It’s all yours, New Zealand

“It’s all yours, New Zealand.” Those were the words of the legendary Danie Craven when he addressed the New Zealand crowd after the epic battle between the All Blacks and the Springboks in 1956, the year the Kiwis scored their first ever series win over South Africa.

Some 55 years later, it’s time for modern South Africa to do the same, and acknowledge that the All Blacks are indeed the best rugby team on the planet and are thoroughly deserved World Cup winners. While the final may have been close, and the statistics favoured France, it would have been a travesty had the All Blacks been denied the right to take their rightful place on the throne.

France were brave in the final and proved that some of the pre-match predictions that they would just be overpowered were well off target. France always front the All Blacks in big matches, and too much may have been made about the pool match between these teams last month, where the French had nothing to gain from winning and got some of their selections hopelessly wrong.

It wasn’t enough though for France, and maybe that is a good thing for rugby. New Zealand, given the way they have dominated rugby during the past four-year cycle, deserved the title. There isn’t a rugby nation that they have lost to more than they have beaten since 2007, and on that basis alone, they are worthy champions.

The World Cup hasn’t always produced the best team in the world as the winner. Arguably the only times it has, are this year, 1987, 1991 and 2003. It was why after the last World Cup in 2007, when the Springboks won without playing any of their big southern hemisphere rivals, there were some who were questioning how seriously we should be taking the World Cup.

Certainly the Tri-Nations, in terms of hard, competitive games, is a far tougher competition, though the World Cup may be more brutal for the way knockout rugby can determine the legacy of teams, coaches, players and eras.

At least this year we did see the best team win the competition. If there are South Africans who want to argue the point I would counter that had the Springboks won more often against the All Blacks in the past four years than they have lost, there might almost be validity to the argument.

But that is not the case, and while the Boks did win one Tri-Nations title in 2009, they came last in the other three, and that is not a good basis to say the Boks would have beaten the All Blacks at this tournament had they played them. The balance of probability would say the opposite.

If the All Blacks' win underlines to South Africans the need to start winning more consistently and building up a winning habit as a better guarantor of future World Cup success, then maybe there is a silver lining in all of this for the former world champions.

Hopefully there aren’t too many South Africans still rabbiting on about Bryce Lawrence’s role in their team’s demise two weeks ago, for while the referee was poor in that game, it certainly wasn’t the first or only time in World Cup history that this was the case. The Springboks probably wouldn’t have won the previous World Cup had referee Wayne Barnes not missed a French forward pass in the try that killed the New Zealand hopes.

My Kiwi mates tell me that New Zealanders continued to complain about Barnes for months afterwards, but we in South Africa were oblivious to it because we were too busy celebrating the Springbok win. That is the way it is at an event like this, the tournament moves on, and outside of the affected country no-one cares beyond a couple of days.

Sitting in New Zealand at the moment as I am, I can tell you that this is the case here too – the All Blacks and their fans are celebrating their triumph without any thought to what might have happened had they ended up playing the Boks somewhere along the way. And why should they – it wasn’t something we thought about when the boot was on the other foot in 2007, was it?

So let’s not be sore losers and instead acknowledge the All Blacks for what they are - worthy world champions.