2019 Rugby World Cup: Gregor Paul - The two All Black 'differentiators' at Rugby World Cup

COMMENT:

For wine to be at its best, the vine must struggle and the maker must be patient. Quality comes from hardship, from having to fight to survive and knowing that it always takes time for the potential to be truly fulfilled.

Right now there is no better metaphor for the All Blacks, who two games into their World Cup campaign have played about as well as they had any right to hope for while hinting at there being more to come.

The possibilities for this team look infinite and while it's a fool's game to believe in certainties, there's an undeniable sense they are building towards something special in Japan – that in the next few weeks they are going to play with such speed, skill and controlled fury that if they don't win the tournament, it will take an incredible performance to stop them.

Everything is coming together and not by chance. The All Blacks have reached this land of possibilities not by good luck, but by good management. Struggle and patience have made them as dangerous as they are.

They have the opportunity to make history because the coaches have been patient with the two players at the heart of this team, and likewise these two players have had to be magnificently resilient to make it as far as they have.

While this World Cup campaign could still collapse in an unexpected heap against a resurgent Ireland or inspired Japan in the quarter-final, the probability of the All Blacks redefining how rugby can be played is higher.

Integral to this mission to reshape what is possible on a rugby field are Beauden Barrett and Ardie Savea, who have arrived in Japan with an obvious desire to write their names in the stars.

The best teams at this World Cup are just about inseparable in many categories, but no other side has anyone quite like either Savea or Barrett.

These two are the differentiator: the men who with their phenomenal skill-sets and athleticism elevate the All Blacks to a team that is hard to define and even harder to contain.

Ardie Savea and Beauden Barrett. Photo / Photosport

This is their time, their tournament and the patience of the coaching group in getting to them this point has been the adversity they have endured.

While others such as Sam Cane, Kieran Read and Sonny Bill Williams have had to overcome serious injury, Barrett and Savea have had to deal with the less random and in fact, entirely deliberate human interference to hold them back.

They have superstar status now, but it didn't come easily or quickly for either of them and under a different coaching regime it may never have come at all.

Barrett has been eight years in the making and what we forget because his brilliance is so blinding and his presence in the starting team automatic, is that almost half his test career has been spent on the bench.

There were plenty of memorable Barrett moments between 2012 and 2015, but they were snatched in the 20 minutes or so he was given in most tests and seeing where he is now and how he was used then, there would have been intolerable feelings of frustration that he couldn't break out of the shadow of Daniel Carter and Aaron Cruden.

That No 10 shirt he coveted dangled so close, yet remained so elusive and far from being an act of madness by the coaches that they denied Barrett for so long, it was indeed their patience that made him.

Barrett wasn't ready to rule the test football roost back then. Not as a first-five. He hadn't worked out how to package all his incredible skills into a cohesive package and he was instead a collection of disparate parts.

Test by test, for four years, he learned with snatched cameos from the bench, how to piece the various parts of his game together.

It was a risk to be so softly-softly with him as it could potentially have thrust Barrett into the arms of overseas predators.

Beauden Barrett. Photo / Photosport

Just as easily, though, to have asked too much too soon could have seen Barrett broken by the expectation. Plenty of youngsters in the past have been pushed into the All Blacks and judged harshly as not being up to it when they haven't made an instant impression.

That could have been Barrett's fate but somehow the coaching panel expertly managed to slowly develop him while simultaneously protecting him.

And Barrett somehow found the resilience to hang in there, see the logic of the path he was asked to follow and in June 2016, it all clicked for him.

He was ready by then. His graft had developed craft. His decision-making and game management reflected the knowledge and experience he'd accumulated almost by stealth.

While Carter and Cruden had been burdened with all the pressure and responsibility to drive the team, Barrett had been afforded a long and less exposed apprenticeship learning that same art without the same public glare.

No one, least of all Generation Y, likes having to wait, but if there was a tempest within Barrett caused by being denied the role he craved, it only made him want it more and what shines through every part of his game now is the hunger he has to play test football.

Savea's story is not so different. When one section of the crowd at Oita Stadium began to chant late in the second half against Canada that they wanted Ardie, it brought back memories of June 2016 when the Wellington faithful demanded he be introduced against Wales.

Ardie Savea. Photo / Getty

He was and when he scored a 40 metre try with his first touch of the ball, that was all the proof his wide-body of support needed that he and not Sam Cane was the rightful heir to Richie McCaw's No 7 shirt.

But the All Blacks coaches weren't seeing the same things as everyone else. Savea hadn't developed the physical presence required to be effective at the breakdown. He lacked the raw power to knock big men, the trundlers who have a bit of extra cushion for pushing, off their feet.

He buzzed about at a million miles an hour in his first year in test football, but that wasn't his job and for much of his second season and parts of his third, he was barely sighted in the test arena.

The coaches kept him in cold storage, patiently waiting for him to learn his craft: to see the orthodox requirements of his role as the foundation of the unorthodox.

Like Barrett, Savea must have had a few tortured nights trying to sleep while his career seemingly stalled. He had the public telling him he was ace and the coaches saying he had a long way to go.

It reached the stage where he was ready to pack it all in for a contract in France but like Barrett, such frustration gave him purpose and focus that he channelled into his personal growth and development.

What didn't kill him made him stronger and he's here in Japan now without a shred of doubt about what he wants to achieve and why.

The coaches have played the long game with them both, managing them carefully and deliberately to get them to this point in time at the peak of their extraordinarily considerable powers.

It's been a journey that no one could ever be sure would end where it has.

Struggle and patience, though, are so often the best guides.