All Blacks v Uruguay - Rugby World Cup 2023: Gregor Paul on what’s really happening with the All Blacks’ defence

OPINION

Gregor Paul in Lyon

In the past few days, two legends of the Irish game have publicly questioned the quality of the All Blacks’ defence and suggested it may be their weak point - the area in which they are not keeping up with the Joneses at the Rugby World Cup.

First, it was former Crusaders assistant coach Ronan O’Gara who brought it up, before the game against Italy, saying that he felt the All Blacks’ defensive system hadn’t evolved and that it lacked an aggressive mindset.

Then, after the 96-17 demolition of Italy, former Ireland fullback Rob Kearney made similar comments, suggesting that the All Blacks give opposition teams too much time and space because their defence is passive.

He noted that Italy managed to get outside them three or four times and that Ireland, should they play New Zealand in the quarter-finals, will be much better at exploiting opportunities should they too find they are given that much room in which to operate.

Some of this could be seen as former Irish players doing their patriotic bit to cast the All Blacks in an unflattering light and boost the confidence of their countrymen.

Talk the All Blacks down, build the Irish up - it’s the expected thing to do.

But even allowing for a little nationalist jiggery-pokery, there’s truth to what both O’Gara and Kearney said, and if the All Blacks are going to spring a surprise in the quarter-finals, it may well be that their best chance of doing that is through the way they defend.

There were signs against Italy, amid some lapses in application, that the All Blacks have shifted the dial in terms of their defensive intensity.

Kearney wasn’t right to call New Zealand’s defence passive, it’s certainly not that, but the All Blacks don’t tend to blitz rush the way the South Africans do, or push up so hard from the outside as the Irish like to.

Both Ireland and South Africa, and France and England, like to use their defence to shut teams down, to smother and suffocate them and leave them with no ability to generate momentum.

The All Blacks’ defensive mentality is different. They want their defence to win back possession - to isolate opposition ball carriers through dominant tackles that create turnover opportunities.

One system is exclusively trying not to give the opposition any space, whereas the All Blacks aren’t so fixed on that being the arbiter of defensive success.

Former players have suggested the All Blacks give opposition teams too much time and space because their defence is passive. Photo / AP

They don’t actively concede territory, but they don’t fret too much if they do, because the key for them is being able to immediately transition from defence to attack.

Their whole defensive structure is designed to have men on their feet and in position to counterattack once they have won the ball, and so if they concede 20-30 metres to win a prime opportunity, they will see it as a win.

To those who don’t fully understand it, the system can look passive and there were times against Italy, says defence coach Scott McLeod, when the players didn’t implement the structure well enough.

“They managed to get us around a little bit and that hurt us at various times,” McLeod said. “We recovered from it, but we don’t want to be painting those pictures, and although there were a lot of good things, we have got to keep growing our game.”

But what was equally noticeable against Italy was that the intensity of the All Blacks’ tackling was higher and that they made more dominant hits than they did against France.

Their tackling accuracy was 79 per cent and they won six defensive turnovers, which compares with 73 per cent accuracy against France and five turnovers.

So while the two tries Italy scored by getting on the outside of the All Blacks have been the focus of the post-match analysis, the real story in Lyon was that the system essentially cranked up a gear.

The defensive statistics don’t tell the full story either. The 96 points the All Blacks scored are partly attributable to the quality and dominance of their tackling and ability to win turnover possession, which enabled them to attack against an unstructured Italian defence.

When the All Blacks are in free-flow as they were in Lyon, it’s typically, but not always, an indicator that their defence is working precisely as it should be: that there are dominant tackles being made that are creating turnover opportunities from which to launch counterattacks.

This is essentially how the All Blacks won the 2015 World Cup - they brought in Wayne Smith to rebuild a defensive system that was all about empowering the counter-attack.

Smith didn’t make the All Blacks defensively water-tight at that tournament - although they only conceded three tries in the knockout rounds - but his system enabled the team to score a staggering 116 points in their last three games of the tournament.

It was the quality of the All Blacks’ defence that created the opportunity for them to score an average of almost 40 points a knockout game, and there were signs against Italy that the current defensive system has the potential to be an equally effective attacking launchpad.

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Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He has won multiple awards for journalism and has written several books about sport.