Gregor Paul: Improved O'Neill still on the outer

Kevin O'Neill has every right to be perplexed. Maybe a little angry, too. An All Black last year, not even close to making the Juniors this year.

Such alarming falls from grace do happen but the strange thing about O'Neill is that almost every amateur selector in the country had him either in the squad or just missing out.

The Chiefs lock seemed to know what he was doing. He cleaned out at rucks, took lineout ball and helped keep a Chiefs scrum steady enough.

He looked a lot more like an All Black this year than he did when he came off the bench in Dunedin for his solitary cap last year.

It must be confusing. You play your way into the All Blacks one year, come back to Super 14 and do the same things, but better, and find eight blokes in front of you. All of whom were around last year.

In this equation O'Neill has been the consistent - the All Black selectors the variant.

They made a mistake with O'Neill last year; they thought he was All Black material only to discover once he got out there that he wasn't.

It's a faded memory but there is a faint recollection of the All Black scrum scuttling back the first time it contained O'Neill.

Down the two packs went and a few seconds later Springbok wing JP Pietersen was sliding in at the corner after Joe van Niekerk picked up from the base.

It was a scrum that came about after O'Neill slapped down a loose lineout throw.

O'Neill is an honest plodder, a fact that was exposed by the mobility and athleticism of Bakkies Botha and Victor Matfield.

Those two were superb in their core skills and dangerous in the loose. That defeat in Dunedin forced the selectors to challenge their thinking. What did they want from their locks?

They found the lines had become blurred. The All Blacks had stopped building locks as such and were effectively trying to create pseudo-loose forwards.

What set Matfield and Botha apart was their attention to the core skills. They were there to win the ball in the air, to take kick-offs, to dominate lineouts and to clean-out the breakdown.

They were locks first, ball-carriers and explosive tacklers second. And so it dawned on the All Black selectors they too needed to build genuine locks, to put the emphasis more firmly on the core competencies.

But that was not to be at the expense of other skills - the rangy, athletic stuff that saw the boilerhouse contribute to the expansive gameplan.

By the end of the analysis it was apparent O'Neill didn't fit the brief. He wasn't going to deliver the full package - the cake yes, the icing, no.

He does the grunt work but nothing else. His stats show he barely made 200 metres with the ball throughout the Super 14.

That's the stuff you can't coach. You can't compensate when the genetics haven't been delivered.

Hence the big fall for O'Neill - he won't ever be the player they are after.

Bryn Evans and Isaac Ross, on the other hand, have the potential. Both are athletic and mobile and, with the right coaching, with the right values drummed into them, could become quality All Black locks.

Jeremy Thrush, Jason Eaton and Tom Donnelly are seen as a bit further behind, but still more likely than O'Neill. Ali Williams, Brad Thorn and Anthony Boric are the top three so O'Neill is now the ninth-ranked lock in New Zealand. He's been dumped and there is no ladder on which he can climb back.

O'Neill most likely won't find solace until he jumps on a plane to Europe and finds a more appreciative employer.