Wacky week of hysteria and silliness
Get a grip: Pack has to play with controlled aggression and speed, and things will turn around for All Blacks
It was Winston Churchill who said of the Royal Air Force that never had so much been owed by so many to so few. This week in New Zealand, maybe it’s true that never has so much been made by so many of so little. Hysteria has gripped the build-up to the second Bledisloe Cup rugby test between the All Blacks and Wallabies at Eden Park tonight. One defeat has sparked half-baked, sensational theories claiming the All Blacks are on the verge of implosion and that rugby’s world order has been flipped on its head.
It has at least been entertaining, mostly for the silliness of what has been proffered as analysis, but also because it is genuinely intriguing to imagine how those who have painted a picture of an ageing All Blacks team in a panic-ridden decline down the world rankings react if New Zealand come to life at Eden Park and suddenly everything clicks for them.
Brace for a shock, horror moment — the All Blacks have previously lost test matches.
Even more shocking is that some of them have been to Australia. And perhaps the biggest shock of all is the All Blacks don’t have a divine right to win the Rugby World Cup.
The key to making sense of the last three tests is perspective — as in having some and realising they are not now heading to Japan without hope just because they lost in Perth.
The picture never changes as much as the headlines suggest and there is only one universal area on which to agree, and that is that the All Blacks have not played well in 2019.
The basics of their game have been poor and without a foundation of dominant collision work, good ball retention and crisp pass and catch. They have failed to live up to their own expectations.
But everything else is open to interpretation.
Clearly, there are those who like a little drama and have decided the All Blacks machine is broken, possibly beyond repair.
They have seen enough in the last three tests to believe the All Blacks are in the middle of some kind of pre-World Cup crisis because they can’t understand their own game plan, have pulled too many players out of their best positions and have aged about 15 years since the last rounds of Super Rugby.
Those who see the world this way mostly believe the All Blacks are by default better than every other team and make all their assessments on that basis.
It’s a crippling way to see the world and a touch arrogant as it fails to fairly assess that England, South Africa, Australia and Ireland have all been capable of beating the All Blacks, and three of them have in this World Cup cycle.
There’s nothing between the top teams and the All Blacks’ No 1 ranking only confirms they are more capable of delivering consistent quality performances, not that they are necessarily capable of producing higher quality performances than anyone else.
The World Cup is not suddenly potentially tighter than ever. It has always been tight, and Australia, South Africa, England, Ireland, and Wales for that matter, have all been good teams throughout the World Cup cycle, even if their respective form has dipped at times.
There has been some suggestion the All Blacks are now vulnerable in a way they previously weren’t.
Which is true, but not because they are suddenly flailing or regressing while their rivals are advancing, but because it’s World Cup year, and in their quest to build towards that specific point in time, they have taken risks with selection while simultaneously trying to adapt their attacking strategy.
There’s no more telling statistic to confirm that pretournament is the time to target the All Blacks than the fact Australia have won just seven Bledisloe fixtures since 2007 and four of them have come in World Cup years.
Part of that risk-taking has seen the All Blacks omit
One defeat has sparked halfbaked, sensational theories claiming the All Blacks are on the verge of implosion and that rugby’s world order has been flipped on its head.
Owen Franks, Ben Smith and Rieko Ioane from the Eden Park test tonight.
To some, this has been seized as evidence All Blacks head coach Steve Hansen has panicked — dropped the big names on the eve of the tournament because he’s lost at sea in terms of his best team.
The coach was happy for the media to say the players in question had been dropped and yet confirmed the selectors would probably have made the changes anyway, regardless of what happened in Perth, as they wanted to expose Nepo Laulala, George Bridge and Sevu Reece to genuine test match pressure.
He wants Franks, Smith and Ioane to squirm a bit and be uncomfortable about their non-selection. But Hansen hasn’t lost faith in these world-class players or suddenly panicked on the eve of the tournament.
The past week has seen the wrong questions posed and wrong conclusions reached.
The last three performances have been generally poor but not without specific bright spots and flickering signs of what could happen if the forwards get on the front foot.
The team isn’t being hampered by a sense of confusion about how they are trying to play, and there was reassurance on that when Beauden Barrett, looking as relaxed as he always does, said on Thursday he has infinite confidence in the game plan.
The attack hasn’t shone because no attack does when the forwards aren’t winning the collisions and hence Bledisloe II is now all about the All Blacks pack.
Forget everything else, the only thing that needs to be conclusively answered is whether the pack has the ability to play with the controlled aggression and speed to ensure they deliver the quality of possession that successful execution of the game plan requires.
As Hansen said, he needs to see Sam
Whitelock leading the way with a dynamic, bruising performance. He needs, in his words, a “200 per cent” increase in effort, quality and impact, which will require Joe
Moody to do more than just scrummage and
Patrick Tuipulotu to be at his damaging best.
Everything the All
Blacks are trying to do in reshaping their attack game and giving themselves an element of unpredictability in Japan is dependent on the tight five providing a flow of possession.
If they get that right at Eden Park, then some of the hysteria should lessen, or more likely switch in tone to equally over-the-top and unfounded claims the
All Blacks are back to being untouchable World Cup favourites.