With nine changes to the starting side and Sam Cane returning as captain, Chereè Kinnear and Liam Napier take a look at what it'll take for the All Blacks to finish on a high against Uruguay in Lyon. Video / NZ Herald
OPINION
Gregor Paul in Lyon
When the All Blacks lost their opening World Cup game, it deepened the prevailing sense that they are a team plagued by mental demons that haunt them at inopportune times.
After four years of volatility in which the All Blacks have been occasionally brilliant, butunable to consistently win the big games or stay in the big moments, the 27-13 loss to France reassured the World Cup’s main contenders that the game’s big, bad, wolf may well huff and puff, but there was no real danger of New Zealand blowing too many houses down.
But on the eve of the All Blacks’ final pool game, there is a creeping worry among the heavyweights that the big, bad wolf might be significantly more dangerous than they previously thought.
The mood didn’t change after the All Blacks blew down Namibia’s house of straw, but it did when the Italians were splattered all over Lyon in a way none of the other Six Nations teams imagined was feasible.
The problem with Italy is, that no one quite knows what their house was made of, but certainly the likes of France and Ireland have previously discovered it to be constructed with stone, and by no means a flimsy structure.
It was a rogue result, a massive outlier in a season in which Italy have been competitive against the best teams in the world, and that has created an element of uncertainty about what to make of it.
There is no shortage of doubters in New Zealand who believe the Azzurri ran the white flag up after 20 minutes, but in Europe, where there’s deeper knowledge of and respect for the Italians, there is a rising fear that the All Blacks produced a stunningly powerful performance that no team in the world would have been able to withstand.
The evidence for this rising fear can be seen in the way there have been so many critics lining up to explain why the All Blacks showed all sorts of vulnerability against Italy, despite the monumental scoreline.
Former Irish fullback Rob Kearney, working as an analyst for Virgin Media in the UK, was quick to see defensive frailty in the All Blacks, and found plenty of reasons to see the 17 points they conceded as the bigger storyline from the game.
And there was no shortage of pundits, most specifically former England wing Chris Ashton, who jumped in to say that the result signalled why Italy need to be booted out of the Six Nations.
Sam Cane returns to the starting side to face Uruguay in the All Blacks final pool game. Photosport
The narrative was all about downplaying the performance and ability of the All Blacks, and that’s typically a sign the rest of the world is edgy, maybe even a little scared.
When the All Blacks were just about unbeatable between 2012 and 2015, the foreign commentary would often latch on to the smallest things that didn’t go right and inflate the scale of the problem.
Pundits North of the Equator tend to be most critical of the All Blacks when they have the least reason to be, and they see all sorts of weaknesses not because they are there, but because they want them to be there.
After all, Italy scored 24 points against France in this year’s Six Nations, 20 against Ireland and 17 against Wales, yet there was no analysis suggesting the victors in those games were defensively frail.
And the Northern Hemisphere analysis of Ireland’s pool match victory against South Africa has glossed over the failure of both their scrum and lineout and largely ignored the fact South Africa missed 11 kickable points.
Instead, the focus has been more on Ireland’s resilience and calm decision-making, which is entirely valid as these are qualities that win big games, but it does highlight the eagerness of people to see what they want to see and the determination that is there to find and exaggerate problems within the All Blacks.
Dane Coles heads for the tryline. Photo / Photosport
The outbreak of negative chatter and this need to subject the All Blacks to a gratuitous level of analytic scrutiny no other team seems to face, points towards there being some trepidation brewing about New Zealand’s potential to be more of a factor at this World Cup than some were expecting.
Almost certainly this means that regardless of what the All Blacks deliver against Uruguay, the rest of the world will dismiss the relevance due to the lowly ranking of the South Americans and then find endless faults with the way New Zealand went about their business.
But this obsessive need to nitpick, to denigrate great performances and belittle the teams the All Blacks play needs to be seen by New Zealanders as a reason for optimism: a sign that their team does have a relationship with demons, but they are roaming around in the heads of their rivals.
