All Blacks right wing Sevu Reece celebrates his try against the Wallabies. Photo / Mark Mitchell
All Blacks right wing Sevu Reece celebrates his try against the Wallabies. Photo / Mark Mitchell
COMMENT:
The good news is that the All Blacks are not entirely broken. The bad news is they are not entirely fixed either.
But they are well on the mend and they achieved their main goal of the night which was to deliver some kind of meaningful response and dragthemselves out of the fug they have been this year.
They didn't do it perfectly, but they did it well enough to confirm that it will take a special performance to beat them in Japan, where they are shortly heading with perhaps a deeper confidence than many realise.
This was a good performance. It was gritty and full of energy. It was thoughtful and rugged. It was mostly controlled, largely but not always disciplined and there were moments of supreme awareness and clinical finishing.
There was also some punishing defence and everything pieced together didn't make effortless, beautiful viewing but it was effective and damaging which is all that mattered and it left Australia broken.
The attacking flow and rhythm didn't quite come in the sense that the All Blacks cut loose, running freely for minutes on end.
Sevu Reece celebrates his try. Photo / Getty
It nearly did. There were moments, passages of excellence and certainly enough to be optimistic that it's all coming together.
But it wasn't really imperative for the All Blacks to be emphatic about that: it was a night for the All Blacks to provide some kind of reassurance, in anyway they could, that those who said they were in a bad patch rather than terminal decline had some evidential basis to support their faith.
And specifically it was a night where the pack, particularly the tight five, had to wind themselves up into a controlled fury and crunch their way through 80 minutes in all aspects of their work.
We needed to see their heart and soul: their desire to not graft, but hurt Australia and to impose themselves in every way they could.
It was about making sure the Wallabies never settled: never had an easy way into the game and to leave them feeling that same old horrid feeling they always have at Eden Park which is that they are being beaten up by a team that wants to win more than they do.
That was the big tick. The really big turning point in 2019 because the lineout aside which was a bit of a shambles, the pack did indeed do what they haven't done all year and stomped all over the opposition.
A Wallabies pack that had the freedom of Perth suddenly found life a little harder at Eden Park where Patrick Tuipulotu was a one man tackling machine of doom.
TJ Perenara kicks ahead during Bledisloe Cup test match. Photo / Getty
There was no give from the All Blacks this week. No soft bits to poke and prod and even the famed Wallabies driving maul was sent chugging into reverse and there wasn't an area of the conflict where the All Blacks came second.
And they certainly owned the scrummaging battle which can't be considered a contest because Australia didn't offer enough resistance for it be termed that.
Things can't be so bad if the All Blacks managed to buckle the Wallabies scrum with just seven men. On that basis alone, there was enough reason to be satisfied there is life in this old All Blacks dog yet.
The first scrum of the game was exactly what was required: set the perfect tone when the Wallabies were reeling backwards at a rate of knots before they pulled anchor and gave away a penalty.
It's not often that the first play of the game carries such meaning, but this one did. It was an immediate reminder that there is venom in this All Blacks pack and in a week when their aura had supposedly been lost and the word vulnerable has clung to them, it was important not to let the game drift by before they made their presence felt.
The lineout needs some critical attention and Dane Coles probably needs to calm down, but on a night when the All Blacks retained the Bledisloe and run up a cricket score, they can be sure the fix-it list is a lot shorter than it was this time last week.
