KEY POINTS:
Halfback Jimmy Cowan could not quite pinpoint why the All Blacks were unable to cut loose against England but that niggle was overwhelmed by the Grand Slam conquest.
It was a great end to a tough season for Cowan, whose battle with the bottle mid-season endangered his place in the squad. By Twickenham he had been involved in all but three of the 15 tests and could spend his summer musing about how he was going to continue that revival in 2009.
"It was not the toughest game we had," he said of yesterday's 32-6 final win against England.
"Personally I always felt safe, they did not really threaten us. When they did threaten us it was through our mistakes. They were a handful though and you can never underestimate England at home.
"They came out after halftime with a bit of aggression there but we managed to stop that and it opened up for us.
"We have not had our line broken - we felt we did not play for the whole 80 minutes, we still felt we had another 20 left in us and again we were disappointed after the game today. We strung a few tries together in the second half and we were looking for that game that is still eluding us," he said.
The All Blacks and coaching staff had all worked hard and Cowan predicted when that game clicked it would be apparent on the scoreboard.
"It is hard to put a finger on it. We did not get any flow in our game and it starts from the set-piece and me distributing the ball and I could not get any flow in my game. They tend to kill the ball and wait for the ball to be in my hands before they attack."
The aggressive Cowan had been frustrated by England's attempts to kill the flow of the match.
England were punished with four yellow cards and that had killed off a great deal of their ambition. But Cowan and some teammates had been greatly frustrated - under different circumstances the halfback might have lashed out.
"As I said to one of the boys later, if I wasn't playing for the All Blacks and had been at home playing for Southland or the Highlanders, I would have thrown a couple [of punches]," he joked."But I am pretty scared of the coaches here. They keep me in check."
