All Blacks v Springboks: What sort of champions rugby needs from New Zealand-South Africa World Cup final

OPINION

Gregor Paul in Paris

It’s not just the Webb Ellis trophy up for grabs this Saturday when the All Blacks take on the Springboks at Stade de France, both teams will also be playing to capture the soul of rugby and the chance to define the essence of the modern game.

It will be as much a battle for hearts and minds as it will be a battle for metres won and territory gained as the world will see two old rivals take to each other in Paris with vastly different views about how the game should be played.

It’s a World Cup final and so it would be easy to say that victory is all that matters, and any means will justify the ends, but rugby is a game of such complexity and locked in a ferocious battle to win its next generation of players in a fierce anti-contact sports climate, that the nature of how could have ramifications that impact for years.

Rugby needs a champion in more than name. It needs a saviour almost, a team to prove that the laws are not so archaic as to present international coaches with the binary options of playing beautifully but losing or winning ugly to win.

The world needs to see that winning rugby can be beautiful and brutal together, not selectively choose which one it has to be or proclaim that relentless brutality is its own kind of beauty.

Really, the world just needs to see that playing rugby, not the anti-rugby version that was on view in England’s semifinal with South Africa, can prevail.

Rugby was supposedly born of frustration, with legend having it that William Webb Ellis, bored with the game of football he was playing, picked the ball up and ran with it.

There would be a sort of dark irony, a sense of regression, even, if 200 years on since Ellis created something multidimensional that a team could be crowned world champions by doing nothing much other than kicking the ball.

This isn’t a World Cup final of good versus evil, or the great romantics taking on the staunch pragmatists, for the All Blacks and Springboks can simultaneously be both as they have demonstrated throughout this tournament.

But if we forget labels for the moment and judge both on their broader rugby philosophies, then there is little doubt that the All Blacks, particularly at this tournament, have played in a way that seems truer to the foundation principles of the game.

They bring a greater array of options to the table, a variety of athletes the South Africans don’t and a willingness to be vulnerable in pursuit of playing a multi-faceted pass-run-kick game.

It’s not just that the way they play feels more in tune with how rugby was initially visioned, it’s also a style that sparks the imagination and elevates rugby beyond a morass of collisions and a war of inches.

Shannon Frizell steamrolls Springboks fullback Willie le Roux on his way to a try earlier this year. Photo / Photosport

The All Blacks, should they win, combining their raw physicality and natural instincts, would be the sort of champion team to motivate a new army of players to kick their round balls for touch and pick up the oval one and pass it instead.

Rugby needs that sort of world champion – one that gives the sport its true voice in a marketplace where sports codes need to shout to be heard.

And this question of what the sport wants to be has loomed over this tournament, with All Blacks coach Ian Foster saying after his side had thrashed Italy 96-17: “If you look at the South Africa-Ireland game, it was a very different game of rugby.

“The ball in play was 27 minutes in the whole game. So a very stop-start game, very physical, very combative, whereas you saw a different spectacle tonight, and probably at some point the world’s got to decide which game they’d rather watch.”

His point was a veiled dig at the game’s administrators, asking them to consider whether they could be doing more to amend the laws and the interpretation of the laws to facilitate the sort of rugby the All Blacks played against Italy.

This tournament has been refereed in favour of the defensive teams, with the first three rounds producing the unforgettable statistic that 60 per cent of the turnover penalties were going to the defensive team.

If the people running the game want a more compelling product, then why create an environment that actively encourages teams to not play with the ball?

The England versus South Africa semifinal was Frankenstein’s monster created by the refereeing of the early rounds - and also the decade-long failure to stamp out the seeping cynicism of time-wasting.

Since Foster suggested the world needed to make a choice, his argument has been bolstered by the brilliance of the quarter-final matches – a weekend in which the rugby was compelling both as spectacle and as drama primarily because all eight teams embraced the full spectrum of what was on offer to them in both attack and defence.

And when the choice of having more games like New Zealand versus Ireland is put up against having more games like South Africa versus England, it doesn’t seem like a choice at all.

Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He has won multiple awards for journalism and has written several books about sport.