This is the dilemma with which the selectors must wrestle this week – working out whether intuition or history is their best guide when they come to pick their team to play the Pumas and try to push the All Blacks into their third World Cup in the last four tournaments.
It’s deceptively hard to get this right and there are good coaches around the world carrying regrets to this day about the little mistakes they felt they made in the last weeks of the tournament.
The danger of the All Blacks rubber-stamping the same 23 is that it potentially opens the way for mental and physical fatigue to hit in the final should they make it.
The All Blacks, after all, made 276 tackles against Ireland – 100 of them coming in the last quarter – and that physical effort, combined with the emotional energy that was invested in a game the team had been targeting for the last 15 months is presumably going to take a toll at some stage and hence injecting a few fresher pairs of legs is a valid consideration.
Get too cute with this, though, and the All Blacks won’t have a final to worry about, and so it is a search for that sweet spot of expending enough energy to make it to the final, but not so much as to have little left once they are there.
It’s not so much the physical challenge – although it can be - that presents the biggest problem, it’s the difficulty of bringing players to their mental peak when each game has so much riding on it.
The margins in this territory are unbelievably fine as any team coming into a knock-out game with their mental energy fractionally off, can be, and most likely will be, beaten on the day.
That’s how World Cups work, as the All Blacks discovered in 2019. In an eerily similar context to this tournament, they threw an enormous amount of emotion into their quarter-final destruction of Ireland but were then mentally flat in their semifinal seven days later against England and were bundled out after a passive performance.
There were several factors that the All Blacks feel they got wrong last time round, with former coach Steve Hansen blaming himself for not doing enough to instill a killer mindset during the build-up.
He was concerned that captain Kieran Read wasn’t going to be fit to play after picking up a calf injury, and because of that, he didn’t want to be his usual overpowering self with the players for fear he’d break rather than build their confidence.
As he would reveal in Steve Hansen: The Legacy: “It was about going to the next game confident but not overconfident and the difference is small margins. But if you come out and the margins are in the negative then you are in trouble.
“I probably would have applied things differently during that week. I wanted them to be confident and believe that if Reado wasn’t going to be there they could still do it without him.
“But I think in hindsight I made the wrong decision there. I would have handled that week differently from a mental point of view.”
He also regrets dropping Sam Cane to accommodate Scott Barrett at blindside flanker – a change that was made for tactical rather than fatigue management reasons.
For the All Blacks of 2023, there may not be much inclination to play around with the starting XV for Argentina, as the quarter-final was the only game this tournament in which they have had their first-choice team available and Ethan de Groot, Tyrel Lomax, Shannon Frizell and Sam Cane either because of suspension or injury, have had relatively light workloads.
If the selectors are thinking about tweaking things, then potentially they could rotate their three locks in a different order with Sam Whitelock starting and Brodie Retallick coming off the bench, with a view to reversing that the following week if they win.
In the backs, Mark Telea may return to the left wing instead of Leicester Fainga’anuku – in a move that wouldn’t make a huge tactical difference but would bring the fresh energy of someone playing their first knock-out game.
But probably, the best energy conservation policy will come through the management of the bench, and the plan may be to empty it early.
Bringing the likes of Damian McKenzie, Anton Lienert-Brown and Cameron Roigard – whose greater attacking weaponry may be preferred this week against the Pumas ahead of Finlay Christie’s defensive portfolio – into the contest earlier than usual will change the picture for the Pumas and enable the exiting players to keep a bit in the tank.
Most likely then, logic and history will tell the All Blacks coaches that a little tinkering, combined with a strategic use of the bench may be the plan for this week.
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