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Rugby world awaits the New Zealand response

rugby12 August 2019 05:28| © Cycle Lab
By:JJ Harmse
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New Zealand © Gallo Images

Wellington a few weeks ago was the game that most of the rugby world regarded as the most important before the eagerly awaited Rugby World Cup pool clash between New Zealand and South Africa, but now there is a game that eclipses even that one.

Thanks to Australia’s 47-26 demolition of the All Blacks in Perth at the weekend, the interest in this week’s Bledisloe Cup decider at Eden Park in Auckland has been ratcheted up several notches. While most southern hemisphere critics will agree that the Springboks, after their equally emphatic away win over Argentina, are worthy Rugby Championship title holders, no-one will be writing off New Zealand.

At least not yet. Wind the clock back four years. In that year’s Championship game, Australia won 27-19 against the All Blacks in Sydney. The Wallabies clinched the Championship. But all that good progress was undone a week later. You just need one game to get momentum ahead of the World Cup, and the All Blacks did that, retaining the Bledisloe with a thumping 47-13 win at Eden Park.

If Kieran Read’s team do something similar on Saturday, it will be a case of order restored ahead of the World Cup. And that is in more than one sense, for until they were undone by a very impressive yet patchwork, in terms of selection, England team in another World Cup warm-up match played at the weekend, Wales were on the cusp of claiming No 1 spot in the world rankings.

Indeed, they did become No 1 for a few hours, they just weren’t able to hold onto to it long enough for their new-found status to be reflected in the official release from World Rugby.

CHICKENS COMING HOME TO ROOST

At the start of the new week New Zealand, though beaten and thoroughly chastened after what happened in Perth, are in their familiar position at the top of the world rugby pile. But for how long? While some Kiwis may bleat about the red card that saw their team play with 14 men in the second half, there were lots of horrible truths that emerged and chickens that appeared to be coming home to roost for them at the Optus Stadium.

While England and Wales are just at the start of their build-ups to the World Cup, they are nearing the end of theirs, at least when it comes to on-field preparation. After Eden Park the All Blacks don’t play again until they bump into Rassie Erasmus’s well-coached South Africans in Yokahama just over a month later.

There can be no denying that the All Blacks have issues, much more than they had four years ago. For a start, that red card came in a period of the game when it became clear the All Blacks were losing discipline. They were rattled, and they didn’t react well to it.

Only good scramble defence, and some poor decision making from the Wallabies, prevented the home team from being further ahead than just a few points at the juncture when Scott Barrett was sent off. The Wallabies appeared capable of breaking the initial All Black defensive line at will and there were several glaring defensive errors throughout the game from the Kiwis.

ALL BLACKS WERE RATTLED

The bottom line is that the All Blacks did not react well to the pressure that was applied on them, and since their series against the British and Irish Lions in the middle of this World Cup cycle, they have struggled to consistently bring the composure, assurance and aura of near invincibility of before that.

Perhaps it is significant that a red card, the one shown to Sonny Bill Williams in the second test of that series, was probably the defining moment in 2017. New Zealanders appeared to look at that incident as a bit of bad luck rather than bringing the proper introspection to the incident that they should have. In this day when the prioritising of player safety is perhaps over-sanitising the sport, discipline can cost you.

It cost the All Blacks against the Wallabies not just through the red card incident. There were other moments before Barrett was sent off where the All Blacks were infringing and showing signs that they might spit the dummy. The Barrett charge into the loose scrum was sloppy in addition to being dangerous, and it isn’t going to help New Zealand rugby if the defeat is going to be overshadowed by criticisms of referee Jerome Garces, who according to the letter of the law did make the correct decision.

WALLABY FORWARDS BEAT THEM UP

It can happen again in the World Cup, and if it does, then it could be a World Cup losing moment.

Not that there should really be any risk of Kiwis burying their heads in the sand too long after Perth, for most of them would probably agree that the most bothersome aspect of the defeat was something that was glaringly obvious and was a fact long before Barrett got his marching orders. The All Black pack was beaten up.

The Wallaby forwards didn’t look that flush against the Springboks at the start of the Championship, but they looked like world beaters against the world champions. Michael Cheika has chosen a big pack and it is working for him, with the preponderance of big men in the unit freeing up Michael Hooper to play his best rugby. The Wallaby captain was the best loose-forward on the field by a mile, and it probably isn’t a coincidence that he was the target of much of the All Black boorishness in that first half.

An openside is supposed to be a pain the neck for an opposing team, and Hooper was that to the All Blacks. But the Wallaby forwards' performance hasn’t come in isolation. There has been a noticeable improvement in the physicality of the Australian forward units in Super Rugby, particularly the Brumbies and to a lesser extent even the Reds, where the players are all next generation performers.

SO MUCH HINGES NOW ON EDEN PARK

That is now being transported to the Wallabies, and it has made them genuine contenders for the World Cup. But a lot does hinge for them psychologically on what happens at Eden Park, a venue noted as a graveyard for visiting teams and the spiritual home of the All Blacks.

The Kiwis need to respond, and respond well. Their public is already getting impatient, for their coach had promised that Perth would be the turn-around performance. It was a long way short of that, at least if the turn-around that was implied was intended to be in a positive direction.

Right now the biggest thing to come out of the Optus Stadium fixture is the seismic blow to the All Black aura that such a big defeat implies. There’s a lot riding on the Auckland game.

BOKS IN THE BEST SPACE

By contrast the Springboks are in a great space going into their next warm-up fixture against the same Pumas team they thrashed in Salta to clinch their first Championship trophy (it was previously the Tri-Nations) since 2009.

It was hard to pinpoint an area where the Boks struggled in a deciding game that became less of a deciding game once the Australians had done their hatchet job on New Zealand, as it left them needing to pick up just a bonus point to be sure of the title. They grew incrementally during the course of an admittedly truncated southern hemisphere tournament and by the end of it produced their most clinical away performance since Jean de Villiers’ team thrashed Australia in Brisbane in 2013.

Coach Erasmus will not want to lose the winning momentum ahead of the World Cup, but then after what they did against Australia in Johannesburg at the start of the tournament, he will back his back-up players, who will all be hungry to play, to be able to do the job on the Pumas in Pretoria at the weekend.

Unlike the All Blacks, this weekend won’t be the last game that the Boks play ahead of the World Cup. They will see action against Japan two weeks before the official kick-off to the tournament and that is likely to be the next time we see the full strength Bok team in action. This Saturday will be about deciding if there are areas in the top team that can be improved upon. Given how good the Boks were in Argentina, that’s quite an awesome prospect.

WEEKEND RUGBY CHAMPIONSHIP RESULTS

Australia 47 New Zealand 26

Argentina 13 South Africa 46

WORLD CUP WARM-UP GAMES

England 33 Wales 19

Ireland 29 Italy 10

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