All Blacks’ Halloween show pulls in the cash
AS AN exercise in number crunching, what some dismissed as a masquerade of a Test match would have kept the money men on tenterhooks right to the very end.
Only then could the accountants and anyone else with a loose grasp of arithmetic calculate how rugby’s biggest cookie for a one-off fixture actually crumbled. The £2m the All Blacks got for turning up worked out at not far off £300,000-a-try and £37,000 a point, give or take the odd fiver.
Charging your host at the rate of £25,000-aminute sounds seriously over the top but not when the host in question makes twice as much as a result. After the ravages of the pandemic, the Welsh Rugby Union’s £4m profit will have come like manna from heaven.
Someone would have to pay for it with Alun Wyn Jones, of all people, the first casualty. The burden fell on those left behind, most notably the aptlynamed Taine Basham, who dared to challenge history by giving the fans a brief run for their money.
Nobody told them they would finish up chasing shadows in the rain, mesmerised by the All Blacks’ unique capacity to impersonate the Harlem Globetrotters as if by nothing more strenuous than the flick of a switch.
Every time Wales stoked their flickering lamp into a flame, every time they dragged themselves off the canvas and threatened to make a game of it, New Zealand raised their game to a higher level and snuffed it out. At the end, it was as if the Red Dragons had been puffed out by all manner of All Black magic.
On Halloween weekend, theirs was the ultimate in treats and tricks, issued in triplicate as a devastating reaction Rhys Priestland daring to narrow the gap to a mere 12 points by making Johnny Williams’ try. Three converted tries in the space of eight minutes and the All Blacks were 33 clear and out of sight.
Mercifully from a Welsh perspective, the most bewitching move of all, embracing four players and eight passes at high speed in tight corners, came to nothing thanks to Aaron Wainwright’s overworked breakdown service.
Neutrals the world over will have understood why the All Blacks can command top dollar.
They have put rugby where world heavyweight boxing stood in the Seventies when George Foreman put his title on the line for a similar purse in a place he had never heard of. And a fat lot of good it did him.
By a strange coincidence, yesterday marked the 47th anniversary of Foreman’s epic with Muhammad Ali in Kinshasha, ‘The Rumble in the Jungle’. Measured in terms of global impact, this, by contrast, might not have been any more than ‘The Tiff by the Taff’ but there were times when they ought to have landed telling blows.
On a night when they knew they would need something as implausibly deceptive as Ali’s rope-adope trickery to defy the odds, Wales started the match by throwing away a try and finished it by throwing away another.
The set-piece throwing hurt them even more.
Three times either side of half-time, Wales hounded the All Blacks into conceding five-metre lines out only to miss their jumpers on all three. Collapsed scrums also cost them dearly, allowing their opponents to reach the break 18-6 clear after a first-half distinctly scruffy by their standards.
Beauden Barrett answered the scruffiest moment by preventing Johnny Williams’ inside pass reaching Owen Lane galloping in support, an open-and-shut case of a deliberate knock-on and ten minutes in the bin. Strangely, Mathieu Raynal chose to keep the yellow card in his pocket.
When the French referee belatedly showed it, to Nepo Laulala for
smashing an arm into Ross Moriarty, the crowd howled in anger. Red cards had helped Wales win the Six Nations and another one here, just before halftime, would have helped, not that it would have been justified.
The final score may have been cruel on his team but Wayne Pivac will wonder whether he ought to have started with Rhys Priestland. The Cardiff playmaker’s replacement of Anscombe gave Wales a direction and belief to play with a real sense of authority, albeit all too briefly.
Unfortunately, Priestland succeeded only in goading New Zealand into a response, as if they suddenly remembered that they were here for the money and that it might be a good idea to show a packed stadium and the world at large why they are worth the big bucks.
Including the uncapped match in 1974, when a team bristling with seven of the most revered Welsh Lions failed to score a try, New Zealand have now beaten their favourite old foes 33 times in a row with maybe another 33 to come.
Even as patriotic a spectator as Sir Gareth Edwards, six years old and far from the madding crowd when it last happened in 1953, must wonder whether he will ever see it happen.
The domination has lasted long enough to throttle the life out of the age-old theory about team sport, that you can never know for sure who will win.
When it comes to WalesNew Zealand, you do.