Beauden Barrett of New Zealand gives a team talk during the Rugby World Cup France 2023 match between New Zealand and Uruguay. Photo / Getty Images
Beauden Barrett of New Zealand gives a team talk during the Rugby World Cup France 2023 match between New Zealand and Uruguay. Photo / Getty Images
OPINION:
Gregor Paul in Lyon
The All Blacks are heading into the quarter-finals with a sense they have most things in their game just about operating as they need to be, but with just a hint of anxiety that they haven’t been put under any real pressure since France didthem over in the opening game.
It’s a familiar story for the All Blacks – reaching the last eight without having had to battle through the sort of intense encounters that define the knock-out rounds, but nor is it something about which they can overly fret.
They can only play who gets put in front of them and being in a relatively soft pool didn’t hurt the All Blacks in either 2011 and 2015.
They showed then that all they needed to burst into life was a sense of occasion and the real threat of being in a do-or-die contest.
And in some ways, their lack of precision against Uruguay was down to the lack of authenticity in the contest: the mental security the All Blacks had from knowing they were going to win and didn’t have to be their best to do so.
They racked up a huge scoreline against Uruguay which was testament to their phenomenal scrummaging power, the bruising running of Leicester Fainga’anuku and the sporadic bouts of slick and at times impressive continuity they were able to string together.
But while the scoreline was emphatic, the performance wasn’t. It had bright spots, certainly. The scrum again being the star of the show with the lineout not so far behind.
The All Blacks’ defence, heavily criticised last week, was organised, cohesive and suffocating. There were big tackles, well-taken turnovers and general confidence about the way the All Blacks went about their work without the ball.
These are the foundation parts of their game and to have them in such good shape this close to the knock-out rounds will be a source of genuine comfort for the coaching staff.
Damian McKenzie of New Zealand scores a try. Photo / Photosport
Next week, no matter who the All Blacks play, the scrum contest will be decisive. It will swing the match one way or the other and there’s no denying that, in the past three weeks, the All Blacks have scrummaged at a level that has restored some confidence they have a set-piece that can hold up against the best.
There’s no point in endlessly bemoaning the lack of resistance the All Blacks have met in the past three weeks.
They can’t scrummage against Ireland when they are playing Uruguay and what mattered was that they got their timing right in the engagement against a front-row that was up to all sorts in its efforts to survive.
But the sight of Tyrel Lomax limping off after 10 minutes was a concern and the early indication is that he’s suffering ligament damage, but the seriousness of which is not known.
Other than their scrummaging, there was nothing emphatic or statement-making about their work against Uruguay.
Part of the problem was that despite their scrum dominance, it didn’t deliver a clean platform. It was messy, because Uruguay made it messy. They dropped it, they turned it, they disrupted it and they didn’t give the All Blacks the opportunity to attack off it.
The All Blacks were still able to dismantle Uruguay as everyone knew they would, but it was start-stop, penalty after penalty and things never flowed quite the way they would have liked.
Beauden Barrett of New Zealand. Photo / Photosport
They built some phases, and they scored tries, but not with the relentless intensity with which they blew away Italy last week.
They never reached the same attacking heights, mostly because they didn’t hold the right attacking shape for long enough periods and their general accuracy was sporadic.
The precision of the All Blacks’ pass and catch wasn’t sharp enough and there was a lack of tidiness in presenting the ball and looking after it.
Too much of the first half looked like the old All Blacks of the dark times in 2021 and 2022 when they wanted to fling the ball about, hoping that if they got it to the wing quickly that would be enough to make a hole magically appear in the defence.
But that sort of rugby didn’t work a couple of years ago and it didn’t particularly trouble Uruguay either.
The second half saw the All Blacks straighten their running lines, come on to the ball harder and attack the middle of the field more.
When they went back to that formula, were prepared to break down Uruguay first and earn the right to move the ball wide, they looked an infinitely better team and they ended up doing enough to generate some confidence about what might lie ahead.
New Zealand coach Ian Foster. Photo / Photosport
There is no one, least of all the All Blacks coaching staff, kidding themselves that the team is the finished article.
But they have grown the key parts of their game since they lost to France. They have powered up their set-piece, sharpened their defence and become more comfortable with their attacking patterns and running lines.
They seem confident in the gameplan, confident in each other and they remain the best side on the planet at transitioning from defence to attack.
Give them the chance to run against a broken defence and they are deadly and while the quarter-final may not afford them the sort of space and volume of opportunity they have enjoyed these last three weeks, it will be worrying the surviving teams how deadly the All Blacks can be if they are given just a hint of space.
