The All Blacks suffered a humiliating 43-10 defeat to South Africa in Wellington, raising concerns about their performance.
The Springboks’ attacking flair highlighted the All Blacks’ struggles with power, pace, and precision.
Questions have arisen about the All Blacks’ ability to recover and deliver consistent high-quality performances.
It’s hard to know what Wellington is killing off quicker – the careers of civil servants, or the reputation of the All Blacks.
It’s probably the latter, because even though thousands of government jobs have been cut in the last 18 months, the All Blacks have been slowlydying in the capital since they lost the second test to the British and Irish Lions in 2017 – and have now either lost or drawn a game in every year they have played there since.
None, however, have been as damaging or emphatic as this 43-10 rout. A game that was well-poised at halftime to be yet another gripping epic to the death took a major detour somewhere dark and nasty for the All Blacks in the second half.
South Africa, medieval last week, had quite the renaissance, but not the All Blacks. They were stuck in the dark ages – peddling a brand of rugby that was all leeches, poultices and gobbledygook thrown in a cauldron.
The self-styled innovation leaders of the world game were blown off the park, and chunks were taken out of the legacy. Losing doesn’t do wholesale damage to the brand, but record defeats do.
All Blacks loosie Ardie Savea shows his frustration after their humiliating 43-10 defeat to the Springboks in Wellington. Photo / Photosport
It’s possible to brush off a bad night at the office, but not so easy to walk away from a total system malfunction.
And it’s stretching credibility and the patience of the wider market to be arranging additional games all over the world on the self-proclaimed certainty that the All Blacks are the game’s greatest asset and everyone deserves the chance to see them.
The All Blacks are clearly not the game’s innovation leaders at the moment and of all the aspects that hurt in Wellington, none will have stung more than knowing that South Africa’s win came with more attacking flair than New Zealand have managed all season.
The All Blacks have talked all year about wanting to play at pace, but goodness knows why because they couldn’t remotely compete with the Boks when the tourists rammed the stick into fifth and played with a compelling mix of power, pace, precision and ambition.
The sight of the giant R.G. Snyman ghosting through a passive defensive line was plain embarrassing.
When the Boks grabbed a sixth try in the last minute to push the score past 40, it was plain humiliating.
Maybe that’s harsh, but the All Blacks of today have to be judged against the standards set by the All Blacks of yesterday, and their predecessors would not have recognised what happened in Wellington.
They certainly would not have liked what they saw as it ran contrary to the legend. There was not a hero among them. There was no stunning resistance to break the momentum the Boks started building early in the second half.
Instead, the All Blacks capitulated. There is no getting around the truth – the All Blacks were humiliated. They couldn’t live with the power of the Boks in the collision areas, their lineout fell apart, their attacking shape collapsed and, once again, they lost the aerial battle.
And that wasn’t even the worst of it. The scrum was a horror show. Forwards coach Jason Ryan promised that the sight of the All Blacks scrum being shunted like a lightweight caboose (as seen at Eden Park last week) would never happen again – and yet it happened regularly in Wellington.
Maybe not as dramatically as that one-off, but all night the All Blacks were barely surviving as they scrambled the ball out, ever fearful that the shrill of referee Nika Amashukeli’s whistle was milliseconds away.
Still, in the first 40 minutes it felt like the All Blacks could effectively compete in spite of their faltering scrum because it actually suited them to be getting the ball out quickly and shifting wide quickly.
In that pre-Apocalypse period, the All Blacks looked relatively sharp and polished at times. They arguably scored the best try of the Scott Robertson era when they broke out from their own half, went touchline to touchline and worked Leroy Carter into the corner with the precision and timing of their passing.
But that was the only high of the evening – a sole marker of optimism in an otherwise horrible night for the All Blacks.
South Africa's Damian Williamse scores a try in the tackle of Finlay Christie. Photo / Photosport
How they recover from here is going to occupy a lot of minds and force a lot of questions to be asked in the next two weeks before facing Australia at Eden Park.
Was this an aberration – a night on which South Africa hit some magical sweet spot they will never find again, or was it bona fide evidence that this All Blacks side has serious underlying issues that were not exposed last week by a vastly different, old and uninspiring team that will never be seen again?
Worryingly, it feels like it might have been the former. The All Blacks have lost two from seven this year and there remains no sign that this is a team that can consistently deliver high-quality performances or back-up week-to-week.
