All Blacks: Panel pushing to rediscover lost art

While the full extent of the All Blacks tactical vision will not be known for months, they make no secret they need to rediscover the art of mauling.

Working a rolling maul is one priority; the other is stopping a rolling maul.

The inability of New Zealand sides to make use of a tactic tailor-made for the current law interpretations worries the All Black coaches. They don't need to crunch data to know rolling mauls are producing significant numbers of tries.

"It's something we have to be able to be good at," says forwards coach Steve Hansen. "We have never been a mauling team unless you go back to the late 1980s when the likes of Waikato were very strong at it.

"So we are going to have to tap into people who know about mauling. We did that last year before we went on tour with John Mills and that helped a lot.

"In learning how to stop it, you learn how to attack it. The principles are important because as a trend, as a tactic in the game at the moment, it's really very effective. We've got to say 'listen, we're not good at this and we've got to be good at it because it's an easy way to score five points'.

"It's a given you score tries if you kick a penalty out to five metres, win the lineout and set up a good rolling maul. So we have to be able to do that as a priority, and more important we have to be able to stop other teams from doing that."

No one within the All Black camp expects a rapid transformation. There is an awareness mauling is alien to all levels of the game here.

Hansen astutely makes the point mauling was more prominent in New Zealand before wall-to-wall TV. A full generation of players have never been taught or encouraged to maul nor seen it performed at the highest level.

No one has said it in such explicit terms but this panel have the desire to leave mauling as a legacy. Winning a World Cup would satisfy many of their personal ambitions, vindicate the New Zealand Rugby Union board for re-appointing them in 2007 and give the nation a feel-good factor by kicking the enormous monkey off the back.

But teaching and encouraging a generation of players to maul would be more enduring and arguably more beneficial to the game's health long-term.

New Zealand rugby doesn't need to immerse in a mauling culture but it is a handy skill.

Graham Henry partly subscribes to the view that if the All Blacks were to show how it can be effectively used, then it is probable teams at lower levels will try to emulate what they have seen in the test arena.

"It is the forgotten art of New Zealand rugby," says Henry. "You rarely see it [mauling] at school, club, provincial or even Super 14. There is an argument that if the All Blacks do it, the rest will copy and there is probably some good reasoning behind that.

"If you watch a game of rugby between two South African schools, you will see plenty of mauling. But if you went to watch, say, Auckland Grammar play Christchurch High School you probably wouldn't see one maul in the whole match.

"We have spent a lot of time talking about this and we are going to try to have this as part of our game plan."

Part of that plan is to badger the officials to referee this facet of the game better. While there is a crusade to revert to law in key areas, Henry and others, believe the maul is currently being neglected. Referees are too lenient towards the attacking team making it next to impossible to stop the maul if it builds any momentum.

The dreaded truck-and-trailer routine has been allowed to creep back and several times in Super rugby the ball has been moved to the back of the maul before the opposition makes initial contact.

Henry is still concerned that where there has been ample blocking at the back of the lineout too many referees assume that, if a maul is brought down, it must have been done so illegally. What has happened is the attacking side has fallen over one of their own players.

Hansen says that even when refereed "properly" mauling was a valid and effective skill.