Why I want Aussies to beat the All Blacks

Saturday Comment

SO WE come to the last Test match of the fouryear cycle and, fittingly, it is the two best teams that will be fighting it out at Twickenham today for the boasting rights until 2019.

If it is a fair world, New Zealand will win the World Cup because they have been by far the dominant team since 2011. That you can easily recall their defeats without really thinking about it underlines just how successful they have been – there have been two draws and one defeat against Australia, a loss to the Springboks last October, and the big defeat they copped at the hands of England in 2012.

That is a phenomenal record and they do deserve to be recognised as the world’s best team. If they lose today, it will be a travesty.

And yet, there is big part of me that hopes they do lose. The reasoning isn’t much different to what my late father said to me when, listening on the radio to the 1977 series between the All Blacks and the British Lions, I asked him why he appeared to want the Lions to win.

The Lions had thumped South Africa just three years prior to that and in 1976, Morné du Plessis’ Boks had won a controversial and closely-fought series against the All Blacks. To me, it seemed more logical to want the Kiwis to win on the basis that they had been beaten by the Boks, and thus a victory for them would mean South African rugby was looking quite healthy. But my dad disagreed: “New Zealand have just dominated world rugby for far too long,” he said.

If that was his attitude nearly 40 years ago, I shudder when imagining what he might think of the All Blacks’ current domination. Up until 2011, when they broke a long sequence of World Cup failures, fans of other rugbyplaying nations at least had New Zealand’s perennial falter every four years to keep them interesting.

However, that frontier has now been breached, and more frontiers will be breached if the All Blacks win today, ensuring they have won a World Cup outside of their own country for the first time, as well as becoming the first to record back-to-back triumphs.

The All Blacks always won the Southern Hemisphere competitions in between the World Cup years but today if they win, their hegemony will be complete.

Well done if they get it right, for their success is built around intelligent administration and a unity of purpose that up until now hasn’t been replicated in South Africa (the Boks are moving towards a central contracting model, and that is progress) or anywhere else.

Victor Matfield was 100 percent correct when he said this week the first step towards getting the national team right is to get the Super Rugby franchises up to scratch. It wasn’t coincidence that when the Boks won the World Cup in 2007, it was the first time we had a South African winner in the Super 12.

Heyneke Meyer is too conservative for my liking but to be fair to him, you can’t expect him to get the Boks to play new-age rugby when the franchises are following antiquated strategies. In New Zealand there is synergy, in South Africa there is divergence.

But deserved though their domination might be, it still can’t be good for the sport that one team is winning all the time. Fortunately, the Wallabies are equipped to beat the All Blacks if they are at the top of their game, and if fortune smiles on them.

By my reckoning David Pocock is the best player in the world right now, and what he did to the Boks in the 2011 quarter-final in Wellington – no, it wasn’t just down to Bryce Lawrence – can certainly be repeated today, even if it is the All Blacks he is playing against.

Pocock’s performance at the breakdowns, together with ball- scavenging colleague Michael Hooper, will be the key to the Australian chances of staging an upset.

It can happen. But on the balance of probability, it is unlikely to, and that is my problem with the All Blacks winning today. It’s getting too predictable. So go Australia, confound the critics and make international rugby interesting again.