Become just another team
calmness about us and improve all aspects of our game.’’
In the past, my experience with the All Blacks is that they are honest and objective in terms of their performance appraisal and will examine what they are not doing as well as they have always done.
The All Blacks won’t see the defeat to Ireland in Dublin as an anomaly. The leadership group will look at it and say: ‘‘We haven’t been up to scratch of late and how do we go about fixing the problems?’’
There have been calls for Kieran Read to step down as captain but, for me, that is not the solution. I think the 33-year-old remains a very good captain, and the one thing you won’t see from the All Blacks is them panicking because that is not what they do. They don’t have knee-jerk reactions to defeats and won’t fire people willy-nilly. A sense of level-headedness is a strength of the All Blacks.
The current scenario is a big test of the All Blacks’ leadership ability. The New Zealanders have lost very good leaders in the form of Richie McCaw, who retired in 2015, and assistant coach Wayne Smith who walked away from the test arena last year. It’s the first full season without the influence of Smith. The current leadership group need to step up and say: ‘‘Those leaders aren’t here any more and we are good enough to follow the guidelines they set.’’
For me, the best part of the All Blacks project is that the baton is handed over from one group to the next. The All Blacks are effective at succession planning. Read was around when McCaw captained and Hansen took over from Graham Henry, having served as his assistant. Both men must now really take charge.
Some will suggest that the All Blacks’ aura of invincibility is gone but I believe the bad news for the rest of the world is that the All Blacks will come back stronger from the setbacks they have endured.
As a case in point, when South Africa beat New Zealand three times in a row in 2009, after the Boks bombarded the All Blacks with high balls and put Joe Rokocoko and Sitiveni Sivivatu under pressure, the All Blacks made an art form of the aerial game – even if it was by picking fullbacks on the wings. *South African Brendan Venter is a 1995 Rugby World Cup winner and a former assistant coach of the Springboks. A Kiwi team with nine titles to its name has pipped the Storm, Roosters, Hawthorn and the Queensland Bulls to be crowned Australia and New Zealand’s most successful team of the past 25 years.
It will come as no surprise to rugby fans that the Crusaders, who have won almost one in two Super Rugby titles in the past 20 years, came in top of the pops in an analysis of 122 teams across 14 national leagues since 1993.
But it will shock many that the likes of Manly (23rd), Hawthorn (24th), the Roosters (10th) and the Perth Wildcats (ninth), who have won six ANBL titles and appeared in every finals series since 1987, start appearing only halfway down the inaugural edition of Australasia’s Best Sporting Team.
‘‘We wanted to understand what success looked like. It was about good governance and winning but winning continuously, not just winning a title then falling away,’’ Gain Line Analytics director and former Wallabies prop Ben Darwin said.
The Crusaders, back-to-back Super Rugby champions, will be presented with a cheque for A$25,000 (NZ$26,560) next week to donate to a worthwhile cause. While it may pain Australian rugby fans to have the New Zealand and South African Super Rugby teams included in the study, Darwin said the Canterbury team’s achievements had been remarkable.
‘‘In 2011 they did something we’ve never seen before, they basically played the entire season away from their home ground because of the earthquake and they still made the final. To pull that off is pretty extraordinary, particularly with all the extra things that come with earthquakes, like family stress and constantly changing environments,’’ he said.
‘‘They’ve also punched above their weight geographically, representing an area smaller than Newcastle or Geelong, but they have consistently recruited internally from the local area, and produced extraordinary results.’’
The Broncos and Geelong came in second and third, while National Water Polo League team the Fremantle Mariners and Women’s National Cricket League side the NSW Breakers rounded out the top five, edging out higher profile sides such as the Queensland Bulls (sixth), the Storm (eighth) and the Roosters (10th) in the top 10.
The study, launched in partnership with equities fund Platinum Asset Management, used competition stability, size and longevity to compare teams across the 14 eligible national or Australasian leagues, before ranking them according to consistent performance. The methodology meant that no A League team made the top 25.
Australasia’s best sporting teams, top 10: