Getting SBW off MIA list
Hansen believes Williams can return to prominence for the All Blacks with more game time after an injury-interrupted year
Sir Clive Woodward reckons the All Blacks are missing just one piece in their personnel jigsaw, and if they had it, they would be just about unbeatable. He was right about there being one missing piece, but not that it is a kicking coach and not that the All Blacks will be unbeatable when they find it.
What the All Blacks are missing at the moment is a thundering presence in their No 12 jersey.
They haven’t had a second-five this year who has smashed them over the gainline when they have needed to win that battle for momentum. And more harmful has been the absence of subtle and effective distribution in that same channel.
It’s maybe the impossible dream but the All Blacks essentially want their No 12 to be built like a loose forward with the same ability in the collision and yet have the creative touch and vision of a first-five.
Perhaps they have been spoilt in terms of expectation, as for the better part of a decade, Ma’a Nonu came close to fulfilling that brief — being a ball of destruction, yet also the best long passer in the team.
But the other reason the All Blacks continue to expect they can have their cake and eat it, as it were, with their selection at second five-eighth is that they believe they have in Sonny Bill Williams a player who, much like Nonu, can provide that dual functionality.
Williams may not have the same long-pass accuracy in his repertoire but he has a miraculous range of offloads he can throw and he’s a combat athlete with a love of the rough and tumble that comes with the territory.
He hasn’t been able to deliver what the All Blacks have wanted this year, mostly because he’s spent much of the season injured.
He barely played for the Blues, missed two of the three tests in June and was injured again in the one he did manage, keeping him out of rugby until he started against the Pumas in Buenos Aires.
For All Blacks coach Steve Hansen, Williams’ lack of game time explains his lack of form — or at least his patchy and unconvincing performances in the last three tests.
Williams hasn’t found much of a groove since he came back into the team.
There has been more bad than good from him, or at best a ratio of one positive act balanced by one negative.
Seen through Hansen’s eyes, this is all part of the process when a senior player with so little football behind him this season makes his way back.
A player with less experience, less trust, wouldn’t be in the All Blacks midfield if they had suffered a similar run of injuries and subsequent lack of game time.
They would instead have been sent to the Mitre 10 Cup and worked the errors out of their game in a less intense and scrutinised environment.
But Williams, like Brodie Retallick and Joe Moody, has that proven ability which means he, like they, come under slightly different returnto-play protocols.
Hansen is willing to be patient to rekindle the form he is convinced Williams can still produce.
He made that much clear after the Saturday’s test in Yokohama.
“Brodie [Retallick] said he was heaving after 10 minutes but he still provided a lot of input into the game for us and he will be massively better off for it.
“Moods [Joe Moody] has had a few extra games and that reflected in how he played, and then you have got Sonny, who has really only played a handful of games all year.
“Again, he did some really good things, and then a couple of times, he didn’t do the things he wanted to do and we wanted him to do, and again you accept that because the only way you are going to get them better is by playing them.”
The inference is that Williams will play against England and Ireland because he remains the No 1 secondfive and a player the All Blacks feel can make their midfield a more potent mix of destructive defence and neat offloads.
Hansen’s faith has not been shaken by recent weeks. He’s not buying the story that many are selling, which is that Williams is no longer the athlete he was and now a touch vulnerable to being exposed on defence by those with top-end speed.
He’s sticking by his man — giving him time to play his way back into his best form. Hansen is playing the long game here — willing to be patient, to trust his instincts that are telling him Williams is not a spent force, just underdone.
He’s giving Williams extended time to show he’s still got it; still capable of opening a defence with one welltimed surge and flip, and the missing piece the All Blacks have been looking for all year.