Editorial: Passion, talent and good luck

New Zealand All Blacks winger Julian Savea powers over for a try during the Quarter Final between France and the All Blacks

It was swashbuckling - and it needed to be.

Yesterday's match between the All Blacks and France belied the adage that the World Cup stage inspires an insipid, defensive, attritional style of footy.

Fastening my rug on the couch moments before kick off, I was thinking it's tough to fathom how anyone can be immune to the allure of this sport. That is until my 6-year-old daughter joined me on the couch at 7.55am and looked aghast when I told her there'd be no What Now on the tele today. Instead, we'd be watching the live quarter final.

Sunday morning typically sees me frying pancakes served with lemon juice and a sprinkling of sugar to the spoilt offspring while they watch What Now on the couch.

Yesterday the remote was mine. Their breakfast was theirs to forage.

Realising I was serious, my daughter shuffled off the couch to continue her half-finished jigsaw puzzle. A jigsaw puzzle trumped a World Cup knockout match.

To further confuse, my visiting sister-in-law left the living room during the explosive second half to feed her pet lamb.

Pancakes, a bleating lamb and jigsaw puzzles are a far cry from the living room of varsity flatting during the 1995 world cup, where my contemporaries sat suspended in a sea of pizza boxes and beer cans while directing all manner of vituperation at whoever the men in black were playing.

So what will it take to topple the Boks?

Like Irish rugby legend Brian O'Driscoll wrote in his recent memoir The Test: My Autobiography, to win big games you can't rely on the cornerstones of passion and talent - sometimes you need good old-fashioned luck.