View photosKEY POINTS:
It wasn't just a nightmare. This morning the ache is still there. It is only a game, of course, but that is no consolation. Nor are the excuses readily available for the All Blacks' quarter-final disaster yesterday.
The referee's odd decision to sin bin a player for being in the way of an attacker was the turning point of the match. One short, the All Blacks could not move their attack wide and consolidate the command they had in the first half. Before the French advantage expired they used it to score a crucial try.
But that is rugby. Inexplicable, inconsistent, frustrating penalties are part of the game. So, nowadays, is the dominance of defence. It is little consolation that the All Blacks made most of the play and had the better of the French on every measure but the final score.
We should have been good enough to overcome ropey rulings and aggressive defence. All Blacks teams do not make excuses and this one is following in that tradition. Coach Graham Henry and captain Richie McCaw suppressed any frustrations at the final whistle and their sporting comments were a credit to them.
The coach cannot survive this failure and will not hope to. He and his assistants were granted every wish they thought necessary for success. Now that their strategy has failed we will hear a great deal of wisdom in hindsight.
The policy of rotating players, it will be said, left the squad without an experienced combination, especially in midfield. But it did give the team the depth it needed to cover injuries and form lapses. Its weakness perhaps was that, despite the rotation policy, it relied too much on key players McCaw and Daniel Carter. The latter carried an injury into the quarter-final and could not finish the match.
Henry's insistence on resting most of his likely squad for the first part of the season will be blamed too. The squad performed much more smoothly last year and it might have been better to maintain that momentum into this season. It was an unconventional decision, the mark of a leader with courage and confidence. Henry will be maligned for it now but that is the risk brave leaders take.
Had the two-point margin gone the other way, had the All Blacks been awarded a late penalty, perhaps, we would be praising the coach and players today and as confident of them taking the Cup as we were until well into the second half yesterday.
Now the despair will be as excessive as the confidence was. The All Blacks have dropped one match at a stage of the tournament that allows no second chances. Before the tournament they were odds-on favourites to win it. Their record last year left no argument that they were the world's best. Let there be no doubting they still are.
As favourites they were put in a weak pool of qualifying matches and some of their opposition did not even field their best against them. That is hardly the best preparation for the knock-out matches to come but it is not an excuse, just another point to keep in mind if this disappointment is to be put in perspective.
One day New Zealand will win the Rugby World Cup again and the victory will be sweeter for all of these disappointments. This one, failure in a quarter-final, is the worst so far, the darkest hour.
Four years hence the next World Cup will be held in this country and the hosts were hoping to start as holders. The team's failure this time must not detract from preparations to make the event here the best it can be. Rugby has a place in the life of New Zealand that it holds nowhere else. Our teams regularly win everything except the elusive World Cup. Let the post mortems be reasonable and constructive and the disappointment will be another valuable spur to take our game to greater heights.
