OPINION
When the All Blacks arrived in France two months ago, it’s unlikely that even a quarter of the country believed they would see their team make it beyond the quarter-final.
Whatever confidence had been building when the All Blacks stormed through the Rugby Championship, much of it was lost when they fell to a record loss to the Springboks at Twickenham two weeks before the tournament kicked off.
There were all sorts of mitigating circumstances to partly contextualise that defeat and lessen the blow, but the reality for most New Zealand rugby followers is that they stopped giving Ian Foster’s All Blacks the benefit of the doubt two years ago.
And if most Kiwis are honest, they stopped believing in Foster, his captain Sam Cane and the rest of the team in July last year when Ireland came to New Zealand and provided an education in how test rugby should be played.
That was the point in time when many gave up entirely, wrote Foster off as a veritable dead man walking – just seeing his time out before New Zealand Rugby finally plucked up the courage to either fire him or pseudo-fire him as they did in March this year when they appointed Scott Robertson to take over next year.
Cane was put in much the same boat – viewed as a captain surviving in the role purely because for Foster to drop him, it would look like yet another piece of the empire was crumbling.
And so now that the All Blacks are in the World Cup final, there needs to be an acknowledgement that those who gave up hope, who steadfastly refused to believe that Foster and Cane were anything but perennial nearly men, parked in positions of power by a regime that protects and promotes those already on the inside, were wrong.
No one was wrong to have doubts about Foster and Cane. When the All Blacks were outclassed by Ireland in July last year and then beaten so easily by the Springboks in Mbombela, they were drifting dangerously close to the rocks.
There was no clear sense of how the All Blacks wanted to play back then. They couldn’t combine physicality with creativity, and they didn’t appear to understand the symbiotic relationship between the two.
Their defence was loose and disconnected and there was a hard-to-understand propensity to pick players who didn’t have the sort of attitudes, attributes or abilities to deliver what was needed in the test arena.
The All Blacks were losing too many games, but the real problem was that Foster didn’t appear to have a strong plan on how he was going to fix things and his captain wasn’t producing the sort of follow-me performances that were going to inspire his team-mates to lift theirs.
If Foster had indeed been sacked by NZR in August last year, it would have been a justifiable decision, based not just on the lack of success the team was enjoying, but equally the lack of evidence that this was going to change.
But the reason those who refused to move on from last August were wrong, is because they fixed on this idea that Foster was a bad coach, rather than a coach with all sorts of redeeming and compelling qualities who was simply struggling to get things right in the high-pressure arena of international rugby.
And because of this fixed view, many have failed to see one of the great redemption stories playing out right under their noses.
Sport, as a metaphor for life, rewards those with the capacity to change, to adapt and reinvent. Those willing to keep an open mind, they will have seen how Foster has picked himself and his team off the floor these past 15 months and slowly rebuilt the All Blacks with a simple but devastating game plan.
He’s been brave enough to admit mistakes, to change selections, to work with new coaches, and braver still to continue to believe in himself, his players and his vision when even his own employer seemed to give up on him and them.
As Foster said several times the day he unveiled his team for the final: “We might have surprised a few people, but I don’t think we’ve surprised ourselves.”
His resilience and those of his captain and players has been stunning, and for parents looking for real-life examples to sell to their children about the value of perseverance, Foster’s All Blacks are hard to top.
This, after all, is the essence of the real world: it kicks you in the face and somehow you have to deal with it.
It owes you nothing and can take everything, and so to see an All Blacks team booted repeatedly in the face these past few years and then fight to climb back to the summit of high performance is genuinely inspirational.
And if Foster has been the calm, assured, tactical general in this story of revival, Cane has been the emotional heart, the battle-hardened warrior who has brought the tactical blueprint to life.
Rugby is to some degree physical chess, but knowing when and where to kick, run or pass and knowing where an opponent may be weak is not necessarily enough.
The All Blacks have made it to the final because they have not just had a smart plan, they have had the intangible quality of playing for each other: of investing their respective souls in the jersey.
And no one has done this more obviously than Cane, whose ferocity burns on the field.
He’s tackled with a physicality that often defies belief, scurried around the field with an urgency that says he is investing everything in each moment and produced the sort of world-class performances that demand he be considered one of the game’s great opensides and captains.
What could have been more inspiring than Cane, ridiculed and humiliated by Ireland last year and subsequently torn apart by his own public, delivering the single greatest performance of his career against them in the World Cup quarter-final?
To not appreciate the magnitude of that performance is to fail to understand the magic of sport and its capacity to rewrite the narrative when individuals and teams are bold enough to stare into their inner workings and realise they have to change to survive.
That a nation had doubts about the All Blacks throughout what has been the most turbulent World Cup cycle of the professional age is entirely understandable.
But to hold on to those now, having seen the All Blacks morph from caterpillar into butterfly, is to have the coldest of hearts, blocked entirely to the romance of sport and its ability to vilify and vindicate as it sees fit.
How to follow the World Cup final action
When: 8am, Sunday
Follow live updates: nzherald.co.nz
Listen to commentary: join Elliott Smith on Newstalk ZB, Gold Sport and iHeartRadio, or catch the ACC on iHeartRadio or Hauraki.
Get full coverage of the Rugby World Cup.
Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He has won multiple awards for journalism and has written several books about sport.
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