Gregor Paul: The big fear for the All Blacks in 2022

Ardie Savea of New Zealand. Photo / Getty Images.

OPINION:

The last two years have shown you can have too much of a good thing and as much as the Bledisloe Cup is a treasured part of the rugby calendar, no one should pitch a tent and order a Portaloo in protest that the All Blacks will only play the Wallabies twice this year.

That's the plan at the moment – play Australia twice, home and away and use the Wallabies in 2022 more as garnish rather than the star of the dish which they have been in recent seasons.

It was never a deliberate ploy to put the Wallabies on a continuous loop in 2020 and 2021, but instead a necessity borne out of the pandemic circumstance.

With quarantine requirements and all the rest of it, choices about who to play and where were thin on the ground so two-thirds of the All Blacks' test programme in 2020 was devoted to playing Australia.

Last year that dropped to 20 per cent but still means that of the 21 tests played since head coach Ian Foster took over, seven – or one third – have been against the Wallabies.

In the short-term at least, there are valid developmental reasons why contests against the old foe need to be reduced.

The Wallabies' individual skill-sets stand comparison with the best and in the last decade they have beaten the All Blacks more than any other team.

Anton Lienert-Brown celebrates with the All Blacks. Photo / Getty Images.

Mathematicians will, however, attribute Australia's win rate to statistical probability – they have beaten the All Blacks more than any other country in the last decade because they have played the All Blacks more than any other country in the last decade.

The rugby analysts can argue that while the Wallabies have good individual skill-sets, their collective game intelligence is often lacking and too cheaply and too often they have handed the All Blacks easy points and failed to keep them in the same vice-like grip that the South Africans and Irish have.

Australia also play a ruck and run game that produces free-flowing Bledisloe contests that thrill with their speed and adventure, but which serves to zag against the Northern Hemisphere zig of explosive power, confrontation, set-piece supremacy and supremely organised defence.

The Wallabies are the staple of the All Blacks' test diet, but they have the nutritional value of sugar which is partly why Australia need to become the occasional sweet treat.

Rugby Australia won't agree the Wallabies are merely a sugar hit for the All Blacks and will inevitably, in the coming weeks, try to push New Zealand Rugby into agreeing to a third test this year.

The Wallabies need all the exposure they can get to the All Blacks – a team that tests them in all the areas they need to be tested.

Rugby Australia also need all the money they can get, and they know that if they scheduled a third test for Suncorp this year, it would sell out even if the Bledisloe wasn't up for grabs.

But the problem with playing a third test this year – the additional game would be in Australia – is that it would be yet another week away from home for New Zealand's players when the last thing in the world they need is another week away from home.

Ardie Savea of New Zealand. Photo / Getty Images.

2020 saw the All Blacks spend five weeks in a bio-bubble in Australia and two in MIQ. Last year they were on the road for 15 weeks consecutively and already this year, players have been camped down in Queenstown since early February.

The time in bio-bubbles and hard isolation is starting to mount and the big fear for New Zealand's players is that if the Government doesn't relax its self-isolation requirements for international travel, they will have to bunk down in Australia from April and spend 10 weeks there to finish off Super Rugby.

With two tests to be played in South Africa and four on the end of year tour in Europe, the big challenge for the All Blacks might not be finding the physicality they need to confront the best teams in the world but avoiding an existential mental health crisis.

It's a crisis NZR would knowingly be fuelling if they agreed to a third Bledisloe: a game whose only justification would be to generate cash.

Those of a less empathetic-bent will cite the good old days when the All Blacks travelled by boat to be away for months on end as a means to denigrate and question the commitment of the current group.

But the untold story of those early generation All Blacks is the impact those endless tours had and the number of alcoholics, broken marriages and dysfunctional family relationships that could trace their origins to being away from home for so long.

Mental health was neither recognised nor valued back then and so even now historians view the amateur All Blacks through a narrow lens which focuses exclusively on results and not human impact.

Those who say months away from home never hurt the early generation All Blacks are most likely entirely wrong and thankfully now we live in an age when rugby administrators are willing to recognise that the emotional and mental well-being costs of a third Bledisloe this year, would be significantly higher than any derived financial benefits.