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The All Blacks' comprehensive win in the first two Tri-Nations tests against the Springboks depended in part on crucial decisions made by the referees…
You look back at the end of the game with the final score seemingly inevitable, but in the first half the All Blacks held their own, stopping the French from scoring other than with penalties. Clearly, discipline let them down in the game as a whole, much of it from French pressure but also from simple errors liked dropped balls. The French deserved their win, but the lucky bounce at the end blew the score out. As ever, Anton Leinert-Brown was a non-factor–the All Blacks need a fit Jordie Barrett to add go-forward in attack and hopefully to free up Ioane. And someone needs to tell Beauden not to kick the ball back to the opposition when his team needs a try in the last quarter of the match. In his bad games in the last few years he seems to lack any sense of daring, and this hampers the counter-attacking style that was/is the All Blacks special sauce (see Mt Smart). Not having McKenzie on the bench to bring on 30 minutes from the end was a major tactical error. Havili? Zzzzzzzz. No one can make something out of nothing like McKenzie. Against the top teams (and what is France but that?) we need courage, skill and adventure as well as muscle. But all is not lost. The All Blacks have until the quarterfinals to get Jordie, Frizell and Retallick fully fit, and to integrate McKenzie into the A team.
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The point of selecting DMac is that he breaks up the pattern of a game in a way that none of the other backs do. Given that the All Blacks at their best play a high risk, back-oriented game that relies on speed, sustained lung-sapping phases combinations and quick hands, DMac provides the necessary spark. We did need that sort of change against the forward-oriented Boks at Twickenham, but who did we bring on: Anton Leinert-Brown? The result: same old same old. There’s no point in having DMac rip Namibia to shreds. The failure to select him against France means that he will not have played a tough game before the quarter finals when we face one of the Springboks, Ireland or Scotland. We need him to build combinations under pressure with other players, not simply perform outrageously well in walkovers.
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The draw has a powerful warping effect because pools A and B are so much stronger than C and D. The All Blacks and France can both afford to lose the game on Friday night because they are still likely to be in the top two position in pool A. That gets them through to the quarterfinals where they will play one of South Africa, Ireland or Scotland (probably the first two, but don’t write off the Scots). If the All Blacks, for example, win their quarter final they go through to the semis against one of the lower-ranked teams from pools C and D—say, Australia or England. A win there puts them in the final. So, the All Blacks only need to win one hard game in the quarters on their way to the finals. The same is true for France. The teams in pool B have it far worse. None of South Africa, Ireland or Scotland can afford to lose any of the pool games against each other. (Depending on results, it is possible for one of them to lose one of those big games and get through, but who would want to be at the mercy of for and against points?) Then, in the quarter finals, whether you’re first or second , the teams in pool B must beat either France or the All Blacks to get through the semis. So, while the All Blacks could lose to France, win their tough quarter and easy semi on their way to the final, South Africa (to take one team from pool B) really has to beat both Ireland and Scotland, and then either the All Blacks or the French to get to the semis. The top teams in Pools C and D get through to the semis only having to beat (let’s take Australia) Wales and Fiji in the pool games (taking them to the top of pool C) and then Japan or Argentina (the likely runners up in pool D). Which route to the semis would you choose: Scotland, Ireland, France on the one hand, or Wales, Fiji and Japan on the other? I know which pools I’d rather be in.
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The Boks were far and away the better team on Friday night. But each game has its own narrative. The previous time the teams played the All Blacks ran the Boks off their feet in the first 20 minutes. The first 20 minutes of Friday’s test, by sharp contrast, was played almost entirely in the All Blacks’ 22, a seemingly endless series of penalties keeping the Boks on the front foot camped close to the All Blacks’ line. Strength sapping stuff for the All Blacks and psychologically uplifting for the Boks. That pressure produced two yellow cards, reducing the All Blacks at one point to six forwards. And yet, if you wanted to salvage something from the debris (and there’s no doubting that for the All Blacks that Friday night was a trainwreck) the Boks only scored two tries for all that first half dominance: one when the All Blacks were down to 13 men, the other from an intercept. With one man permanently down from the end of the first half the game was essentially over for the All Blacks, especially as the Boks 7/1 bench split meant that they could bring on a new forward pack. Which, sensibly and decisively, they did almost immediately. Their three second half tries, as you would expect, were all scored through forward dominance, the first from the fact that Aaron was filling in for Dane Coles on the blind side. He was never going to stop Malcolm Marx. So the Boks’ focus on forward drives was exactly the right strategy from a team with a skilled, giant and aggressive pack. The Boks’ dominance meant that they were able to play in their comfort zone throughout, and they did that regally. Congrats to them. The Roigard try merely saved All Black blushes. But, as the difference between the Mt Smart and the Twickenham games shows, the team able to establish its pattern of play (forward-oriented, in the case of the Boks, backs-oriented in the case of the All Blacks) is likely to dominate. This is to take nothing away from the Boks’ win, which was awesome. But as both teams have shown in their last two confrontations, past performance is not indicative of future results.
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SA scored 5 tries in that game, four by forwards. The one by a back was an intercept. NZ was down at least a man for all of the tries. In the second half, when the Boks scored three tries from lineouts, they used their 7 fresh forwards, which was smart and effective. But the fact that Scott Barrett had been sent off sure helped.
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