The All Blacks during the national anthem. Photo / Photosport
The All Blacks during the national anthem. Photo / Photosport
OPINION:
Things are about to get serious for the All Blacks. They are off to Argentina on Sunday to kick off their Rugby Championship campaign that will then bounce into the Bledisloe Cup and before they know it, they will be in Paris, playing France in the opening game ofthe World Cup.
But then again, when are things not serious for the All Blacks, and for all the analysis that has been done in trying to explain why they have struggled for form since 2020, could it be as simple as saying because they have lost the joy of playing?
The last few years have beaten them down so much that maybe they can’t find a way to rekindle their love of the game.
Finding that happiness may be the key to their World Cup campaign. After all, look at the Fijian Drua – what made them so compelling was the obvious love the players had for the simple joys of pass, catch, kick.
Whether they won or lost, the Drua players looked like they were grateful for the chance just to play and perhaps that’s what has been missing for the All Blacks in recent times.
The players say they love being All Blacks and they love playing rugby, but I have to wonder if some of them, many of them, have become so conditioned to shutting themselves off emotionally when in the public domain that they have lost any way of knowing whether they really do love playing rugby.
And if some of them have lost the purity of their connection with the sport, it’s hardly surprising.
Life as a professional in the highest places of the sport must feel a long way removed from where these players started.
A journey that began for most of them as barefooted five-year-olds, half playing, half wandering around just waiting for morning tea, has brought them to the unrecognisable world of the All Blacks.
Ardie Savea celebrates his try with teammates during the All Blacks' first test against Ireland last year. Photo / Photosport
When they were five, maybe there was no greater thrill than getting their hands on the ball and running with it. But the elite development system has a way of grinding people down and sucking the joy out of things.
Nearly all the All Blacks of today have been exposed to the horrors of school First XV programmes, which tend to err on the side of being overly serious.
By the time New Zealand’s best players emerge into the All Blacks, some of them have effectively been professional since they were 15, and life for some has a formulaic and structured feel to it.
The process of reaching the All Blacks is draining and relentless, but life inside the team these days must at times feel so crushing and overwhelming: so tense and riddled with anxiety as to make fun the last thing anyone thinks they are supposed to be there to have.
Some of that tension has been the result of New Zealand Rugby’s handling of head coach Ian Foster, who now finds himself in the last few months of his tenure, knowing he could win the World Cup and it won’t get him his job back.
That whole business was messy. It lacked empathy and professionalism, and the players didn’t love being put in the invidious position in which they were.
How could they enjoy being All Blacks when their employer was humiliating their coach, and even now that the future is settled, there is a sense the division between the players and the NZR executive has not quite healed.
Then there is the joylessness that has come from the team being so commercialised. This is a team, having accepted an equity stake from US fund manager Silver Lake, that now comes with a mandate to make money. The waters have been muddied by this.
The All Blacks are a high-performance team, but their commercial masters are too often pulling the strings, and no one should underestimate the pressure that has come from carrying the vanity investments of billionaires Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Mohed Altrad.
And no one gets a snitch quite like the New Zealand rugby public, which has a unique ability to neurotically nit-pick and find fault where there isn’t any.
Sam Cane has played out of his skin this year and yet you’d think his only contribution to the Chiefs was to be yellow-carded late in the final.
It’s frankly mad how little respect there is for someone of his standing and when people are so willing to condemn him regardless of what he does, it must remove some of the joy that comes with being All Blacks captain.
It all seems rather hopeless – a schools programme that tries to make men out of boys at far too young, a professional system that institutionalises the players, an All Blacks set-up that is pretty much run by the bean counters and a fan base that relentlessly finds fault.
And so too is it hopeless to imagine all of this can be magically fixed this week to enable the All Blacks to rekindle their joy of playing and rediscover that connection they all once had back in the beginning.
But who knows, with the coach and most of his management staff leaving and a handful of legacy players also on their way out after the World Cup, maybe the All Blacks can find that missing element of joy.
For the next five months, maybe they can all remember that they played rugby once for the purity of emotion it sparked within them, and their mission is to head to France not in search of the Webb Ellis trophy, but of their inner five-year-old selves.
