All Blacks 2023 Rugby World Cup squad. Video / Carson Bluck
OPINION
Youth helps in many areas, but the Rugby World Cup isn’t one.
Fast Eddie Jones has selected an Australian squad for the Cup in France that’s so young and inexperienced it looks like a group designed for future years, not for a competition that starts in less than amonth.
As rugby writer Iain Payten said in the Sydney Morning Herald: “There’s rolling the dice as a coach. Then there’s remortgaging your house, selling everything in the shed, and taking all your cash to the casino for a one-off punt on red or black.”
To be fair to Jones, it seems the calf injury suffered by captain Michael Hooper may be so bad that it isn’t worth taking the risk of including Hooper, the best Wallaby of recent years.
Michael Hooper will not be travelling with the Wallabies squad to France. Photo / Photosport
Hooper didn’t just bring a fearless, skilled approach to the vital area of the breakdown, he also offered intelligence, maturity and decency - all of which are gold during relentless tournament play.
By contrast, the Springboks have taken a chance with their talismanic captain Siya Kolisi, who hasn’t played a test this year as he struggles with a knee injury. I’m inclined to agree with former Boks coach Nick Mallett, who suggested last week Kolisi should go to France “even if he doesn’t play a single match”.
Of the 33 players in Jones’ squad, 25 will be at their first World Cup. Three have never played a test, while seven others have a total of just 21 tests between them.
Meanwhile in Wales, coach Warren Gatland has also named a young team, and has been refreshingly honest about the process.
“We’re in a bit of a transition, so in the back of my mind, I was thinking we are building not only for the next few months, but also starting to think about what we need to do with the next cycle of players going forward towards 2027.”
Gatland, forever the realist, knows the harsh reality that rookies don’t win the Cup.
A myth has developed over the decades that the first world champions, the 1987 All Blacks, were largely a product of the 1986 Baby Blacks, who, with 11 test debutantes, astonished the world by beating a potent French team, 18-9 in Christchurch.
Nice thought, but in the 1987 final, against France at Eden Park, there were just four survivors of the Baby Blacks, captain David Kirk, John Kirwan, Joe Stanley, and Sean Fitzpatrick. The backbone of the 1987 team was provided by weathered veterans of the Cavaliers tour of South Africa the year before.
David Kirk lifts the trophy after the All Blacks victory in the 1987 Rugby World Cup final. Photo / John Stone
There was room in the final for just one fresh face: the astonishing Michael Jones, a 22-year-old so good he was the player of the tournament. And as great as Jones was, as an openside flanker, he wasn’t directing play. That was down to Kirk, in his fifth year as an All Black, and Grant Fox, in his fourth All Blacks season.
Probably the best Cup-winning team was the 2015 New Zealand side, who had a staggering amount of experience.
Captain Richie McCaw, our greatest first five-eighths, Dan Carter, and gifted centre Conrad Smith, were in their third Cup campaign.
While veterans in a squad don’t guarantee success, I believe Kiwis can take comfort in the fact 16 of the 2019 All Blacks Rugby World Cup squad in Japan are in the 2023 tournament squad.
It’ll do no harm that the trauma of the semifinal loss to England in 2019 in Yokohama may be festering at the back of the minds of the survivors.
At a brutally honest press conference in Japan before the play-off for third with Wales, coach Steve Hansen found a glimmer of hope in the gloom.
He’d been in the traumatised coaching group when the All Blacks were knocked out in the quarter-finals in Cardiff. Speaking before his last match as All Blacks coach, Hansen observed that the infamous 2007 defeat by France “has earned us two World Cups because it’s created a real pain that’s personal and deep inside you”.
“Until you suffer that yourself and it becomes personal, you don’t know what people are saying.”
Between a taste for sweet revenge in half the squad, and an influx, led by Will Jordan, of new blood in the other, it may be that for the All Blacks the tumblers are falling into the right order to unlock the Cup.
