Goodhue, centre of attention
Perhaps this goes back to being beaten on the outside by Ben Lam in Wellington earlier this year. But be fair – give Lam some grass to gallop into and no one is catching him.
Goodhue also has something that ‘quicker’ players would swap their fast-twitch fibres for. Along with Damian McKenzie, no one hits the ball better than Goodhue.
Perhaps the All Blacks will go back to Williams and Crotty as a partnership this weekend, when they name their team today. They invested a lot of faith in it last year.
However, with No 12 being Crotty’s best position the All Blacks can get most attacking uplift from changing the picture at No 13. That’s part of what makes Goodhue so appealing.
Has the time come to make the first big unforced selection shift in 2018 and revisit the pecking order in midfield?
* Stats provided by Opta
‘‘He [Jack Goodhue] has beaten more defenders than Beauden Barrett and scored more tries than Ben Smith.’’
Backline general Ryan Crotty is adamant the All Blacks have taken big lessons from their shock loss to the Springboks and won’t repeat the same mistakes in Pretoria this weekend.
Crotty, one of the deeper thinkers in the All Blacks camp, lamented that New Zealand gave South Africa their 36-34 win in Wellington as much as the Boks earned it.
He admitted there were breakdowns in the team’s ‘‘connections’’ as they eased up following two tries in the first 15 minutes.
‘‘We were feeling good when we were 12 points up and we let them back in ourselves,’’ Crotty said as the All Blacks settled into their base in South Africa.
‘‘They created a bit of pressure but we let them back into the game. The learnings were that we could have executed a bit better down the stretch . . . also that we always believed we were going to get it done and we didn’t and it hurt.
‘‘We gifted them a couple of tries,’’ he added of an intercept and a loose throw-in that were picked off by the Boks. ‘‘It’s about eliminating those and fixing a couple of learnings defensively from last time.
‘‘So a lot of learnings but probably as the leadership, just how important our connections are out there . . . the connections that feed into our driver so that we can make good decisions based on the game plan, game flow, and how we can exert pressure.’’