Gregor Paul: Northern Hemisphere teams bringing knife to Rugby World Cup gun fight

England will look to dethrone the All Blacks at the World Cup in Japan. Photo / Getty

COMMENT:

It would seem that once again the Northern Hemisphere is going to make the mistake of bringing a knife to a gun fight.

It so often happens like this.

The north just don't pick what's happening in the south and get horribly caught out at the World Cup.

The Six Nations is partly to blame. It creates this bubble that it's hard to see out of. The hype is huge, the media coverage endless, and the Northern Hemisphere ends up believing it is the centre of the rugby universe.

What's also to blame is a time-honoured fixation with the confrontational elements of the game.

Any Six Nations team that builds a destructive scrum or powerful driving maul is considered to be on the way to greatness, invincibility even.

Somehow the north can't grasp that there is more to test football than collisions. They don't get that a good set-piece is not a gameplan in itself but a launching pad from which to attack.

Six Nations teams don't seem to understand that there's more to winning the World Cup than a big scrum and collisions. Photo / Getty

History tells a specific story in that regard. There have been eight World Cups and seven of them have been won by either New Zealand, Australia or South Africa.

Only once has there been a winner from the Six Nations and what that suggests, confirms even, is that it is the Southern Hemisphere sides who are the game's great innovators.

It is teams from the south which have historically arrived at the World Cup with a clever new way of playing.

It is the southern teams, not all of them and not always, who typically spring the surprises at World Cups in terms of how they are playing and what they are able to do.

And four months out from the 2019 tournament, it's shaping up to be a southern-inspired tournament again.

The reason for thinking that is simple enough. It's the pace at which Super Rugby games are being played.

New Zealand sides are leading the way perhaps, but the Australians and South Africans aren't so far behind, nor are the Jaguares.

The quality in terms of the basic skill execution has been sketchy. The decision-making at times has been frenetic and the error count high, but none of this will bother the All Blacks coaching team or indeed the respective coaches of South Africa, Australia and Argentina.

Super Rugby is conditioning their players to last 80 minutes at a killer tempo.

That's what the All Blacks want – because they know when they pluck out the best players later in the year, they will be able to refine the individual and collective skill execution.

The great All Blacks performances of the last few years have all been built on their ability to attack with width which is generated by the speed at which they recycle and move the ball.

It's deadly when they get it right, as evidenced in the way they destroyed Australia in two encounters last year and toasted France in Auckland.

The speed at which the All Blacks moved the ball against France in last year's series was remarkable. Photo / Getty

The grounds on which the All Blacks play in Japan will be hard and fast and speed is going to be a more effective weapon than brutality.

But clearly, the Six Nations sides aren't convinced that will be the case.

Having spent the last four years in the midst of a rugby renaissance borne by their collective failure at the 2015 World Cup, the Northern Hemisphere teams appear ready to give up the ground they have made and come to Japan with the same old, flawed belief they can bludgeon their way to success.

There were signs of where things were heading during the Six Nations.

Wales won a Grand Slam on a gameplan almost totally devoid of risk.

The physicality of their pack was impressive as was the intensity of their defence.

Their kicking and chasing was supremely effective, too, and they ground teams into submission: squeezed them out of the game by giving them nothing.

Maybe it will work for them in Japan but they creaked when the Scots ran them around a bit this year and there's just this hint of suspicion that they could be ripped apart in a high tempo encounter.

Wales won the Grand Slam on a gameplan almost totally devoid of risk. Photo / Getty

England were at times devastating with the pace they generated, but they also too readily lost confidence in the fast approach and reverted to a more stoic kicking game.

Ireland have never been a high tempo side under coach Joe Schmidt. Their rise up the world rankings came on the back of their ability to retain possession and kick to the right places at the right times.

They are a good side and hard to beat but they were exposed at the last World Cup when the Pumas ran them ragged in the quarter-final.

The masters of low risk, conservative rugby were found wanting when Argentina were able to keep the game flowing and nothing has happened in the four years since to believe that Ireland are any less vulnerable to high tempo rugby.

So Super Rugby will probably continue to look like a shambolic mess this season but the faster and more frenetic it becomes, the more the gap between the two hemispheres widens.