KEY POINTS:
Most people have accepted that a lack of mental toughness cost the All Blacks the 2007 World Cup and my thoughts have turned to how we can develop that mental strength so we are not exposed again.
We've simply forgotten what we learned years ago - playing international rugby, and I am including Super rugby in that, brings rewards.
Super rugby - the Super Six and then the Super 10 - was really the first time we could give our senior players experience in an international arena outside a test match.
Before that, the All Blacks played in club rugby and provincial rugby and then we all talked about what a big step up test rugby was.
If you think back to the Australians, we had it all over them because more of our players were involved in that kind of rugby. It wasn't until they started being involved more heavily in the Super 10, 12 and now 14 that they caught us up.
We exposed more of our players to this international competition. But what have we done now? I have been concerned, as many regular readers of this column will know, about the devaluing of the All Black jersey through the rotation policy. Rotation is fantastic for developing a wider squad.
But rotation and overdoing the reconditioning have meant that, instead of playing All Blacks in our club, provincial and Super competitions, we have been withdrawing them.
That's how our mental strength was dwindled. We have completely turned on its head the concept of exposing players to the week-in, week-out, grind of winning rugby.
It's come from the top and it has a trickle-down effect. You could see the effect in the Super 14 this year. With 22 All Blacks out, it was a less interesting competition. The South Africans won.
You can certainly see it in the Air NZ Cup. I haven't seen a lot of that competition but what I have seen hasn't been particularly good and I am told by a lot of knowledgeable judges the standard isn't high and crowds have been staying away in most cases.
Why? Because our All Blacks aren't in it. There's a reason why you get only 7500 people to an Air NZ Cup semifinal between Wellington and Canterbury on a fine Christchurch evening.
When I was coming up as a player, you could always measure yourself in club or provincial rugby. Not now. Club rugby? Its a joke. Its full of 21-year-olds; there's no old stagers around.
That's our problem. Instead of playing our All Blacks in club, provincial and Super rugby, we have withdrawn them.
How are they expected to develop mental toughness from that? I'd be interested to know how many games Richie McCaw played last year - I'd bet only around 20. That is not a big workload and, of course, he's played a darn sight less this year.
Some people say there's too much rugby. But 25 games a season is not a huge workload for these guys. Players like McCaw, Dan Carter and Jerry Collins are the sort who thrive on hard work and whose form sharpens as they play more. But we didn't do that.
We wanted our players to be fresh. Okay, but look at the sides who have won the World Cup. They have generally done so with the same team played throughout or nearly so and that team has always contained experienced, hardened players. Take a look at the lineups of England and South Africa in today's final.
I firmly believe the only way we can build that mental toughness to win a World Cup is by making sure our All Blacks play at club, provincial and Super level. The game has moved on and we're being left behind.
We need to be right up there in that weekly grind of must-win rugby and to make sure our top players are fronting up.
I'm not having a pop at the players. It's the system they've been placed in. We haven't learned our lessons from 1999 and 2003.
We have got to stop focusing totally on the World Cup and doing so from top-down. We have to build now from bottom-up, involve our top players consistently, make them play.
I wouldn't exactly say the World Cup will then look after itself. But I would bet we will have the kind of combinations and mental strength needed to win it.
I've also heard some people saying we need to change our attacking style for the World Cup and should go more conservative. I don't think that's right.
The All Blacks are the most skilled, the fittest, the fastest and the strongest players on the planet. We also didn't actually do a lot wrong in that test against the French. It was just those last 20 minutes; when we forgot our natural game and decided to push it around in the forwards.
We tried to outmuscle them and we drank from a very old trough. We should have used our backs.
And why didn't we? Mental strength and a lack of tough, grinding, must-win rugby.
