A dejected NZ captain Kane Williamson. Photo / Photosport
COMMENT:
If you thought the tiebreaker during Monday's Cricket World Cup final at Lord's was stupid, let me take you back to the afternoon of Saturday, June 24, 1995, when, at the end of 80 minutes of the Rugby World Cup final, the All Blacks and South Africa are tied, 9-all.
Extra time, 10 minutes each way, begins. Andrew Mehrtens kicks a penalty after a minute. Joel Stransky kicks one for South Africa at nine minutes. Now it is 12-all. Two minutes into the second period of extra time Stransky kicks another, to make it 15-12, and so it stays to the end. The Springboks kneel and pray. South African President Nelson Mandela leads the cheering of the sell-out crowd.
On the press bench, Kiwis like me are stunned. The All Blacks had been red-hot favourites, looking unbeatable after thrashing England 45-29, in their semifinal.
In hindsight, we might have all been a lot more stunned if Stransky had missed that 12th-minute penalty. If extra time had finished at 12-all the All Blacks would have won the Cup. Not because they scored a try in the final. Neither team did. Not because they had a better points-for-and-against record in the tournament, although they did (222 to 45), compared to the Springboks 68 to 26.
No, the All Blacks would have won because they hadn't conceded even a yellow card in any of their games, while in the last 10 minutes of a pool game with Canada in Port Elizabeth, Springbok hooker James Dalton was red-carded by Scottish referee David McHugh, after a brawl that also saw Canadians Gareth Rees and Rod Snow sent off.
The rules for the '95 World Cup meant that if the scoreboard couldn't decide the result of a knockout game, which the final was, the disciplinary record of a team would.
The stadium at Ellis Park was packed with 63,000 people that day, and the atmosphere was extraordinary. When South Africa won the elation was huge and happy and embracing. It was the safest any of the New Zealand media people, one of whom, Bob Howitt, had a gun held to his head while he was robbed at his motel two weeks earlier, had felt since we'd been in Johannesburg.
I'm not so sure we'd have been so relaxed if the All Blacks had won on a ridiculous red card technicality.
Look to France for the changes that have occurred in Argentine rugby.
When New Zealand teams first started venturing to Argentina in the late 1970s the ethos for the country's rugby was borrowed almost exclusively from England.
Having spent a month in Argentina with the Hamilton Marist club side in 1976, it was clear rugby there was a sport for the wealthy. Hosted by Club Athletico San Isidro in Buenos Aires, all of the Marist squad of almost 30 players and about 15 outriders were invited for a cruise on the River Plate on the club president's yacht.
"Would there be room for everyone?" asked a dubious Marist manager, Bill Stack, who wondered why the local club official laughed at his question.
The next day, being served chilled beers off silver trays by half a dozen white-jacketed crew members as we glided downriver under diesel power, we realised this was a yacht in the sense that Graeme Hart's $380 million floating palace Ulysses is a yacht. The CASI club president, we discovered, wasn't the chief executive of Argentina's biggest insurance company. He owned it.
Upper-class British behaviour manifested itself in other Hooray Henry ways. The dinners after matches usually featured flying bread rolls, and the way the teams played was right out of the England national side's playbook.
Kickers such as Puma great Hugo Porta, a first-five, were revered, and in Argentina scrummaging was initially taken to an almost comical level of commitment. The Pumas perfected an eight-man shove in the scrum. Sometimes, as Graham Mourie, the captain of the first All Black side to tour there, in 1976, noted with astonishment, their hooker, both feet planted firmly for the drive, would hook the ball with his head.
When professional rugby arrived in the 1990s, Argentina was the last of the first division test nations to embrace it. Players who signed for European clubs were barred from the national side. New Zealand has a large enough talent pool for such a policy. Argentina did not.
There were humiliating results. In 1997 in Wellington, the Pumas were beaten 93-8 by the All Blacks, and hidings became so embarrassing the "home players only" rule was quietly ditched.
What's intriguing about Argentine rugby now is that the man in charge of the Pumas, Mario Ledesma, cut his playing and coaching teeth in France. So did Gonzalo Quesada, the coach of the Jaguares, who, as predicted, have basically become, with 13 starters in the test team, the Argentine side.
"The DNA has changed," Ledesma has said, and that's true. The Puma scrum is still solid. But it's not the fearsome machine it used to be.
Now the Pumas, not, it has to be admitted, with any great success to date, play with a lot of the flair we'd normally associate with good French teams.
Nicolas Sanchez, the first-five they've jetted in from Europe for tomorrow morning's game, has played in France since 2011 and is now one of the highest-paid players at Stade Francais in Paris, which means he's one of the richest rugby players in the world.
For the money his club, and now the Pumas in Buenos Aires, get a player who not only sets his line alight in a structured situation but also presents a constant dancing, gliding threat when play breaks up.
After the blinder he played against the All Blacks in Nelson last year, coach Ledesma was right on the money when he said Sanchez "has always been a really good rugby player but I think this year, if anything, he's been conducting the team much better".
The match-up between Sanchez and Beauden Barrett is reason enough alone to take an interest in the test, given that both are capable of creating a try virtually out of thin air.
And if your taste runs more to battles at the breakdown, then look out for the clash of the captains, when Pablo Matera, the Pumas' dynamic flanker, and All Black skipper, Sam Cane, go foraging for the ball. They're both 80-minute battlers, with Matera having a slight edge, as a sometime lock might, in size, at 109kg to Cane's 103kg. Cane nudges ahead in test experience, having played one more season of internationals than Matera.
Common sense and history point to an All Blacks win, but gaining that victory should be tough, and engrossing.