Rugby: All Blacks win good news on injuries

The news on the injury front has turned out to be about as good as the All Blacks could have hoped for with captain Sam Whitelock, Sam Cane and Ryan Crotty all available for the first test this Saturday.

The only disappointment is that Brodie Retallick has been ruled out with a pectoral injury, the full extent of which won't be known until tomorrow [Tuesday] when he can have a scan to properly assess the damage.

And with Liam Squire avoiding suspension in relation to a high tackle committed against the Hurricanes on Friday night, the All Blacks aren't facing quite the same dramas as they had feared over the weekend.

The return of Whitelock offsets the loss of Retallick and the return of Crotty offsets the loss of Sonny Bill Williams.

If Cane can come through training unscathed – and the medics are hopeful he will - then his availability will be a major bonus and the All Blacks will feel like they have enough experience in all their positional units.

Not that head coach Steve Hansen was in particularly effervescent mood about it all.
Two separate off-field incidents involving Jordie Barrett and Rieko Ioane will have caused some internal difficulties – not that he wanted to talk about that.

Barrett's faux pas in Dunedin of mistakenly finding himself in the wrong flat in the early hours of Saturday morning, wouldn't necessarily have concerned Hansen.

But the fact the 21-year-old was still out at that time and munching on burgers, will have worried the All Blacks management group as it's clearly not the expectation of how a high performance athlete should be behaving 24 hours before heading into All Blacks camp for a three-test series against the French.

Ioane was involved in an altercation with a Blues teammate late on Saturday night that required the star wing to have a cut above his eye stitched.

The official explanation was high jinks getting out of hand and again the concern for Hansen will be around mindset and how his youngsters are preparing.

The veteran coach, however, made it clear that the issues had been dealt with in-house and that he wasn't going to discuss them publicly.

"I'm not really interested in talking about Jordie or Rieko. Enough has been said about that stuff," said Hansen.

"We have conversations with people with whom we needed to have conversations."
Hansen is understandably eager to keep distractions to a minimum this week, knowing that the All Blacks have struggled in previous years to get themselves ready for the first test of the year.

It's particularly hard when there are intense Super Rugby games the weekend before as it is challenging for the players to be involved – as the Highlanders and Hurricanes were – in heated local derbies and then come together as one team the next day.

Then there is the added difficulty of getting the players into test football mode. Super Rugby is fast and furious and the skills which come to the fore are not always those which matter in test rugby.

The step up to test football is significant and the coaches have to labour the point that the penalties for being one per cent off on Saturday are extreme in comparison with Super Rugby.

Which is why Hansen will have been alarmed at some of the loose beahviour over the weekend and why he was also at pains to talk about the importance of the two training camps that were held in the last two weeks of May a

"We would have been setting ourselves an impossible task if we hadn't had those camps," said Hansen. "A lot of people may not understand that you have the five groups of different players coming into one environment.

"They have had three months to get ready for their first game and we have got seven days, so to not have had those camps and be able to get some information into the players we would have got to this point and had information overload.

"We have got to try to get to Thursday and not worry too much about what we don't know but get excited about what we do know."