Around 10.30 on Sunday morning I strolled through Centennial Park musing about the gripping Rugby World Cup 2015 semi-final victory of the New Zealand All Blacks over the South African Springboks.

On my mind was the question – what had really happened in the 20-18 All Blacks victory?

I noticed two good old boys, iPhones in hand, chatting about the match.

GOB 1: “It was a terrific match. Both teams went at each other hard. But best team won.”

GOB 2: “The rain didn’t help the teams, especially the All Blacks.”

This is true enough, as far as it goes. But for me the crucial factor in the result was that, despite the rain tumbling down at Twickenham, the All Blacks tried to score tries while the Springboks played for penalties.

The All Blacks had dared to be great. Great with the ball in hand. Great at playing modern 21st century rugby.

The Springboks had played no-risk rugby football to win the match. Winning rugby in the 20th century manner.

The Springboks had the courage of their restrictions. The All Blacks had the courage of their convictions.

So the All Blacks won because they scored two tries, both which were converted by Dan Carter. The conversions were from the sidelines and, in a real sense, turned out to be the crucial factor in the outcome of the match.

The tries had come at crucial periods of the match. In the opening minutes when Jerome Kaino smashed through Lood de Jager’s tackle to plant the ball one-handed over the try line, and not long after half-time when Beauden Barrett scored after a sustained series of attacks inside the Springboks 22.

That try and conversion completed a 10-point surge for the All Blacks, taking them to a lead that the Springboks were never quite able to overcome.

The Springboks got their penalties. They kicked all six of them. But they lost the match. They had played to win, certainly. But they had restricted their options for winning to the whim of the referee, Frenchman Jerome Garces, or to the occasional stupidity of the All Blacks, as when the other Jerome (Kaino) he kicked away the ball to stop a Springboks attack inside the All Blacks half.

As the SAS motto proclaims, however: Who Dares Wins.

It was the All Blacks who dared to be great who rightly claimed the victory.

Owen Slot in the Times of London expressed this notion in a compelling and convincing manner: “The semi-final was tight and tense, but only one team tried to play rugby. Hard, tense, compelling. And a victory for the team who tried to play. In this magnificent World Cup, where the rugby has been of such a soaring, entertaining level, the team that elected not to play nearly prevailed …”

Someone posted a Twitter before the match pictures of a sleek All Blacks speedster car and a chugging Springboks Volkswagon, with the heading: The Race is on…

This is a mechanical way of describing what the two teams brought to the match. On a dry field, say the Millennium Stadium under the roof, the All Blacks speedster game might have resulted in the sort of boilover inflicted on France a week ago.

But on the slippery Twickenham pitch that made running and handling parlous, the chugging Springboks game received its full value.

The All Blacks had to kick a lot more on attack than they would usually because, as their quick-silver halfback Aaron Smith explained after the match, the conditions favoured the side playing without the ball.

When you compare the two teams, there is no reason aside from coaching ineptitude and a chronic lack of imagination in South African rugby why the Springboks could not have done some running with the ball. In fact, in the opening minute or so, they worked a backline play that saw Jesse Kriel bolt through a gap and race towards the All Blacks 22.

But this was never tried again. Not even at the end of the match when they needed to get out of their 22 and somehow set themselves up for a penalty or a drop goal, or heaven forbid actually score a try to get back the lead.

But after eight phases of smashing the ball up, using strength rather than skills, Victor Matfield knocked the ball on.

Game over, and virtually no ground had been made.

You look at the Springboks back row of Duane Vermeulen, Schalk Burger, Francois Louw. Has there been a better balanced trio for the Springboks in decades?

There were two young outstanding locks, Lood de Jager and Eben Etzebeth, who is destined to be a Springboks great.

Bismarck du Plessis is the best Springboks hooker in decades.

Then you look at the backs. Fourie du Preez is one of the greatest halfbacks to play rugby. Before the semi-final he had won 7 of his 12 Tests against the All Blacks.

The youngsters in the backline, Handre Pollard, Damian de Allende (a bigger centre than Ma’a Nonu and possibly more explosive!) and Jesse Kriel, have the talent to shred any defence.

Willie le Roux is a rugby magician, if given the licence to play his natural, skilful game.

Bryan Habana is an all-time Springboks great winger. But, possibly because he is kept locked and bound in some tactical jail, he made several errors that went a long way to costing the Springboks the match.

He charged at Carter before he had moved in to convert the first All Blacks try. Carter missed his first shot but converted his second. The All Blacks try had come when Habana had shot out of the defensive line.

In the second spell, Habana was sin-binned when the All Blacks had the momentum of scoring 10 unanswered points.

You have the feeling with Habana’s play that he gets cabin fever from being isolated out on the wing with no plays specifically created for him. He seems to look for opportunities when they are not there that make him force the issue and create problems for himself and his team.

Imagine what a New Zealand coach like Vern Cotter or Joe Schmidt would do with this Springbok talent?

Imagine what Steve Hansen would do.

Even with the non-coaching from Heyneke Meyer the Springboks have won 70 per cent of their matches. But against the brilliantly coached All Blacks, this ratio plummets down to Meyer’s rugby IQ level, which decency requires me not to reveal.

The crucial fact for the Springboks is that they won the 2007 Rugby World Cup tournament with a great lineout, the accurate goal-kicking of Percy Montgomery, the incessant use of the rolling maul, the lineout genius of Victor Matfield and an obsessive defensive attitude that eliminated any desire to play expansive, skilful rugby.

Before the 2007 Rugby World Cup tournament, the Springboks coach Jake White predicted that the best defensive team would win the Webb Ellis trophy. So he devised Jakeball, which remains – unfortunately – the essential Springboks game to this day.

Sir Graham Henry, speaking as the All Blacks coach, said that he refused to try to win the Webb Ellis trophy with a defensive, unskilful, smash-barge game plan.

The All Blacks were bundled out of the tournament by a French side playing its version of Jakeball.

New Zealand rugby took stock. There was a painful and painstaking review. What was decided was that the whole culture of New Zealand rugby had to change.

Total Rugby. The All Blacks would go back to the inclusive game devised by the famous 1905 All Blacks that led the British writers to hail the team as “all backs,” in the same manner as Owen Slot’s tribute

Culture. Better people made better players.

Passing The Ball. A high tempo, skills-based, smart game based on passing the ball would take the All Blacks towards a standard that other teams might not be able to match. Greg Mumm on The Roar has pointed out that a game sense coaching philosophy, developed by Wayne Smith, requires the All Blacks to spend 25 per cent of their practice time on catch-pass skills in decision-making scenarios.

In football, this method was created by the Pope of Football, Johan Cruyff, for his Holland team in their losing 1974 World Cup final.

It was later taken to greater and more successful heights by Barcelona where their academy is called “the university of the pass.”

The big idea behind the Cruyff method in football – and the All Blacks method in rugby – is the notion of dominating the ball. The journalist Simon Kuper explains the method this way: “Pass and move, pass and move, create space out of nothing for effectiveness and aethestics.”

The new post-Rugby World Cup 2007 All Blacks came together as a winning side under intense pressure, just, at the 2011 Rugby World Cup.

In the four years since then the All Blacks have been virtually unbeatable, having lost once to England, Australia and South Africa.

It is telling that the great strength of the Springboks in Rugby World Cup 2007, their lineout, was exposed by the All Blacks who won a crucial turnover against Victor Matfield, the king of the lineouts in that tournament.

And it was Matfield who handled, rather mishandled, the ball in the very last Springboks touch of the ball at Twickenham. And his era was well and truly ended with that mistake.

It was Sam Whitelock’s mighty lineout leap and steal that was hailed by Richie McCaw, the defeated All Blacks captain in Rugby World Cup 2007, as a “decisive” moment in the semi-final.

The beauty of the All Blacks skilful ‘pass and move’ method of winning matches is that it is easier to come down or ease down in plays in difficult conditions, as the All Blacks endured at Twickenham, than it is for restricted sides like the Springboks to skill up, as their failure to make any headway at the end of the match revealed.

As David Campese famously remarked about the England side’s decision to try and play expansive rugby in the 1991 Rugby World Cup final: “You can’t learn to play running rugby in five minutes.”

All this is not intended to put down the Springboks. They played a mighty match. They could have won it, too, with a bit more luck.

But things have changed since Rugby World Cup 2007. The laws have been opened up more to allow more space for attacking play. Attacking techniques and systems have been developed that allow sophisticated attacking sides like the All Blacks more options and opportunities to make breaks.

And the skills levels of all the players, especially with the All Blacks, has risen to the such levels that Steve Hansen can set out game plans that are as sophisticated as they are effective.

Some thoughts jotted down during the match:

“Good call, Johnnie,” from Jerome Garces to the Irish assistant referee Johnny Lacey when he spotted an All Black offside allowing Handre Pollard to kick his second successful penalty.

I noticed, too, that Garces tended to warn the Springboks defensive line, “back, back!” which he did on numerous occasions. But he never warned the All Blacks. The result was a penalty count of 6 to 1, at one stage, that threatened to lose the match for the All Blacks.

The All Black great and current selector Grant Fox, usually very reticent about these matters, confined himself to noting that the All Blacks discipline was “good enough in the first half” before adding, “I’m going to get into trouble for saying this but we didn’t much in return on the other side for all the pressure we built.”

The Springboks, the commentators pointed out at half-time, have won 21 Tests since 1999 when they have led at half-time. At Twickenham, the Springboks were leading 12-7 at half-time, Kaino in the sin-bin. This was the fifth successive match the All Blacks have lost a player to the sin-bin.

I thought that the turning point in the match came just before the start of the second half when the All Blacks came out early and started doing their pass-catch drills.

During half-time, the television pictures showed an agitated Meyer addressing his players a bit like a headmaster talking to recalcitrant students.

In the All Blacks dressing room, the players and the coaches were in groups. You could see that they were working out how they could wrest control of the match back from the Springboks.

Then they came out early and did their drills. This was a sign to the Springboks that the All Blacks were ready to play, and to play skilfully. As it happened, they were totally dominant in the second half.

The Springboks got two more penalties and the All Blacks scored a converted try and a drop goal. That drop goal by Daniel Carter was a telling strike. Kaino was still off the field. It gave the All Blacks the lead, which they never gave up.

It was taken early, too, just after half-time. I have often argued that during the match, and not at its end, is generally the best time to boot over a drop goal. Carter’s strike had no one charging at him. It was not expected. So he had time to set himself up.

By way of contrast, in the last minute of the game when he tried to set up a second dropped goal, he was bustled out of it. The All Blacks were forced to run the ball. Sam Cane dropped a pass. This gave the Springboks their last scrum and last chance to snatch a victory.

In the 52 second minute of the match, these telling statistics were put up on the screen: Carries SA 40, New Zealand 92, Metres gained SA 118, New Zealand 335.

Throughout the match, the All Blacks were smart with kicking off to the Springboks. Not once was a short kick-off used. Why? Because the Springboks never run the ball out from deep in their territory. So by kicking deep from the kick-off, but just outside the 22, Carter was ensuring that the All Blacks got the ball back in Springboks territory.

During the match, too, it was obvious that the Springboks were making many head tackles, with Bismarck du Plessis being a serial offender. After some time of this, and with no penalties coming, McCaw talked to Garces about it, making a gesture of an arm around the throat.

From the next play, Joe Moody was penalised – for a throat-tackle clear-out.

But later in the match, towards the end, the Springboks won a penalty from a lineout about 40m out. Patrick Lambie had booted over a longer penalty just before this. It was in the context of the game a relatively easy shot for the Springboks to snatch the lead with 10 minutes to play.

But the TMO, George Ayoud, spotted a throat-tackle clear-out from Matfield and the penalty was reversed. Justice, perhaps, for the many similar tackles missed by Garces.

Towards the end of the match, with the All Blacks on attack, it was very clear that Garces was not going to award them any penalties to entrench their lead. The Springboks, on desperate defence, made early tackles, got on the wrong side of rucks, and went early in the scrum (conceded but unpunished by Garces).

The Springboks, too, were allowed to send players to the ground in the last 20 minutes as they tried to conserve energy from their drained bodies.

I don’t often praise something that Phil Kearns says. But he was spot-on when asked before the match why he thought the All Blacks would win: “New Zealand have many facets to their game. The Springboks have one facet, and when that doesn’t work they do it again, harder.”

Too true. South African rugby has to go through the soul-searching New Zealand rugby went through after Rugby World Cup 2007. For New Zealand the pay-off for facing up to the hard reality that dramatic changes were necessary, on and off the field, has been to win the Webb Ellis trophy in 2011 and to be in the final to win again in 2015.

***

Not long after the match, Brian Moore, a former England player and now commentator, posted a video purporting to show Richie McCaw elbowing Francois Louw. “This might be interesting – ” Moore posted.

It was clear the mischief Moore was up to. He wanted to get McCaw out of the 2015 Rugby World Cup final. If McCaw is taken to the tribunal and found guilty, the punishment is two week’s suspension.

New Zealand journalists, though, were on to the nasty tactic. Duncan Johnstone quickly ran a story with the explanatory headline: Suggestions of a deliberate Richie McCaw elbow are insulting.

Stuff.co.nz quickly followed up this story with a slow-motion replay of the incident. The heading to the story makes the valid point. It is an illusion, there is no elbow from Richie McCaw.

When the video is slowed down it is obvious, and as you would expect, that McCaw did not elbow Louw, even accidentally.

He runs around the back of ruck as the Springboks are clearing it. He swerves to avoid Louw who is falling out of the ruck. Louw’s head hits McCaw’s hip.

“Forget the elbow, the panicked eyes watching this are blurred,” stuff points out, correctly. “There is no elbow, it is an illusion.”

Paul Cully on his whiskeycully twitter acount notes: “The technical term for what McCaw did is ‘running after the ball while other players are on the pitch.'” Quite so.

The main point I take out of this is how slack the Australian rugby media in England – together with the ARU – was in allowing World Rugby to smear Craig Joubert and, in doing so, put pressure on the Wallabies when they face up to the Pumas with a hostile crowd and a referee under intense scrutiny not to give the Wallabies the benefit of any doubt.

The Australian rugby media should have reacted as quickly, forthrightly and as intelligently as the New Zealand media to protect the interests of the Wallabies.