Gregor Paul in Lyon
For the past decade, and certainly earlier this year, the All Blacks were a team that was happier with the ball than they were without it.
It’s in their DNA to want it and to keep moving it. They have the athletes for
All Blacks v Namibia: The big question around All Blacks’ tactics at the World Cup - Gregor Paul
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Arguably, the All Blacks, just ahead of Fiji and Australia, are the best team in the world at playing unstructured, free-form rugby.
When they were at their best this year, they operated through multiple, often double-digit phases of recycling possession on the back of hard, direct ball-carrying.
They mixed in a bit of kicking and the overall impact was that they were able to generate enough running and aerobic content to bring fatigue into the contest.
There isn’t an optimal number in mind as such for how long the All Blacks would like the ball to be in play during a typical test, but in Auckland against the Springboks it was 33 minutes and in Melbourne against the Wallabies, the ball was alive for 41 minutes.
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It’s a small sample group, but there is a link there to say that the longer the ball is in play, the greater the likelihood the All Blacks will win.
They are not the world’s best rugby team, but they remain the world’s best aerobic rugby team.
But against this are the entirely contrary statistics produced in the opening weekend of the 2023 Rugby World Cup, which revealed that playing without the ball was the more successful approach.
The teams that were happiest playing without the ball tended to exert the most pressure.
It was a weekend where conservativism ruled and rugby once again looked like an easy-to-understand sport where the three key areas were the set piece, defence and kicking.
The French booted the ball away for most of the first half and the most telling statistic to come out of Paris was that the ball was only in play for 27 minutes.
Combine that relatively low aerobic content with the directive to take water breaks midway through both halves, and the picture starts to form about why the All Blacks weren’t able to get what they wanted out of the game.
And this World Cup is now shaping as a test of the All Blacks’ conviction in their chosen game plan.
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This is a tournament where their belief in how they want to play sits at odds with how the rest of the world is going about their business.
The All Blacks want things to flow, for the breaks in play to be short and they have turned up in France as the only serious contender that wants the ball to be in play for 35-minutes plus.
They are the only serious contender that wants the last 10 minutes of any test to be played when the athletes are at the edge of their aerobic capacity.
The All Blacks are built to play in that fatigued state. It’s what their hybrid conditioning is all about - producing lean, powerful athletes who have the capacity to put serious horsepower into the scrum, but the requisite mobility and lung capacity to still be running deep into the game.
And more importantly, they are conditioned to be able to resist fatigue from clouding their decision-making.
Rugby World Cup 2023 results so far
In Melbourne earlier this year, the All Blacks blitzed the Wallabies in the last 15 minutes, and it wasn’t just their supreme fitness that enabled that, it was their ability to make sharp, instinctive decisions and accurate executions.
This has long been, and continues to be, the All Blacks’ happy place. For other teams, most obviously South Africa, this is the equivalent of their Everest Dead Zone - a place where they never want to be. A place where they are slowly dying.
France are much the same, so too Ireland and England: they all know how to move the ball, to play with width and tempo, but they don’t all want that to be the nature of the game from minute one to minute 80.
For these teams, this World Cup will carry a heavy focus on scrummaging and kicking.
Risk-taking will be at a minimum and they will all be happy trusting the quality of their defence, the accuracy of their kick-chase and power of their scrums to build the pressure and induce mistakes from which they can capitalise.
One week in, and the lower-risk-taking approach has proven more successful - and the big question for the All Blacks is whether they can make their higher-tempo, more aerobic brand of rugby work in a climate where everyone else is out to slow things down, kick long and mostly play without the ball.
