There’s no doubt too that the All Blacks have made a strong self-assessment about their skillsets, and believe in their ability to pass and catch at a sharper level than all those they play. They have unbreakable faith in their conditioning and athleticism that tells them if they can generate width in their attack and play at a high tempo, the slow-moving icebergs won’t get close enough to rip any holes in their hull.
But the test in Tokyo again showed the All Blacks hold themselves hostage every time they fall prey to their ambition to defy the principles of test rugby.
They made themselves instantly vulnerable with their desire to play this wide-wide game where they tried to pull Japan from one touchline to the other.
Vulnerable because this sort of rugby has proven to have a low and declining success rate for the All Blacks.
As Japan showed, it’s relatively easy for defences to shuffle across the field and even easier to isolate the All Blacks ball carriers after a few phases.
The All Blacks seem to adopt this approach to make their attack unpredictable, but Japan, as many other teams before them, knew exactly where the ball was going and what they were facing.
Occasionally, and usually its against Australia, this east-to-west game that the All Blacks so love – this million-miles-an-hour ball in hand, run from everywhere approach – breaks an opponent early and opens the door for a rout.
But the statistics which have built against the All Blacks and their non-conformist style have become more compelling.
When the All Blacks smashed Wales last year, it was on the back of their scrum and rolling maul.
When they fought back against France, it was all because the forwards owned the ball, driving low and tight in prolonged periods of ultra conservative pick-and-go.
The win at Ellis Park this year was built on the foundation of scrum, lineout, maul and collision. Ditto the victories in Hamilton against the Pumas and Wallabies at Eden Park.
Whatever vision the All Blacks hold of themselves, the reality is they are at their best when they conform to the same basic template as everyone else.
They are good at mauling these days, can just about edge any scrum they face, have an improving battalion of ball-carrying forwards and statistically win more when they use their kicking game to gain territory.
There seems to be a reluctance to accept this or a difficulty in understanding that they become the unpredictable team they want to be when they first lay down this platform.
It’s been in plain sight all year, longer even, that there is a direct and proportional relationship between the effectiveness of the All Blacks grunt work and their attacking creativity.
The first bit leads to the second and while the All Blacks scraped home against Japan, the scrambled nature of the win should serve as the irrefutable basis on which the team abandons, once and for all, this idea that it can dominate the world game without adhering to the foundation principles.
They can go to France as idealists, play their hit and miss wide-wide game and most likely come home in the quarter-finals.
Or they can abandon their pursuit of this style that is both beyond them and clearly not as effective as they have convinced themselves, and begin their journey to conformity against Wales this week, staying on it through to the World Cup next year.
