Rieko Ioane has looked a bit out of sorts of late. Photo / Photosport
COMMENT:
There's no formula for players to follow when they are out of form. No best known method to quickly and easily remedy the underperforming.
Which is a great shame, because it would be nice if someone could just click their fingers and bring Rieko Ioane back to the boil.
The World Cup is precisely the stage for which a player such as Ioane was made. Ioane at his best on the hard grounds of Japan would give the All Blacks another dimension.
But right now no one can be sure Ioane is going to be at his best in Japan. No one knows if or when he will return to being the player he was in 2017 and while it's almost certain that the All Blacks coaches know the outside backs they are going to take to the World Cup, which of them will start in the tournament-defining game against South Africa is a much harder question to answer.
Even a month ago, no one foresaw that Ioane's starting place would be under threat. For the last 18 months he and Ben Smith have been the non-negotiable selections and yet now, with the tournament less than a month from kicking off, it's not clear where Ioane sits in the pecking order and how the coaches plan to use him in Japan.
New boy Sevu Reece is in that rare place where everything he does comes off and when someone is running that hot, it's often best just to keep picking them until the magic inevitably dries up.
But for most of Ioane's test career, he too has been able to make almost anything happen and he can't be the forgotten man. Not yet, not so easily and readily because while Reece has been quite brilliant, Ioane, for all that it is easy to forget given his lack of form in recent tests, is the better player. Ioane can pose more questions, he has the greater array of weapons to strip a defence and the All Blacks will pose more of a threat with Ioane than they will Reece.
It's all Reece at the moment, so the question that Ioane must now answer, with so little time in which to do it, is whether he can snap out of his malaise.
At 22, he can hardly be deemed a spent force. He's been robbed of nothing physically. His pace is still there. His agility is good. His power and acceleration still obvious.
That he has struggled to impose himself in the last two tests is surely attributable to some kind of mental fragility that wasn't previously in his make-up.
This isn't a case of a once explosive wing suddenly finding that his natural gifts have expired. This is a young man who has temporarily lost his way and needs all the help he can get to find a way through it as what we know about Ioane is that when he's confident and hungry to be involved, he is the most destructive outside back in world rugby.
In 2017 he invoked a sense of foreboding in Australia when, with his first touch in the opening Bledisloe Cup fixture in Sydney, he stood up Israel Folau with barely a metre of space in which to work and scored in the corner.
That was enough for most Australians to fear that the All Blacks, having inflicted Jonah Lomu and Christian Cullen on them, had found a new way to torment the Wallabies.
Ioane was just 21 when he made Folau look so ponderous and in Australian minds, a decade of pain stretched in front of them, with the All Blacks wing central in this dystopic vision, twisting and turning them in all sorts of cruel and unforeseen ways.
Later that same year the rest of the world felt the power of Ioane as he single-handedly turned the tests at Murrayfield and in Cardiff by finding ways to beat defenders and open holes.
He was the best finisher in the world in 2017 and probably was until the end of last year when his test performances strangely became a little erratic and less dynamic.
At Twickenham he was animated during the haka, making a point of eye-balling his opposite man, England wing Chris Ashton. But while it was intended as a statement of intent, it clearly just over-aroused Ioane who was caught horribly out of position three minutes into the game, allowing Owen Farrell to float a pass over his head so Ashton could score in the corner.
A week later in Dublin and Ioane made a searing break but with the Irish line at the All Blacks' mercy, he threw a wild pass to no one and the moment was gone and with it the test.
Looking back, those two games at the end of last year were probably the first indications that Ioane, for whatever reason, was no longer turning up to test matches with his head clear and his decision-making governed by instinct.
In his first full year of test rugby Ioane was uninhibited, fearless even. He had no reputation to live up to and no expectations placed upon him other than to get his hands on the ball and run.
In 2019 he's played like a man who is second guessing himself for 80 minutes. He's played as if he has doubts, as if he sees the 2017 version of himself as a different being entirely – paralysis by analysis is the jargon.
How he reconnects with his true rugby self is for him to work out, but he might be advised that he won't find anything useful in that regard by looking at his phone.
Clearly there will be more involved in project 'Ioane Revival' than simply ditching social media but it would certainly be a good start.
He's in the midst of his first career set-back and Ioane, speaking before he returned to Auckland colours this weekend, admitted to being frustrated at what he has been reading about himself on social media.
"Sometimes social media takes its toll on the team, the boys," he said. "Not so much on me but some of the boys get talking, and then you get messages from other boys, asking 'what's going on?'
"But I'm good. I'm happy being me. I'm happy with the way I'm playing and that's just the way rugby goes sometimes. There's no big dramatic feeling."
He might say it's not affecting him, but wallowing in the lunacy of the Twitter-sphere is not a good idea at any time, but especially not when he's searching for mental clarity and confidence.
He's too good a player, too great a talent to let the ugliness and spitefulness of ill-informed trolls get inside his head and lessen his impact.
Instagram will not lead him back to the promised land and the only thing he should let inside his head at the moment are the comments made by All Blacks coach Steve Hansen after Ioane had saved the day with two tries against Wales in 2017.
"He's phenomenal," Hansen said. "He's got something a lot of other people don't have, namely myself, and that's pace. Every time he gets the ball you think 'wow, what's going to happen?' He only needs half a yard because he is so quick and he's strong with it.
"If we can keep his feet on the floor he could go anywhere that kid."
If he holds on to that, who knows, it could prove to be the quick-fix that returns him to his best form and enables Ioane and not Reece to be the hottest property at the World Cup.
The squad aims to dominate the gainline with powerful ball carriers and defenders.
