The All Blacks secured a late victory at Eden Park, overcoming a strong Wallabies challenge.
Warning signs were missed when they beat the Springboks in Auckland before losing a week later.
Focus is needed on identifying and solving performance issues to secure future victories.
Victory, especially when it comes at Eden Park, has been a powerful seductress for Scott Robertson’s All Blacks and lured them into making all sorts of false self-assessments.
Memories are still painfully fresh of the All Blacks beating what turned out to be a horribly out-of-sorts Springboks inAuckland, only to suffer a record loss to the same team seven days later in Wellington.
The warning signs were perhaps missed amid the celebrations of extending the Eden Park unbeaten run to 51 games.
It’s not as if the All Blacks free-wheeled into the capital after beating the Springboks at Eden Park earlier this month and thought the rematch would be a bit of a hoot. But clearly they fell foul to victory’s insidious nature to some degree and didn’t, as former All Blacks head coach Steve Hansen used to say, “go bone deep” in their preparation.
It’s not easy building immunity to victory’s seductive powers, but it’s one that Robertson’s All Blacks need to start learning as despite showing some healthy resilience and composure in beating the Wallabies 33-24, there were fairly large cracks on show for the 80 minutes.
And while it may be a joyless and oppressive process, the next few days for the All Blacks should be focused entirely on identifying only the negatives that came out of their performance and being driven exclusively towards finding solutions.
All Blacks coach Scott Robertson. Photo / Photosport
This is the dark soul of high-performance sport – it is a relentless, emotionless, singular quest for improvement.
It’s a cold, clinical business that has to be performance and not outcome focused and if the All Blacks want to secure a consecutive victory in Perth, they are going to need to be honest enough to admit that various parts of their game in Auckland were a cause for concern.
Top of the list was their vulnerability to the Wallabies maul, which produced two tries and sparked memories of the late 2021-early-2022 period in which the All Blacks displayed an alarming vulnerability to teams who chose to drive from lineouts.
The softness of the All Blacks underbelly in that period led to forwards coach John Plumtree being let go, and in his place came Jason Ryan, who welded an iron plate onto that facet of the All Blacks defence.
But some kind of rethink and remedial work is necessary, because if Ryan thought he’d built the rugby equivalent of the Maginot Line, the ease with which the Australians were able to set and rumble suggests otherwise.
The Wallabies will welcome back the powerful Will Skelton and Rob Valentini this week to ratchet up the maul’s horsepower yet higher, and the All Blacks also can’t afford to gloss over the fact that twice James O’Connor missed touch from penalties that really should have left Australia five metres from the All Blacks line.
And nor can they afford to miss how often and easily the Wallabies won the breakdown battle, and how much of a menace openside Fraser McReight was for 80 minutes.
A good review of the All Blacks’ performance there will say that they were the majority beneficiary of referee Andrea Piardi’s unfathomable rulings, and that it was ultimately good luck rather than good management that they were rewarded with 15 penalties.
He was probably right, but the All Blacks can’t afford to fall into the trap of reading best as good enough.
They were better in the way they used the ball, but it’s against a low benchmark and while the last try of the game was particularly well constructed and executed, there were still long periods in which the attack lacked cohesion, direction and accuracy.
The fact that McReight and his back-row chums Harry Wilson and Tom Hooper were able to compete as well as they did, was a sign of and in itself, that the attack wasn’t performing as it needed to because ball carriers were too often isolated.
Again, looking back at the late-2021-early-2022 period, the All Blacks were being turned over too regularly and too quickly, a problem they ultimately concluded was the result of a failing attacking blueprint and consequently parted company with assistant coach Brad Mooar.
Life with the All Blacks should be, by necessity, an uncompromising, unflinching never-ending appraisal that always finds fault and reasons to fret.
That’s the way to stay immune to the seductive forces of victory and the All Blacks, having perhaps been blind to the problems manifest in their Eden Park win against the Boks, can’t afford to make the same mistake again.
