‘What I’d change about THAT semifinal loss to England’
In this edited extract from Steve Hansen: The Legacy by Gregor Paul, the former All Blacks coach examines the World Cup semifinal loss to England
On Sunday, October 20, sore but elated, the All Blacks gathered for their performance review of the quarter-final victory and to hear how Hansen planned to tackle England in the semifinal. He wanted to sow the seed that he had a plan in mind for England, and he cast everyone’s mind back to the contest against them last November at Twickenham. The All Blacks had won that day 16-15 and the key to their win was the pressure they put on England’s lineout. A year on, while England were looking good playing a brutish style of rugby, their media were still suggesting their lineout was vulnerable. As Sam Cane remembered: ‘The year before, we had played England on the end-of-year tour and we had just scraped through. But we had dominated their lineout. After the quarter-final in the review, I suppose Steve came up with the idea that the best way to beat England — or at least it would go a long way — was if we could do again what we had done last year. We had a tall lineout with specialist jumpers and we could knock the ball off at source. That was discussed briefly in the review, but I didn’t think too much of it. I didn’t look into it in terms of my own selection.’
Cane and the rest of his teammates went through a typical Monday training the next day, working out the bruising and stiffness from the clash with Ireland. Cane had come through in good shape as he’d been substituted at halftime. At 22-0 ahead, Hansen had decided to play the second 40 minutes with the versatile Scott Barrett, a 1.96m, 117kg lock, playing at blindside, with Ardie Savea shifting to the openside after Cane had been replaced. Scott Barrett had been in great form all tournament, but he was being kept out of the starting team by the experienced Sam Whitelock and Brodie Retallick. After Barrett’s second half performance against Ireland, and given that he felt England were vulnerable at the lineout, Hansen kept coming back to a specific thought. Would it be a smart move to surprise England by dropping Cane to the bench and starting the semifinal with the 2.02m Whitelock and 2.04m Retallick at lock, Barrett at blindside and Read at No 8? By Monday night, he’d come up with his answer.
‘I got a text from Steve on the Monday evening to come up to see him in his room,’ said Cane. ‘My gut sank because I hadn’t had a text like that. It’s not a good thing and obviously I disagreed with his reasoning. He pretty much said that they wanted to have a crack at the lineout and it was nothing to do with my form, that I had been playing really well, but this was a decision they had made because he thought it was best for the team. Then it came down to selection between Ardie [Savea] and I at seven and he gave me a good reason for that.
‘I took it on the chin because I could understand his reasons. I respected the fact that Steve was open and honest about his thought process and all I could do was respect that back. As tough as it was to take, he could not have done it any better.’
It was a risk to play Barrett in a position in which he’d never actually started a test, but Hansen had shown such a good instinct for taking risks. Some of his most inspired decision-making was instinctive, driven entirely by what his gut told him. He was a high roller; he bet big to win big.
By the last two weeks of the World Cup, the only teams left standing all had super coaches at the helm. There was Hansen, Warren Gatland, Rassie Erasmus and Eddie Jones. All of them had a PhD in setting the agenda. With the exception of Erasmus, they weren’t academically smart, but Hansen and Jones, in particular, were street smart with a deep insight into the flaws, frailties and limits of the human condition. They knew how to use the media: how to twist words or use sayings that would grab the headlines and build a narrative that would help them.
By the week of the semifinals, the team-naming press conferences had become must-see theatre. These were the moments when the big four held court. When Hansen sat down to discuss his team selection ahead of the England test, there was a crackle of anticipation, as this is typically where Hansen was at his best — funny, relaxed, confident, yet somehow humble with it. It’s where he could be the All Blacks matre d’ almost, the uber-confident front-of-house, assuring everyone that the kitchen staff were working their socks off to prepare something magnificent. He was seemingly relaxed. He smiled a bit and was his usual self except that he seemed to be holding back. He was the cricketer playing a forward defensive when the world wanted to see him swing. But he wasn’t in the right head space to club one out of the ground.
That was because his old pal Jones had played a clever hand earlier in the week at his own press conference. Jones, who took the whole business of unsettling opposition seriously, had wanted to try to put the pressure on Hansen and the All Blacks ahead of the semifinal. He knew Hansen had turned up in Japan claiming every other team was quaking except the All Blacks, who lived like this all the time, and he wanted to depower that argument.
Jones distracted everyone when he said the All Blacks would be feeling the pressure chasing them down the street and that the busiest man in their team would be Gilbert Enoka. Then he made up some nonsense about having been spied on at training. He had everyone, including himself, rolling around with laughter. It was a stroke of genius: he’d waved a shiny piece of paper knowing the media would be transfixed.
But there was more to it than that. Jones took a calculated gamble that Hansen didn’t have the appetite or desire to verbally joust with him in the media. Hansen had too much respect for a relationship that went back almost 20 years.
His plan in the week of the semifinal was to not engage in verbal conflict with Jones. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad strategic decision, but it was illustrative of the defensive mindset Hansen adopted that week. On the Monday before the semifinal, his skipper broke the unwelcome news that he wasn’t much more than a 50:50 chance of being fit to play. [Kieran] Read had taken a bang on the calf against Ireland and was going to have to sit out training until later in the week, then hope he could somehow run without pain. Without the skipper being at training, Hansen decided to ease off a little. He didn’t blowtorch the players: he didn’t climb into them and put them on edge. He felt they needed a softer approach.
The All Blacks versus England in a World Cup semifinal. The stakes couldn’t have been higher and yet the All Blacks, famed for their ability to come alive in the big games under Hansen, gave one of the meekest performances of his eight-year reign. England adopted an inverse V formation to face the haka and it sparked something in them. They scored a try barely two minutes into the game and controlled the contest for the next 56 minutes.
The All Blacks’ only flicker of hope came when an overthrown English lineout landed in Ardie Savea’s arms and he flopped over the goalline to make it 13-7 with 25 minutes to go. A second flicker came a few minutes later when the All Blacks won a penalty on halfway. Richie Mo’unga prepared to kick into the corner, from where the lineout drive would have been set and the All Blacks would have had the chance to maul their way over the goalline. But the penalty was reversed because Whitelock had shoved England captain Owen Farrell off the ball. It was the moment a number of realisations dawned on Hansen. His gut had told him that England’s lineout was vulnerable and he needed to pick Scott Barrett to exploit it. But if he had listened more carefully, it had been telling him to bring in Barrett at lock for Whitelock. If he could have his time again, he’d have picked Barrett and Retallick at lock, Savea, Cane and Read in his back row and put Whitelock on the bench. For the first time in his All Blacks coaching tenure, he’d rolled the dice and his number hadn’t come up. It had also been a mistake not to have hammered the team at training. He should have been edgy, tough, relentless in his demands to keep them in that unforgiving state of mind. And had Hansen made a mistake not going after Jones in the media?
All of these potentially inconvenient truths would have to be faced as the All Blacks slipped out of the World Cup, beaten 19-7 by an England team which had brought more to the table. ‘There were two things that kept me awake at night when I went to the World Cup,’ said Gilbert Enoka. ‘I thought one of the things that was a major impact was that no one in the playing group had been exposed to the pain of the loss in 2007. We still had a core of those players in 2015 who had lost in 2007. When we got to the knockout stages of 2011, that group of players was still there and they knew that you had to earn the right to have another Monday. In 2015, we had the same group of players and so we all knew how
important it was to get back on the horse after each game.
‘In Japan, after we had won against Ireland, I think we thought we had won and that it was going to be easy. The people who had been there in 2007 and 2011 knew how to find a way to get it done in
that moment and we didn’t have anyone that could catch up to that reality in 2019. The second dimension is that Steve is a brilliant people-man and brilliant at reading people. What he tended to do was play games with other coaches. You think of how he treated [Michael] Cheika. Think of how he treated Gatland and he responded to all the other coaches that he’d come up against. When it came to Eddie, he said rather than treat him as an adversary, he would bring him right in close to his circle. He said Eddie is not the type of guy I would want to get into a war of words with. They have a mateship that is still strong today, but I think in the end, that did depower Steve a little bit. Eddie got access to information. Not from Steve but through that relationship over time and that came to hurt us that day. There was a mutual respect, but at the same time, I think he was played a bit.’
For Hansen, that week is his only regret in an eight-year tenure. If he could go back to just one place in history, it would be to Sunday, October 20, 2019 and replay the events leading into that semifinal clash.
‘It was an interesting week in that our skipper was injured and doubtful and we had just come off a really top performance against Ireland,’ said Hansen. ‘It was about going to the next game confident but not overconfident and the difference is small margins. But if you come out and the margins are in the negative, then you are in trouble. I probably would have applied things differently during that week. I wanted them to be confident and believe that if Reado wasn’t going to be there, they could still do it without him. But I think in hindsight, I made the wrong decision there. I would have handled that week differently from a mental point of view.’