Kane Williamson and Kieran Read. Photos / Photosport, Getty Images
Kane Williamson and Kieran Read. Photos / Photosport, Getty Images
COMMENT:
When All Blacks hooker Dane Coles said earlier this week that he and others in the squad felt the Black Caps pain of losing in a World Cup final, he wasn't relating it to personal experience.
How could he have been because Coles, like every other member of theAll Blacks, hasn't lost a World Cup game, let alone a final.
There are no active survivors from the All Blacks' doomed 2007 campaign.
Captain Kieran Read came into the side the following year – so will have seen the pain still fresh in others when he first started playing test football and understood how that quarter-final loss to France 12 years ago stoked a fire within many of his former team-mates such as Richie McCaw, Dan Carter and Ali Williams.
But Read himself has only known successful World Cup campaigns. In his time, the All Blacks have played 14 World Cup tests and won them all.
He, like the other 30-somethings in the squad, grew up seeing the All Blacks find curious ways to tumble out of tournaments, but his playing experience at them has been entirely different.
He, like Owen Franks, Sam Whitelock and Sonny Bill Williams, has been part of two successful World Cup campaigns, so their personal experience is one devoid of pain and adversity borne from failure.
They haven't come through the Nietzsche school of World Cups where what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
Success has driven success – supporting the theory of legendary NFL coach Vince Lombardi that winning is a habit.
A host of others, including Coles, Codie Taylor, Joe Moody, Brodie Retallick, Sam Cane, Aaron Smith, TJ Perenara and Ben Smith were part of the 2015 campaign which ran almost without hitch and ended with the All Blacks making history as the first team to win consecutive World Cups.
When the axe falls to reduce the current All Blacks squad to the requisite 31 they are taking to Japan, it's probable that close to half will have previously won a World Cup.
Kane Williamson moments after the Black Caps' agonising World Cup final defeat to England. Photo / Photosport
What is perhaps of equal significance is that the age profile of many of those who haven't yet been to a World Cup will be such, that while they haven't personally experienced success at the tournament, they haven't any defined memories of anything other than the All Blacks being successful?
None of Rieko Ioane, Jordie Barrett, Braydon Ennor, Jack Goodhue and Anton Lienert-Brown were even in high school when the All Blacks crashed out of the 2007 tournament.
Ioane says he can remember watching the quarter-final with his family in 2007 and thinks he may have cried, but can't be sure, because he was only 10.
More vivid in his mind are the happenings of 2011 and 2015 and if everyone is to some extent a product of their environment then presumably growing up in an era of relentless World Cup success has had a considerable impact in shaping and defining the expectations of Ioane and his Generation Z All Blacks teammates.
There's the old saying in England that football is a game played over 90 minutes and at the end Germany win.
It was a darkly humorous observation that came about after four decades of seeing the Germans find ways to prevail in major tournaments at England's expense.
England famously beat Germany in the 1966 World Cup final, but since then the latter has won the World Cup three times and been in three other finals and also been European champion three times while the former hasn't won anything or even made a final.
Who doesn't wonder if German kids grow up expecting to win – not with any sense of complacency or arrogance but as a matter of fact while conversely English kids know they are destined to lose in big tournaments?
Richie McCaw holds aloft the Webb Ellis trophy in 2015. Photo / Photosport
It felt for some time that aspiring All Blacks, brought up on a diet of World Cup failure, expected much the same until McCaw and his men were able to stop the rot in 2011.
And now there is a generation of players within the All Blacks who have experienced success and another who have grown up seeing it and who have come to believe that rugby is a game played over 80 minutes and at the end New Zealand win.
So while Coles could imagine what the Blacks Caps would be feeling in the wake for their extraordinary World Cup final, it would have been with a sense of emotional detachment.
He'd be aware that such a fate is possible for the All Blacks later this year but it's not one to which he can necessarily relate because with no sense of arrogance or complacency his expectations have been shaped by World Cup success.
