Rugby World Cup 2023: Gregor Paul - the issue with picking Dalton Papali’i at blindside flanker to face France

OPINION

By Gregor Paul in Paris

In trying to assess whether the selection of Dalton Papali’i to start at blindside for the All Blacks in the World Cup opener should be a source of excitement or concern, it’s hard not to keep feeling it is the latter.

Maybe that’s history pushing the pendulum that way rather than objective analysis, but it’s a selection that doesn’t leave much in the way of neutral ground.

First and foremost, what doesn’t quite sit right is that the All Blacks are facing their biggest game in the past four years, and they are picking a natural openside at blindside.

As a general rule, playing people out of position at World Cups hasn’t come up trumps for the All Blacks, although it’s also true that Papali’i will not be wearing No 6 for the first time in Paris.

Papali’i has played at No 6 sporadically throughout his career, but he himself identifies with the No 7 jersey – says it’s the position to which he best relates and the one in which his instincts are attuned.

When he’s played at openside for the All Blacks, his performances have been good enough to spark debate about whether he should usurp the captain from the No 7 jersey.

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He’s quick and his speed allows him to be an occasional menace at the breakdown, while so too can he be supremely effective carrying the ball in wider channels.

But his skill-set doesn’t necessarily neatly or effectively transfer to the blindside.

He’s a relatively big openside, certainly more powerful than he may appear, but he’s not a big, big man in comparison with the likes of Charles Ollivion who is playing blindside for France and who stands at 1.99m and weighs 115kg.

Dalton Papali'i has played at No 6 sporadically throughout his career. Photo / Getty

The typical modern blindside tends to be a behemoth – most of them capable of playing lock, and while at 1.93m and 110kg, Papali’i may not appear to be conceding too much size to Ollivion, the power difference is substantial.

There’s more to this than size, though. Papali’i is a great ball carrier in the wider channels, but it’s a different skill entirely to be first receiver in the heavy traffic and drive over the gainline as is the requirement of the All Blacks’ blindside.

It took the All Blacks’ preferred blindside, Shannon Frizell, until this year to learn the art of smashing his way through the tackles of big men in the middle of the field and it’s a big ask to expect Papali’i to be equally industrious and destructive in the same way.

So much of the All Blacks gameplan this year has been built on the effective ball carrying of Frizell, Brodie Retallick, Ethan de Groot, Codie Taylor and Tyrel Lomax close to the ruck, and three of them are going to be missing at Stade de France, and maybe the reason the selection of Papali’i is risky, is that it leaves the visitors feeling a touch underpowered in the critical art of collision warfare.

So too, lurking in the back of many minds will be the memory of what happened the last time the All Blacks started Papali’i at No 6 with Sam Cane and Ardie Savea.

That was against Ireland in Dunedin and the problem then was that the All Blacks were dominated at the lineout.

Again, the reality of modern test rugby is that teams need three genuinely tall men in the lineout, and with only two such creatures in their ranks in Dunedin, the All Blacks’ aerial vulnerability was badly exposed.

The All Blacks lost the battle of the touchline and Ireland denied them the platform they needed from which to build their attack game.

But perhaps the biggest concern of all in selecting Papali’i at No 6, is the overall balance of the backrow which that creates.

His presence means there are three natural opensides in the All Blacks backrow and that poses the question of whether it is indeed possible to have too much of a good thing.

This is the hardest question to answer because there is one scenario where it is easy to imagine the story of the night will be that the All Blacks lacked ball carrying punch in the middle of the field and didn’t have enough presence at the tackled ball to disrupt or steal France’s possession and play off the counter-attack opportunities they are so good at exploiting.

But then there is potentially another post-match narrative that this selection will deliver – one that says the All Blacks cleverly adapted their lineout, used their greater mobility to constantly switch the point of attack to generate quick ball, and managed to play at a high tempo and with enough width as to run the bigger French pack ragged.

In the past two years, the first scenario has been more common – no matter the make-up of the All Blacks backrow, but if nothing else, there is the law of probability that says this triple openside selection has to work at some stage.

France v All Blacks: Kickoff 7.15am, Saturday

Follow the match at nzherald.co.nz

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