The All Blacks gather for a team talk during a New Zealand training session at Kashiwa no Ha Park Stadium on September 11, 2019 in Kashiwa, Chiba, Japan. Photo / Getty Images.
The All Blacks gather for a team talk during a New Zealand training session at Kashiwa no Ha Park Stadium on September 11, 2019 in Kashiwa, Chiba, Japan. Photo / Getty Images.
All Blacks coach Steve Hansen is content for the Springboks to come to Yokohama this weekend with a plan to tackle their way to victory.
He's more than content, he's quite happy for them to do that as he clearly thinks that South Africa will be making a mistake tobank so heavily on their ability to shut down the All Blacks' attack game.
Such a strategy has worked in the recent past, but the All Blacks might be about to pull off the greatest rope-a-dope trick of all time by suckering everyone into thinking they are vulnerable to defensive linespeed when they really aren't. Not now.
The Boks, like everyone else, might find out too late they have taken a knife to a gun fight at this World Cup.
They, like everyone else, might have fallen into the well-laid trap of thinking the All Blacks have lost their attacking edge when in actual fact they have been sharpening it in secret, ready to unleash something devastating when it really matters.
It's not a deliberate strategy that they have arrived in Japan with questions hanging over their attack game, but it's certainly proven helpful in disguising their possible potency and true intentions at this tournament.
Kieran Read of the All Blacks looks on ahead of the rugby Test Match between the New Zealand All Blacks and Tonga at FMG Stadium. Photo / Getty Images.
What the All Blacks have had in the last month is unprecedented training time. Tucked away in Kashiwa, they have been working on the rhythm and patterns of their attack, building their instinctive feel for how to build their multi-facet game.
They have been working out how to best utilise the dual play-making talents of Richie Mo'unga and Beauden Barrett in tandem with the ball-winning skills of Ardie Savea, Sam Cane and Kieran Read.
They have been trying to better understand how their kicking game helps their running and essentially play this tournament as a nearly unrecognisable force to the one they have been.
They hope the world has them pegged them as a caterpillar and that they can stun everyone by turning up in Yokohama on Saturday as a butterfly.
Which is why Hansen is happy for every team at this World Cup to believe the best way to beat the All Blacks is to give them the ball and then blitz them with the speed and intensity of their defence.
That's been a good way to get under the All Blacks' skin in the last two years. They haven't enjoyed being under that sort of pressure and in more than a few tests in 2017 and 2018, they lost their way on attack when the tacklers didn't relent and the space simply wouldn't open for them.
Looking back, it was a weird two years where the All Blacks were brilliant when they met a team that gave them a fraction of space, but were tied in knots when they encountered the likes of the Lions and Ireland who just didn't give them an inch in which to play.
As much as the defining image of the period was Beauden Barrett gliding through holes and pulling off the play-making impossible, so too was it of him being swamped by defenders, his every move shut down before it was even a conscious thought.
Kieran Read of the All Blacks performs the haka ahead of the rugby Test Match between the New Zealand All Blacks and Tonga at FMG Stadium. Photo / Hannah Peters.
The rush defence has been a kind of Kryptonite used to weaken and frustrate the All Blacks and the tool by which the reigning world champions have been dragged back into the chasing pack.
And the beauty of the rush defence is that it's not so hard to perfect. It's not such a difficult part of the game to get right through multiple phases and it's apparent that the likes of South Africa, Wales, England and Ireland have spent more time training without the ball than they have with it.
The Boks haven't shrouded their intentions in any kind of secrecy. They freely admitted they spent much of their last warm-up test kicking the ball away to get used to defending for sustained periods in anticipation of what they will likely face when they meet the All Blacks.
It's always possible they were bluffing, inventing a story after the fact to reposition a failure of strategy as a clever and deliberate ploy. But probably not.
The Boks aren't renowned for their subtlety and why bother with subterfuge because their defensive ability is so good, that it hardly matters that opponents are forewarned as it doesn't always prove to be forearmed.
Besides, the Boks didn't defend particularly well, if it all, when they played the All Blacks in Albany in 2017 and subsequently lost 57-0.
Since then they have placed a heavy emphasis on defence, rushed off the line and smothered the All Blacks and have secured a draw and a victory and two defeats by the tiniest margins.
The Boks have a plan that has worked before but that's maybe going to be the story of this World Cup – that everyone has misread the All Blacks, failed to see they might be about to pull off one of the great con jobs of modern sport.
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