went into lockdown. A reasonable component of his likely squad would already have been locked in given their experience and proven quality.
Others such as David Havili would have grabbed his attention, as perhaps might have Crusaders blindside Cullen Grace, Blues No 8 Hoskins Sotutu and Chiefs openside Lachlan Boshier.
If the season had run its natural course, those players, and whoever else the selectors had identified as being of interest, would have come under scrutiny to see how they coped as the pressure increased.
That scrutiny is now going to come as soon as Super Rugby kicks off. Those players who start well will be sending a message that they held it together during lockdown.
The odds are shortening that this year’s entire All Blacks test programme will be the Bledisloe Cup. A test series against the Dave Rennie-coached Wallabies at the end of a uniquely disrupted season will be as tough an assignment as a Lions series.
The hype will be extreme and the expectation, even in the All Blacks’ world where it’s always there, will be unusually high. Those who didn’t manage lockdown well are unlikely to be considered ready to handle the Wallabies.