All Blacks ruthless and never satisfied

It’s not Kieran Read or Beauden Barrett who are most important to the All Blacks. Not Ben Smith or Sam Whitelock either.

In the current climate it’s more likely to be Damian McKenzie and TJ Perenara. Or Ardie Savea and Shannon Frizell.

Heck, it’s even the guys who can’t crack the squad and are battling away in the Mitre 10 Cup, such as David Havili and Matt Proctor. Matt Duffie and Jeff To’omagaAllen. George Bridge and Bryn Hall. You could go on and that’s the point.

One day this season the All Blacks will lose a game. Maybe two, it could even be three. The same could happen next year, too. What’s keeping them winning in the meantime, and what they hope will account for South Africa tonight, is all the guys who wish they were starting at Westpac Stadium and aren’t.

The guys in the reserves, or who can’t crack the 23 and will be watching from the stands. All the blokes who might be test regulars in a different country, but aren’t in the mix here.

The accepted wisdom is that South Africa will be desperate this week. They’ve lost two on the trot, coach Rassie Erasmus has said his job’s at stake and New Zealand are the one side they always get up for.

But what about their opponents? How do they generate the same desperation when they don’t have too many humbling results to draw upon?

‘‘Understanding that you’ve got to have a mindset which is that of the underdog,’’ All Blacks coach Steve Hansen said.

‘‘If you sit there at the top thinking ‘yeeha, things are going good here’ you won’t be sitting there for too long. So our mindset has to be always to try and be better than we were before.

‘‘Our mindset has to be always to try and be better than we were before.’’ Steve Hansen

‘‘Accept that, yep, we’re going OK. You don’t want to take away that fact. But you also have to accept the inconvenient facts of ‘we’re not doing that right, we’re not doing that right and we could be better at that’.’’

It’s a really fine balance. After all, if winning’s not fun, then what’s the point? But when you do win a bit, then you do have to take a very sober look at those games if you hope to learn anything from them.

Hansen has had a good career, so you don’t tend to spare a thought for how difficult, or otherwise, his job could be. But motivating players, particularly the more experienced and accomplished ones, must be an interesting exercise at times.

‘‘So we challenge ourselves to climb to a higher standard and if we keep doing that you’ll see people striving harder and harder at training and competition for places is another way of beating complacency,’’ Hansen said.

Complacent is a big word. Quite an insulting one, really. Smug is probably another way of putting it.

Certainly fans in this country can be safe in the knowledge that their favourite sports team rarely makes a stumble. But Hansen can’t be, in his never-ending pursuit of the perfect performance.

It’s another way of guarding against too much satisfaction.

‘‘We’re not the finished product, but we are starting to ask some real big questions defensively with our attacking game. Is it error-free? No. Will it ever be error-free? Probably not. But if we could have a less of those it would be good and that’s what we strive to do,’’ Hansen said.