Have Hansen’s world-beaters become too good now?
STEVE Hansen’s untouchables will have left the rest of an admiring world wrestling with an ominous question last night, one that cannot be ducked much longer.
It has never had to be asked before but it does now: have the All Backs become too good for the good of the game?
Just as Michael Schumacher used to turn Formula One into a tedious procession so the rejuvenated Kiwis are turning the Test rugby circuit into an even longer one. Like Rocky Marciano and Real Madrid in the Fifties, nobody can live with them.
While All Black dominance is nothing new, the Wallabies could always be relied upon to knock them off the perch now and again, most famously in the 1991 World Cup semi-final at Lansdowne Road. Every so often since then, they would walk off with the silverware and strike a blow for the Competitions Commission. Not any more. In successive Saturdays on either side of the Tasman, the Aussies have been outclassed on a scale not witnessed before. Australia, remember, had beaten the All Blacks as often over the last 20 years or so as England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales combined over the last 100.
There is a verdict even more damning than the 54point gulf between the old rivals over the last two weekends. Nothing ought to disguise the fact that this was another no-contest, maybe not as severe a nocontest as Sydney seven days earlier but a no-contest just the same.
The gap had widened enough for the most successful captain of all-time to hope pre-match that it would be “a bit closer”. As Richie McCaw put it: “You don’t want to see big one-sided results between the top teams. I don’t think it’s healthy for world rugby.’’
Foregone conclusions tend to have a seriously diluting effect on box-office appeal and commercial value. Back home in the windiest of Windy Cities, the All Blacks turned this into another foregone conclusion after seven minutes, sixty seconds longer than it had taken them in Sydney last week.
Just in case anyone thought New Zealand’s defence of the Bledisloe Cup anything other than a foregone conclusion, the Wallabies turned it into an exercise of keeping the score down. Ambition had been sacrificed on the altar of damage-limitation.
one bus against the All Blacks is about as much use as Jeremy Corbyn sitting on the floor of a railway carriage. Parking an entire coach-load, as the Wallabies did, still cost them four tries, two in each half.
Quade Cooper, imprisoned with the rest in his own half for most of the match, responded once in sheer desperation by trying to find a way out from his own ingoal area.
It took his team until the 79th minute to come out from behind the barricades and stay there long enough to threaten the New Zealand line. Just before he could reach for it, Israel Folau fell to a scything tackle.
Nick Phipps managed to get over the line in the last minute only to lose the ball in the act of non-scoring. The substitute scrum-half’s misfortune ensured that last year’s winners of a truncated Rugby Championship got what their austere gameplan deserved.
It amounted to a tacit admission that they had no chance, a worrying state of mind for the game at large given that the Springboks have also slumped to a level of mediocrity.
Even from this distance, perhaps only England will offer a genuine threat to their monopoly of the World Cup.
The facts confirm that the holders are not so much in a class of their own but on a different planet surrounded by a more sophisticated solar system. The numbers are unheard-of – 42 consecutive home Test wins since 1998, 14 series victories in the Bledisloe on the bounce, 19 straight defeats for AusParking tralia in New Zealand – and counting.
More seriously for the rest, those figures only tell half the story, if that much. They take no account of the rejuvenation process postWorld Cup, of how good the young ones will prove to be in the months and years ahead because nobody knows other than that that they are already far above average.
The latest to roll off the gold-plaited assembly line, Anton Lienert-Brown, might have been forgiven for looking a touch overawed by his sudden elevation onto the big stage at the tender age of 21. He made it as the fifthchoice inside centre in the unavoidable absence of a quartet of injured Test play- ers – Ryan Crotty, Sonny Bill Williams, George Moala and Charlie Ngatai.
New Zealand have such rich seams of untapped talent that what would be considered a crisis anywhere else is viewed as an opportunity. Lienert-Brown responded by playing a blinder.
His first touch, an overhead pass out of traffic, invited Israel Dagg to score the first try. The new boy’s second touch, a more orthodox pass that enabled Beauden Barrett to leave a drifting defence hopelessly adrift, paved the way for Dagg’s second try.
This time, unlike Sydney, the Wallabies offered some fight, enough at any rate for Romain Poite, to warn the captains three times about indiscipline.
Despite that, the French referee restricted himself to one yellow card, given to Adam Coleman who undid a lot of his abrasive work with a pointless shoulder charge on Ben Smith. Poite ought to have binned hooker Dan Coles for the one blemish on an otherwise outstanding night’s work, a swinging arm to Scott Fardy’s head.
Before the game concerns itself about how to restore competition at the very top short of introducing a handicap system, another depressingly familiar issue reared its ugly head. The 13 scrums generated such a mess that Poite awarded seven penalties and one free kick.
True to form, Hansen’s new team rose above it all, reaching new plateaux of excellence, ridiculing the theory that the mass retirements of last October would bring them back down to the level playing fields of the foothills.
So much for wishful thinking. Hansen has already served spectacular notice of keeping his players on their stratospheric curve and putting them further out of reach, as if they aren’t already.
His post-match verdict suggests it may be another 18 years before they lose at home again:“We just have to keep getting better at everything we do, don’t we…?”