All Blacks fans and arrogance

We need to respect our rivals. Duncan Garner:

IMAGINE the pressure on athletes not just to win every single game, but to win comfortably – and with effortless style and grace.

When you set such high standards that your fans no longer worry about losing – and then they freak out when you do.

The All Blacks face relentless pressure to be the best team in the world. They’re the team everyone wants to beat. They’re the team that other teams significantly lift their performance against.

I pulled up alongside former All Black great and now selector Grant Fox this week at the traffic lights. I asked him if we’d bounce back to beat the Aussies tonight.

He replied, ‘‘I bloody hope so Duncan, the All Blacks usually respond well to a loss, don’t they?’’

Foxy, a genuinely decent and deep thinking man, then said something that has stuck with me: ‘‘As a public we don’t know how to respect the opposition, when it comes to the All Blacks.’’

The lights turned green and he shot off. If only he was that quick on the field in his day.

But Fox makes a bloody good point. Captain Richie McCaw, who makes history tonight as the most capped international, has an 89 per cent winning record. Astonishing. For me he is our greatest All Black.

But we still lose the odd game. And we’re not good at dealing with it. Some of these games, of course, are more important than others. I was there in Cardiff at the 2007 World Cup when the French knocked us over. I’ve never been so deflated in my life.

As I left the stadium an Englishman laughed in my face. The Aussie joker with him pointed at me and said, ‘‘Tough shit mate – that’ll teach ya.’’

It’s seared into my memory. Jerks, I thought at the time. But maybe we have come across as arrogant for decades?

The expectations we put on any and every All Black side are immense. We take it all far too personally.

And when we do have a rare loss the rugby public – hell the whole country in fact – has historically gone off the deep end.

The All Blacks are held to a higher standard of accountability than any organisation in this country’s history. Talk about becoming a victim of your own success.

It’s because we feel such a sense of ownership towards the All Blacks. But they are human too. They have feelings, children, wives and girlfriends. We tend to forget that.

I would argue that losing last weekend to the Wallabies was the best thing that could have happened to this side. You will always learn more from a loss than from any win. We will bounce back tonight at fortress Eden Park.

In 2003 we beat Australia by 50 points in Sydney then a few months later lost the World Cup semifinal to them. Everyone seems to have forgotten that we lost to the Wallabies in 2011 just before the World Cup.

Cast your mind back to the week leading up to the 2011 cup final – the only debate was how much we’d thrash France by. In the end we scraped through by winning ugly.

What happened last weekend is insignificant (at least it gets the monkey off our back about a perfect season, crowned with another World Cup triumph).

Tonight matters a bit more. The Bledisloe Cup is on the line and one loss is OK, but two and the loss of this cup will be a minicrisis. But only a mini-crisis. The real prize lies in wait in England later in the year.

No-one feels the pressure more than the All Blacks. But we need to get perspective. It’s not life and death. It’s a game.

And we need to respect that other teams are good too. This Australian team is strong and well-coached. So are the South Africans. And England. And who knows which French side will turn up.

The reality is that at this top level the gap between these sides is tiny. The All Blacks don’t win by 40 points any more against the top sides. That’s what Grant Fox means by respecting our rivals.

This requires respecting the fact that for so long the All Blacks have set the bar for world rugby. No-one should be surprised that the other teams are finally starting to catch up.

Our opponents demand our respect, starting with not booing Quade Cooper tonight. As massively tempting as that is.