Predictable winner in a weird year

In winning the trophy that put all else that happened in 2011 in the shade, the All Blacks delivered on the predictions that were made by almost every rugby pundit worthy of the title this time last year.

“New Zealand will win their second World Cup” was a no-brainer in December 2010, and as they were hosting the tournament, they remained my tip for the Webb Ellis trophy even after they had surrendered their Tri-Nations title to Australia. In retrospect, to those who believe in omens, winning the Sanzar tournament was the death-knell to the Wallaby hopes as after 17 years no single team has won both tournaments in the same year.

The Tri-Nations decider in Brisbane – effectively the last Tri-Nations game ever to be played as it now morphs into a four team competition that includes Argentina – was touted as a dress rehearsal for the World Cup final, but thanks to Ireland it didn’t turn out that way. They’ve never done well at the World Cup before, but the Irish stunned everyone by beating Australia in a pool game, thus decreeing that the deciding game in the global competition would once again be a north/south showdown, as it has been all but once since the World Cup era started in 1987.

That result put the Wallabies on a collision course with champions South Africa, who, up to that point, had looked anything but possible winners due mainly to the decision to sacrifice the Tri-Nations for the purpose of rehabilitating players fatigued by the ridiculously long expanded Super Rugby competition.

As it turned out, the quarterfinal clash between the two southern hemisphere rivals just about summed up the rugby year – it was one of the weirdest games in the history of the tournament, with the Wallabies winning an 80 minute contest which the Boks dominated everywhere but on the scoreboard.

New Zealand referee Bryce Lawrence appeared to choke under pressure, and the theory forwarded by Victor Matfield in his book, Victor: My Journey was far more plausible than the conspiracy theories that did the rounds in the immediate aftermath. Lawrence just seemed to be like a rabbit caught in the headlights, and found himself almost incapable of awarding the penalties that should have been awarded.

Ultimately Lawrence’s role in determining the course of the match might have done the Springboks a weird kind of favour as the anger back in South Africa was directed at the match official. This set these Boks apart from the previous Bok team to get knocked out in a quarterfinal round as instead of being vilified like Corne Krige’s team were in 2003, the 2011 squad arrived back to a hero’s welcome.

It was a show of sympathy as much as anything else and it overshadowed any debate over the role played by coach Peter de Villiers’s decision to back experience over form in some crucial areas. It was a bizarre defeat, and while the scoreboard reflected that the Boks were out of the World Cup, the coach could with some justification argue that the players didn’t look old on the day – they looked like they were peaking at just the right time.

But there was plenty of irony, for a look at the game again on video shows quite clearly that this was a match that the old hands bottled by making the wrong calls, and the Boks also arguably played the wrong game. The South Africans played more rugby than they had in a clash with southern hemisphere rivals in ages, and in some ways it was redolent of 1991, when England were goaded into playing running rugby in the final against Australia.

There is more irony in the fact that it was what many critics had been calling for, and given the way the law interpretations have changed to suit teams wanting to play ball-in-hand rugby, the Springboks of the future are going to have to play more than the team from this era did.

That said, and this is what made the rugby year so weird, the appearance of New Zealand as the 2011 winner on the World Cup trophy was not a vindication of those who said at the start of the year that the competition would at last be won by a team playing running rugby.

They did do that at stages of their excellent semifinal performance against Australia, but for most of the way when it counted the All Blacks relied on a more conservative and kicking orientated approach than they are used to. In the end their victory was a triumph for balance rather than their trademark style of play, so that was another argument that ended inconclusively in one or rugby’s stranger years.

And it could have been stranger still had Craig Joubert, who was the best referee at the World Cup, not joined Lawrence in bottling a bit under pressure late in the final, when France were rightly calling on him to penalise the All Blacks for lying on the ball as they went through their customary big-match choke.

By not making the call, Joubert allowed the All Blacks to survive the choke this time, something many felt was good for rugby as France, after losing two matches in the pool phases, really had no right to be in the decider. Had we been going into the next four year cycle building up to the tournament in England in 2015 with France as the world champions it would have been bizarre. Yet it so nearly happened.