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Opinion

Why I'm not depressed by the All Blacks loss

Roar Guru
28th October, 2019
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Roar Guru
28th October, 2019
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In 2003 England won the Rugby World Cup after building a team of players who are now looked back on as legends of the game.

The average age was so high compared with the other teams that there was active mockery and the team was labelled ‘dad’s army’. There was a strong body of opinion that the young men would run them off their feet, but England had taken the time to build a very experienced base, a formula that some now use as a major indicator of predicting tournament success.

They had also laid a mental foundation by beating every team they could meet at the tournament in the years before it, and they were clearly the best team contesting the World Cup.

After the triumphs of 2003 the core of that team retired and immediately the wheels fell off. They lost to Ireland at fortress Twickenham and then away to France. Their end-of-year tour to New Zealand had them thrashed 36-3 then 36-12 in successive weekends, and Australia put 51 points on them in Brisbane.

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In 2005 the world champions lost to Wales, France, Ireland and New Zealand but managed one ten-point home victory over Australia.

The lesson of experience was double-edge. As much as you needed buckets of it to win a World Cup, if you didn’t put in the same level of effort into succession planning, the years immediately following a tournament win could become seriously embarrassing.

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One of the key problems in building a large experienced base to win a World Cup is there are not enough Tests played between one World Cup and the next to do it in a single cycle. If one were to start with a very low base of Test caps, you would need eight years – two World Cups – to do it. Given injuries and the general wear and tear on player bodies, eight years is a long run-up time for an experience peak and 12 years is the outer edge of what is physically possible.

Tom Curry and Sam Underhill celebrate

(David Rogers/Getty Images)

New Zealand is the first country to have won two world cups in a row. There was some hope for a third. Before the weekend’s semi-final there was a lot of enthusiasm for New Zealand, a lot of people saying the All Blacks were favourites and a few predicting a 20-point black wash.

But a few were not so sure. Nick Bishops picked England for the win, so the cooler heads were out there. New Zealand were not really hot favourites – the field was so open it’s hard to say if there was anyone who was hot. New Zealand weren’t even No. 1 in the rankings, which chopped and changed because things had really tightened up.

Back in the 2015 Rugby World Cup New Zealand lost a big part of its experienced core but managed to retain some key players. For the All Blacks the cycle was about trying to keep that older core in good condition, getting caps into the younger players while at the same time finding ways around the fast-improving defences.

It is of course much easier to train hard defences than high-quality attacks. Fewer skills are required and you can do it through training patterns and improving fitness levels. Had New Zealand’s focus been solely on the Rugby World Cup, it might have been a pragmatic choice to focus on defence for any three-peat, knowing that the experience base was low, that the risk of injury to the key experience base would be higher, that attack takes longer to train than defence and that time was short.

It’s a great thing for world rugby that New Zealand did not go down the conservative defensive route. We must always remember that the game is an entertainment business, which almost by definition requires good guys, bad guys and as much drama as you can get, with twists and turns aplenty. The more drama and actors you can bake in, the more sizzle your product has.

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The All Blacks remain one of the great dramatic actors of our game. When they win there is drama. When they lose there is drama. Regardless of whether they play the part of the hero or the villain in your narrative, one thing they extract more often than not is emotional commitment. It’s important that the ABs remain as they are.

Kieran Read dejected.

(David Rogers/Getty Images)

One of the big benefits of high experience is that a team can get slowly better at the hardest things, and there are few things harder in elite sport than backing up one big performance with another. In 2015 New Zealand came in with a chip on their shoulder about the quarter-final defeat to France in 2007. With that as the backdrop, they absolutely smashed France in a 62-point routing in their quarter-final. The mental focus from the All Blacks was very high that day.

But the following match was not like that, and in the semi-final against the Springboks they didn’t reach such a high mental peak and won the game by only two points. They again looked relaxed in the final, but the pattern seems clear to me. If a World Cup boils down to three big matches against tier-one competition, there is very likely to be one ‘flat’ game. When concentration levels are simply lower, the rub of the green seems to go against you and only every second thing you do comes off. When it just isn’t your day your experience enables you to ‘win ugly’.

The other thing about knockout tournaments of any kind are that you need a bit of luck. At the outset of this tournament England had the worst draw, having to defeat five tier-one nations to win it. But as Lady Luck would have it, Argentina was gifted to them with a red card and France was washed out by Japan’s biggest typhoon in 60 years. Suddenly five became three and their climb was no worse than anyone else’s. Sometimes the cards fall different to what you expect and by no fault of your own a gap in the traffic appears (or closes).

Because of the mental energy required to beat New Zealand, the final won’t be as open as many think. There is a long history of teams beating New Zealand only to lose their next match looking very flat. England will probably have to win ugly if they are to win.

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So in the midst of the waves of emotion that follow All Blacks losses, I am not depressed. I had estimated the boys were in with a fair shot, maybe 35 per cent to win it all. But in reality I always knew a three-peat was going to be extremely difficult and the rugby gods would have to smile for us to pull it off.

Many had commented that this team was not the same as the 2015 team. It wasn’t. It couldn’t be. And the luck didn’t fall our way. So on a damp day in Japan we couldn’t quite win the collisions, couldn’t quite get the read on their lineout that we needed and couldn’t play quite enough rugby at the correct end of the paddock. We were mentally flat and we didn’t have enough of that experience to pull it in, grind it out and win ugly.

But it was very entertaining, and let’s not forget that’s what we’re selling.

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