Hansen staying calm suffer a rare setback
IT was the morning after the night before and it was time for Steve Hansen to face the media at the All Blacks team hotel in Wellington following his team’s 24-21 defeat at the Westpac Stadium.
Rugby correspondent SIMON THOMAS was there to hear what the former Wales coach had to say in the wake of New Zealand’s first loss at home in eight years. Q: I guess you are entering pretty new territory the day after a home defeat for the All Blacks. What’s the feeling in the camp? A: Disappointment. No-one likes losing, but going to bed and going to sleep doesn’t change the result. It doesn’t change out approach at all. We’ve got to go to Auckland and we’ve got to go to prepare for a Test match. If we’d won the match, the same thing would have happened. Does it make next Saturday a little bit more exciting than if we’d won last night? You bet it does. We’ve got a real challenge on our hands, so that’s exciting. Q: How do you go about keeping Sonny Bill Williams’ head up after his red card? A: Look, he’s disappointed, not for himself, he accepts he’s made a mistake. He’s disappointed because he let the team down. One of our biggest mantras is the team comes first and he knows he’s let the team down, but we can’t go back and change it. People make mistakes. It’s a fluid game, a fast game and a physical game. Unfortunately he’s made a mistake and we’ve got to move on from it. Sonny’s paid a big price and the team’s paid a big price for him making a mistake and we have to wear the decision. That’s just the way it goes. Let’s move on and talk about how good a Test match it was. Q: The game was pretty physical. How borderline was some of that stuff and how much do you expect it to be the same next weekend? A: If you want to write that, that’s what you should write, but don’t ask me to do that because that’s not what we are here for. We are here to discuss the Test match. The Lions played realy well. I thought we were almightily courageous. Did we play well? Debatable. I think we can play smarter, but we certainly showed a lot of ticker and a lot of heart. I’m very proud of our guys. They hung in there against a quality side and had a chance of winning the game. They never gave up. As a coach, that’s all you can ask your players to do when you are in that sort of situation. Do I want them to play smarter? Yeah, I do. Do I want them to play better? Yeah, I do. But I’m not going to sit here and get caught up in the all the stuff that was happening in the game. Q: In terms of the tension and the edge in the game, is that a product of the nature of this particular series? A: You’ve got two quality sides, you’d have to be silly to think we’re all going to go there and be nice. This is a physical game and one of the reasons why we love rugby, and why you guys as journalists love it, I assume, tell me if I’m wrong, is because of the varying natures of the game. And one of those natures is the brutality, the intensity that comes with it. You know, you are asking people to be warriors, within the law, and that’s what’s happening. Is some of it close? Yeah. But it always is.
There’s not a genuine Test match that doesn’t challenge you physically, that doesn’t challenge you mentally. It’s great for rugby, and it’s great for this team of ours. We’re having to learn, as a young team, how to cope with that. So it’s good. Q: Sean O’Brien was cited for the incident that left Waiseke Naholo needing treatment. Do you think that’s a fair cop? A: Again, it’s a process. You’re going to get sick of hearing me answer ‘it’s a process’ if you keep asking me about it, because it’s got nothing to do with me. Waiseke is fine. He passed the test last night. But because he was seen to be knocked out by the match doctor then we just took him off. But he was as good as gold last night and he’s woken up this morning chipper, so that’s great. Q: When the scores were level in the final five minutes, would you have liked to see the ball kicked deeper into Lions territory? A: That’s not a bad call. A couple of times I’d have liked to have seen that. We probably got caught playing in between the two 10-yard marks when long left was on, long right was on. But again it’s easy for me to sit in the box and see all that space because I’m not in the heat of the battle.
So it’s something we’ll talk about and, you know, if the occasion arises again when we’re in that situation with only 14 people on the park, maybe it’s a sin-bin or a red card somewhere along the line, I’d like to think we’d do it better. You’ve got to learn from that experience. Q: Would you have been quite comfortable to come out of there with a draw given the situation? A: A draw or a win would have been pretty good, but we didn’t. So there’s no point even sitting there thinking about it. As I said before I’m really proud of our guys. They showed a tremendous amount of courage.
Can we learn some stuff out of it? Yes. Can we do it better? Yes. But at the same time you can’t walk away from the fact that these kids have really dug deep. I asked our forward pack to do a massive task in taking off Jerome Kaino because we felt we needed the cover, we knew they would be kicking the ball and if we didn’t have enough backs on the field to look after that we’d be in a lot of trouble. So, did they stand up? Yes they did, but unfortunately we just didn’t get home. Q: What experiences do the All Blacks draw on from bouncing back from defeat because it’s not a position you are in very often? A: The big thing about when you lose is that it’s painful, isn’t it? It sharpens the mind, it sharpens the attitude, and you look at things probably a little deeper than you normally do. We try to learn when we win, but in this case we had a side that beat us because on the day they were a little better than us. We have to acknowledge that and then go ‘OK how can we be better than them?’ And we’ll do that through the week, do our best to stay 15 on 15 and then see if we can get some strategies going. Q: Can you draw on how who you felt after the Chicago defeat to Ireland last year? A: The difference in Chicago is that it