Richie Mo'unga and Beauden Barrett will both be leaving offshore after the World Cup. Photo / Photosport
Richie Mo'unga and Beauden Barrett will both be leaving offshore after the World Cup. Photo / Photosport
OPINION:
The true cost of the Covid-isolation years is starting to be felt across New Zealand.
House prices are dropping, airfares rising, inflation is a beast that can’t be tamed, hospital waiting lists are getting longer and the humble cauliflower is now something that only the insanely rich can puton the weekly shop.
Closing the border for two years to prevent the spread of a virus was a little like setting out to squash a mosquito with a baseball bat – the collateral damage from the missed swings having the more enduring impact.
And maybe, because everyone is focused on surviving the cost-of-living crisis and saving up to be able to afford to buy a block of cheese, it hasn’t been fully appreciated that rugby was also caught up in the carnage of the Covid eradication plan.
Or rather, what’s not understood is how much of New Zealand’s rugby decline since 2019 can be attributed to having been cut off from the rest of the world and whether we might now be seeing green shoots of recovery.
Those isolation years were not good for the game – a point that is made not to trivialise the Government’s attempts to keep the nation safe, but to simply acknowledge that professional rugby in New Zealand was a victim of the closed border much like the economy, the travel industry, and the education and health systems.
The enforced creation of Super Rugby Aotearoa provided incredible entertainment for the masses with five evenly matched teams playing out high-tempo epics, but the similarity of mind-sets and game-plans conditioned the players to a specific style of rugby that didn’t necessarily contain a strong enough focus on the core elements to set the players up to succeed on the international stage.
In 2020, the drawbridge was pulled up, Super Rugby fell apart and the All Blacks played seven tests against the Wallabies, four against the Pumas, two against Fiji and one against Tonga – before they faced the Springboks in October 2021 for the first time in two years.
If Covid hadn’t hit, the All Blacks would have played 12 of 28 scheduled tests against Northern Hemisphere teams, but instead they only played three.
It was no one’s fault, but New Zealand fell behind the likes of France and Ireland in 2020 and 2021, and by just how much, became apparent throughout 2022.
Europe didn’t shut down to the same extent that New Zealand did at the height of the pandemic and so, in a rugby sense, there was still movement of people, exposure to other ideas and cross-border games.
Possibly more important, rugby in Europe didn’t have to totally reinvent itself because of the pandemic.
Their league and cup competitions stayed intact, the only alteration being that the Celts welcomed additional South African teams.
What we don’t know, but should believe, is that New Zealand was more affected by Covid than most other leading rugby nations and hence the recovery may take longer.
As evidence to suggest that may be true, look at the way the male and female sevens teams struggled at first when they re-joined the world circuit.
It was a battle for them to match the pace and skill level they first encountered, but 12 months on and they are both leading the world again.
And maybe we will see the All Blacks make a similarly strong statement in 2023 after they were painfully reacquainted with the standards being set elsewhere last year.
There’s certainly been reason to be a little optimistic watching Super Rugby.
New Zealand’s props are working harder off the ball. In Melbourne, Blues prop Ofa Tuungafasi not only expertly fixed the defence with a perfectly timed pass off his left-hand, but then followed the play to take the ball off the final ruck and smash his way over for a try.
This sort of energy and awareness wasn’t inherent in New Zealand’s best players throughout 2021 and 2022.
All five teams are cleaning out more accurately than they were last year, too, seemingly in recognition that this is a core skill in which the All Blacks have struggled since coming out of isolation.
And backlines are typically giving themselves more space to play, aware now that the way to beat a rush defence is to vary their depth of alignment.
The little details that went missing during the Covid years are slowly coming back and there is some sense that the New Zealand teams are more consciously driving higher standards in regard to their execution of the basic skills.
History will remember the period 2020 to 2022 as New Zealand rugby’s dark age, but the era of enlightenment may have begun.
