After providing a magical moment earlier in the week when he expressed his shock at Steve Hansen’s decision to work with Australia, All Blacks hooker Dane Coles again showed his eloquence in the wake of the record defeat to the Springboks by describing it as a “punch in
New Zealand v South Africa: All Blacks hooker Dane Coles talks record loss to Springboks
Faf de Klerk celebrates as Bongi Mbonambi scores the Springboks' fourth try. Photo / Getty Images
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A punch in the face is precisely what the South Africans administered and just as Mike Tyson so famously said, whatever plan the All Blacks arrived with, there was no discernible evidence of it after the veritable fist crunched into their collective faces.
The All Blacks played as if they were dazed and confused for much of the game, and for the first time this season, they failed to produce the core components on which their 2023 revival has been built.
The scrum was dented and buckled. The lineout got messy. Not stag party in Prague messy, but it certainly felt like a battle to win their own ball.
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But the bigger problem was the carnage the Boks were able to inflict at the breakdown.
They have an endless supply of oversized creatures, who can be impossibly difficult to move off the ball if the cleanout work is inaccurate or the ball carriers not dominant.
And this was the story of the night. The All Blacks didn’t have the physical graft they needed and having taken giant strides in the art of collision warfare in the last 12 months, they will be a little taken aback at how easily and totally they were crushed by the Boks.
The days of being beaten up appeared to be behind the All Blacks, as did they seem to have cured their propensity to let their discipline fall apart as a response to being under pressure.
To see those old failings exposed on the eve of the World Cup will be an equal source of relief and concern.
The relief being that this wasn’t the World Cup and the concern being that losing the plot mentally when the physical squeeze comes on, may in fact be as deeply ingrained as middle England’s habit of reverting to read the Daily Mail in times of perceived political volatility.
Fixing this problem in just two weeks may be a tall order, but Coles, one of the oldest serving members of the squad and someone with experience at two World Cups, says the team will work through what is in fact a familiar and comforting process of working through the emotions that come with a defeat and will rebuild mentally and physically before facing France in the opening match in Paris in two weeks.
“We got a punch but we just have to get up and go again and it starts tomorrow when we wake up and things will start falling into place, but the important thing is that you don’t shy away from it.
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“It is tough losing like that especially as a forward as your set-piece is your heart and they went straight through it. But there is a process over the next 48 hours.
“You feel like something really bad has happened, which it has but the first thing is to digest it all and take the lessons and create a bit of ownership over the next two weeks.
“Tonight you could maybe say we got a little too far ahead of ourselves I am not sure.
“You just have to be really hard on yourself and the team and then we will come up with some solutions and that will be the driver for the team.”
Coles’ assessment was largely echoed by team-mate Ardie Savea who said: “We lost the set-piece battle and our discipline wasn’t good.
“If you can’t get those things right it is going to be a long day at the office. We want to perform under those pressure moments and we didn’t do that.
“Which is good because it means we have definitely got things to work on.”
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