Zarn Sullivan of the Blues celebrates scoring a try during the Super Rugby Pacific Round 13 match between the Queensland Reds and the Auckland Blues at Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane, Friday, May 19, 2023. (AAP Image/Darren England / www.photosport.nz)
Zarn Sullivan of the Blues celebrates scoring a try during the Super Rugby Pacific Round 13 match between the Queensland Reds and the Auckland Blues at Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane, Friday, May 19, 2023. (AAP Image/Darren England / www.photosport.nz)
OPINION:
Here we are, just a couple of weeks away from the Super Rugby playoffs, and the Blues may be about to pull off the greatest rope-a-dope trick of the professional age and win their first (proper) title in 20 years.
They haven’t looked like potential champions. Their rugby hasn’tbeen cohesive or consistent and while they have run riot a few times against the weaker Australian teams, they have lost to the Crusaders (twice), Chiefs and Brumbies.
The old fault of not delivering in the pressure moments has plagued them, and so to suggest now that they are well-placed to push on to win requires buying into the idea that the Blues have deliberately and carefully disguised their potential to date and have been holding something back.
If this is all a deep fake conspiracy, then we have to believe that the Blues went to Christchurch two weeks ago and cleverly sold themselves as devoid of any cunning tactical ideas by kicking the ball away for 80 minutes.
And while it sounds too fantastic to be true, maybe it is, because maybe the Blues learned an incredible amount last year when they dominated the competition only to be blown away in the final by a Crusaders team that had more energy and belief.
That defeat was a painful lesson in campaign management for the Blues, who after losing their opening game, went on to win the next 15.
But while they were winning in those closing weeks, they were decelerating towards the finish line and so they learned about the importance of peaking at the right time.
Beauden Barrett scored for the Blues against the Reds. Photo / Photosport
More significantly, the Blues had shown their full attacking hand throughout the campaign and the Crusaders came to the final with a detailed understanding of what they would be facing.
Looking back at 2022, the Blues hailed their mid-April 27-23 victory in Christchurch as the breakthrough moment. It was their first away win against the Crusaders since 2004 and the Blues read it as a changing of the guard.
But they were wrong. They had won a battle not the war and the Crusaders, experts at using defeats to learn about opponents and make themselves stronger, picked the Blues apart in the final.
Did the Blues deliberately kick the ball away for 80 minutes against the Crusaders two weeks ago as part of a well-considered plan to lull their old foe – and the rest of the serious contenders – into believing that’s going to be their tactical approach come the playoffs?
The chances of the Blues meeting the Crusaders again in the next few weeks are high and possibly head coach Leon MacDonald was laying a trap.
He didn’t hide his frustration after that loss in Christchurch, telling reporters that the kicking strategy was not planned and was overdone.
Perhaps he was genuinely disappointed in the decision-making of Beauden Barrett and Zarn Sullivan, or maybe he wanted his old mate Scott Robertson at the Crusaders to believe that there was no alignment between the Blues coaching staff and their two key playmakers as part of a plan to create a false sense of disharmony and dissension within the ranks.
Whatever the truth, the Crusaders came away from their 15-3 victory with no valuable intelligence gathered about where and how the Blues would attack them if they had kept the ball in hand.
They got no insight into the “real” Blues – the first proper sighting of which came in Brisbane on Friday night.
It was against the Reds that Barrett, at last, revealed his real self and played closer to the gainline, backed his running game to challenge the inside defence and played with none of the inhibition that has defined his campaign.
He was forced off early with a gash to his heel, but he did enough in Brisbane to suggest that he – presumably in consultation with the All Blacks coaches – is being carefully managed in 2023 to slowly bring his game to the boil and that he’s going to be something of an unknown quantity in the final rounds of Super Rugby.
With Patrick Tuipulotu and Nepo Laulala also now back having missed much of this campaign, the Blues will have an additional crunch in their tight five coming into the closing rounds and the ability to scrummage for penalties and drive off their lineouts in a way they haven’t so far.
An impressive dismantling of the Reds doesn’t provide comprehensive evidence the Blues have been bluffing up to this point, but it does provide them with a timely boost precisely when they need it – and hints the competition may be about to experience a major shift among the leaders.
