All Blacks captain Sam Cane shared his advice for a defeated Italy following their 96 - 17 thrashing in Lyon. Video / NZ Herald / Photosport
OPINION
It’s going to be two weeks before the All Blacks’ day of reckoning arrives, and inevitably that will be time spent trying to determine whether their crushing win against Italy was an awesome show of strength and precision or that the Azzurri pulled out of the contest 20 minutesin when they sensed it was a lost cause.
Opinions on this are seemingly evenly split, with the long-term doubters in Ian Foster’s All Blacks of the view that the victory was practically meaningless as a means to assess New Zealand’s readiness to win a quarter-final.
Perhaps understandably, there are many New Zealanders who would define their relationship with the current All Blacks team as low trust.
The last four years have been too erratic to build confidence. Inconsistency is a killer of faith and the All Blacks have been the veritable box of chocolates since 2020 - no one is ever quite sure what they are going to get.
It has been a near impossible task trying to understand and evaluate the ability of Foster’s All Blacks, who have been good enough to crush Ireland at Eden Park one week, only to fall apart in Dunedin the next: brave, determined and brilliant to beat South Africa at Ellis Park, and then a passive shambles in losing to Argentina when they next played in Christchurch.
Even this year they have been an enigma: cleaning up in the Rugby Championship with three impressive wins, only to then implode against South Africa at Twickenham and semi-implode in the opening game of the World Cup against France.
It’s hard to trust or believe in a team that has been so volatile, and hence the reluctance some will have to buy into the Italian demolition job as a shock and awe display of total rugby by the All Blacks.
New Zealand coach Ian Foster and coaching staff during warm-ups. Photo / Photosport
The natural inclination, all things considered, is to see the near-100-point victory as being illustrative of Italy’s stunning lack of resilience.
They capitulated in all the key physical areas - scrum, collision, tackle - and their lineout malfunctioned, allowing the All Blacks the freedom of Lyon to play their natural and deadly pass-and-catch continuity game.
Ireland, should they be the team New Zealand face in the quarter-finals, won’t offer up so much easy space, and space is effectively oxygen to the All Blacks: the life source they need to thrive.
And this is what the whole analysis business boils down to - trying to determine whether the All Blacks played with such ferocity, intensity and accuracy in Lyon that they would have destroyed any team in their path, or whether Italy were vastly overrated and spectacularly fell apart in a way that a team like Ireland, South Africa or France never would.
The possibility of the former being closer to the truth can’t be dismissed, and certainly a few of the Italian players were in little doubt that they had never encountered anything like the onslaught they faced in Lyon.
While the narrative of Italy as Europe’s new wonder boys was exaggerated in the build-up, they are a better team than they have been and most tellingly, no Six Nations side got remotely close to destroying them this year the way the All Blacks did.
To say that the All Blacks were gifted 96 points grossly underestimates the carnage they inflicted and the precision rugby they played.
Italy didn’t play particularly well, and they are not giants of the game, but their capitulation was not exclusively self-inflicted, and no one should forget that the All Blacks blew Argentina away in a similar but less dramatic manner earlier this year, and more important still, so too did they beat South Africa at Mt Smart with a high-intensity 20-minute blitz.
Perhaps the safest conclusion to reach about the All Blacks, on the evidence of what they have produced at this World Cup to date, is that they are a different team entirely when they have a full, or almost-full contingent of preferred personnel from which to pick.
The impact both Shannon Frizell and Jordie Barrett made - neither of whom played against France - was colossal.
The former brought dominant defence, destructive ball-carrying and variation to the lineout options. He also gave the back row a better balance - which enabled Ardie Savea to play his natural game.
Sam Whitelock makes his record appearance as the most-capped All Black. Photo / Photosport
Barrett was direct and confrontational, but he was also aware of and alive to attacking opportunities with the skillset to execute what he was seeing.
Having Brodie Retallick back at full fitness - he wasn’t quite there when he was thrown on to the bench against France at the last minute - gave the pack another powerful ball carrier from the start of the game, and the bonus of being able to bring Sam Whitelock into battle with 30 minutes to go.
And the bench was maybe the unsung hero of the Lyon rampage. Bringing Cam Roigard and Damian McKenzie into the game saw the All Blacks maintain, if not up, the attacking tempo, and also having Tyrel Lomax enabled the scrum to become more powerful in the last half hour.
What the day of reckoning will show, when it comes, is that the All Blacks are a better team than the performance they gave against France and not as spectacular as the one they delivered against Italy made them look.
