All Blacks coach Ian Foster. Photo / Photosport
OPINION:
Having been billed as the moment of truth, tonight’s test at Mt Smart will likely produce a tidal wave of misplaced emotion if the All Blacks lose.
A defeat will most probably unleash a torrent of angst – a toxically tinged lament about a doomed World Cup campaign being on the horizon and fears the rot has set deep into the system.
New Zealand, it seems, has no means to meander through life with the All Blacks, simply trusting that time, patience, and resilience will find a way to prevail.
This is a country that instead believes only in emulating science – of using heat and pressure to produce the diamond, and this All Blacks team of the last few years has felt the full weight of the nation bearing down upon it.
The intensity of the angst has been memorable, to the point where even in a world of short memories and hyperbole, it’s difficult to be accused of either when suggesting this has been a World Cup cycle like no other.
The All Blacks have been kicked from pillar to post, not so much by their opposition, more so by a not so adoring public, an unforgiving media and by their employer, who has clearly, at times, felt answerable to the big business interests that now underpin the commercial might of the team.
Assistant coaches have been fired, while Ian Foster came mightily close to also being kicked out of office in August last year and captain Sam Cane it seems could do more good than Mother Theresa and still be cast as Jack the Ripper.
To those observing New Zealand from afar, it looks awfully like the rugby fraternity has ripped itself apart since 2020 and it’s all to do with expectation and the failure to meet it.
Expectation is never quantified as such, but New Zealanders always seemingly know when it is being met by the All Blacks and when it’s not, and players and coaches from past regimes all say that an unforgiving and ambitious fan base has been a powerful and motivating force to improve performances.
But, equally, the danger of unquantifiable expectation is that it can create a wildly misleading framework by which to make sensible and astute assessments about how the team is really performing.
And this is the specific danger that this match with the Springboks presents – it’s being hailed as the only true gauge by which the All Blacks will be able to determine how they are tracking ahead of the World Cup, but it’s really not.
Somehow, the Springboks have become almost deified in New Zealand these last few years, seen as a team able to get almost everything right while the All Blacks have managed to get so much wrong.
While New Zealand has been in a state of constant upheaval since 2020, battling to adjust to the new look Super Rugby Pacific and endlessly scratching around for new gameplans and tactical blueprints, the perception has grown that South Africa seamlessly transitioned its club teams into European competition and that the Boks have stuck rigidly and successfully to a winning formula of picking oversized forwards and bashing the living daylight out of opponents.
The narrative of this World Cup cycle has been that the All Blacks are failing to innovate, while the Boks have cleverly stuck to what is in their DNA.
Facts, however, are certainly not getting in the way of this particular story, as the All Blacks supposedly catastrophic win ratio of 67 per cent since 2020, is considerably less catastrophic than the 57 per cent produced by the Springboks over the same period.
The Boks have been more erratic than the All Blacks these last two years and certainly a lot less successful.
They haven’t found much in the way of innovation or new blood and seem destined to turn up in France with much the same crew they used in 2019 and play much the same way.
But the South Africans have been happy to let the team bump along like this and trust that everything will work out in France, just as it did in Japan four years ago.
And this is where New Zealanders could learn something: the South Africans have more faith, more realistic expectations about what the Springboks can achieve and greater perspective about how to treat each game they play.
This shallower emotional range serves them well and if the Boks lose on Saturday, it won’t deter them from believing in their ability to win the World Cup.
Just as if they win, it won’t see them buy much into any view suggesting they now sit further up the list of favourites.
The South Africans don’t feel that same need to destroy themselves in search of the unobtainable and New Zealanders could save themselves a world of unnecessary pain if they could learn the same art of holding more realistic expectations.
And it would help if it started this Saturday by accepting that despite the hype and sense of this game being a significant landmark on the journey, it won’t be season defining by any means.
As Foster himself suggested, it will be a great occasion and a great test, made more intriguing by the variety of rugby South Africa can produce. But that’s it, there will be nothing additional to mine from this test.
“They have got the ability to play a number of ways,” he said. “To play the control game and to play a wide game. We can’t pigeonhole their game and there is a sense too that there is a game of chess going on here because we play them again at Twickenham and then again potentially at the World Cup.
“How much do you show and how much do you not show. Our mindset is to keep it nice and simple really. It’s a Springboks test and they mean a lot to us and so we are preparing for both strategies that we know they can play well.”
This clash with the Boks isn’t really a moment of truth at all, but just a moment in time.
Live commentary of All Blacks v South Africa:
Elliott Smith on Newstalk ZB, Gold Sport and iHeartRadio; coverage from 6pm
Alternative Commentary Collective on iHeartRADIO, Radio Hauraki and SKY Sport 9
OPINION: Breaking down just where the decider can be won.