The Blues look dejected in their loss against the Crusaders. Photo / Getty
The Blues look dejected in their loss against the Crusaders. Photo / Getty
OPINION:
Losing to the Crusaders will have hurt the Blues. But what will hurt more is the headless nature in which they threw the game away.
This was their moment to spin the club in a new direction – to write a new narrative where the Blues come out asthe heroes of the hour, sporting the spoils and champions grins.
But they killed their own dream with fuzzy thinking and an almost casual disdain for discipline. They worked like Trojans, conjured some great tries and yet so easily and tamely flipped and flopped over the ball at the breakdown to hand Richie Mo'unga a bucket-load of easy points.
It's hard to know whether the Blues were victims of sustained Crusaders pressure, or just relentlessly brainless.
Either way, they took a gun, pointed it at their foot and blew it clean off by conceding what looked to be mostly needless penalties throughout the second half.
And that's why this defeat will be hard to stomach. The final score says the Crusaders won by a couple of lengths and that there was daylight between the two teams: that the pre-match chatter picked it all wrong about there being some kind of equity between the two teams.
But the scoreline was misleading. The gap between the two teams isn't that big, or at least it isn't in all but one, albeit significant, factor.
The Crusaders remain the masters of calm. They remain the only team in New Zealand that can live with pressure: thrive in it even.
Jack Goodhue of the Crusaders scores the opening try against the Blues. Photo / Getty
They spent the first half like the proverbial rock climber with barely a foothold on an unforgiving face and yet they reached the break well ahead. Somehow, they know how to cling on to impossible positions and find a way to scramble to the summit.
It's in their DNA. Or rather Scott Robertson has injected such a deep conviction within each player that they can withstand anything and everything that is thrown against them and that their moment to counter-attack and sucker punch, will always come.
They don't need to dominate territory or possession to win. They can play most of the game without the ball and it doesn't bother them because they work for their moment and remain so alive to opportunity.
It was simply incredible how good they were at transitioning from defence to attack: how they so often would be scrambling on defence only to be cruising on attack seconds later.
There's no way anyone could say the Crusaders are the perfect team or playing faultless rugby. But what they showed again at Eden Park is that decision-making under pressure remains their forte: the thing they do better than any other team in the country and why they keep winning.
By contrast, it highlighted how the Blues have not made anywhere near the progress on that front that many thought they had.
There is succumbing to the pressure of the occasion and then there is just being plain daft and the Blues were a sad mix of both in a performance that will rank as one of the more infuriating of their recent history.
Take Kurt Eklund, one minute he scored a razor-sharp try, the next he was judo throwing Sevu Reece over his hip in what was the dumbest act of the season so far.
But this was how the Blues were. They found a way to keep clawing back into contention with some great use of the ball and space and then so easily and almost casually infringed to hand the Crusaders easy points.
It was the classic 'one step forward, two steps back' performance and there's no point in the Blues fixating on those multiple little moments that cost them so dearly at Eden Park.
Blues prop Ofa Tuungafasi was yellow carded against the Crusaders. Photo / Photosport
When they review the game they will see there were way too many moments to sit back and think 'if only'. That luxury only comes when the game swings on one or maybe two bad decisions, but this contest didn't swing so much as consistently head in the direction of the Crusaders.
The Blues weren't guilty of lacking concentration in little moments or misjudging a few key incidents. They have the much bigger problem of having a mindset issue.
There is something more fundamental at the heart of the erratic and prolonged poor decision-making. Their discipline, or lack of, points to there being a more significant problem that deep down, too many of their players don't yet have that same conviction in themselves when they are under pressure.
Too many Blues players still don't have the confidence to trust they are good enough to absorb pressure legally and respond to it.
In a few weeks, they will be afforded a new opportunity to take on the Crusaders – a game in which they will only be able to win if there is some serious uplift in their self-confidence.
