Prop Tadhg Furlong helped Ireland win the forward battle - and the match. Photo / Getty
Prop Tadhg Furlong helped Ireland win the forward battle - and the match. Photo / Getty
OPINION:
"Rugby is a pretty simple game," Sir Fred Allen, the only unbeaten All Black coach, once said to me. "The problem is that people like to complicate things and they bugger it up."
The Irish display in their brilliant 29-20 victory over the All Blacks in Dublin had manyaspects, but at the heart of the game was the fact the All Blacks, not for the first time since the loss to England at the 2019 World Cup, were out-muscled up front.
And, as was brutally demonstrated at Aviva Stadium, when you're winning the forward battle, there's a very good chance you'll win the game too. It was a simple fact of rugby life that applied when Allen was coaching, and it still does.
Irish players like Andrew Porter, a prop who it's said can squat 325kg in the gym, loose forward Caelan Doris, at 23 a fearsome runner and tackler, and prop Tadhg Furlong, who, it may come as no surprise by the look of the man, was once told by his club nutritionist to cut down the 10 potatoes he'd eat every day, all echo the sort of fearsome physicality that players like Brad Thorn and Jerome Kaino brought to the All Blacks when they won consecutive World Cups.
Defensive lines are so well organised in test rugby it takes front-foot ball for any backline to fire, and Ireland had the vast majority of that sort of good possession.
If it hadn't been for massive collective heart among the All Black tacklers this could have been a humiliating defeat, but despite their courage, they were never likely to win.
The answers to countering the brute forward strength and relentless drive of teams like Ireland and South Africa are not obvious and not easy for the All Blacks to find. Personnel is a problem. Forwards like Kaino, Kieran Read, Owen Franks and Richie McCaw were once-in-a-generation players.
Prop Tadhg Furlong helped Ireland win the forward battle - and the match. Photo / Getty
But a bigger issue is the lack of Super Rugby experience playing against South African teams. Australia, as was obvious in Edinburgh when they were beaten by Scotland and at Twickenham in their 32-15 loss to a pretty average England side, suffer from the same lack of forward dominance the All Blacks did against Ireland.
Nobody in New Zealand would like to see the All Blacks embrace the dour style of the current Springboks, but with victory over Wales - albeit narrowly and a little luckily- and a 30-15 win against Scotland, South Africa seem better placed to deal with the hard grind that bettering a good Northern Hemisphere forward pack will always need.
In simple terms, any chance to play a South African team should be seized, not feared. The All Blacks need more experience of how to deal with forwards happy to be what used to be called concrete mixers.
Nelson's gift to Ireland
Eleven years ago I had a brief, warm email exchange with James Lowe's father, Geoff, who told me about some of the battles young James had in Nelson as a child with an initially undiagnosed rare form of arthritis.
James in 2010 was a teenager, fully recovered, and on the cusp of signing up with Tasman. The day after he did sign, Geoff emailed that key factors were that James would be coached by Leon MacDonald, and would be having regular meetings with Todd Blackadder, the coach of the Crusaders. "For a young lad from Nelson," wrote Geoff, "it doesn't get much better than that."
I'm guessing that if there is something that might be even better it'd be the magic game that Lowe just turned on against the All Blacks.
James Lowe celebrates winning a crucial penalty against the country of his birth. Photo / Getty
Lowe came very close to being an All Black himself. Steve Hansen told him in 2015 that if Lowe hadn't been booked in for a shoulder operation to clear up lingering damage from a crushing tackle by Crusader Jordan Taufua weeks before, when Lowe was playing for the Chiefs, Hansen would have picked him in the All Black squad that would play a season-opening test in Samoa.
An All Black opportunity never came again, but for the rest of his life if Lowe seeks happy rugby memories they'll surely include diving over for the opening try of the Dublin test in the 14th minute, and the thundering, crucial tackle he made on Rieko Ioane in the 72nd minute that not only snuffed out a promising All Black attack, but won a penalty, which Joey Carbery kicked to extend the Irish lead to 26-20.
Welshman Luke Pearce provided one of the most bizarre refereeing displays ever seen in a test match.
The weirdness was unending. He didn't wreck a thrilling game, and he got very little wrong.
But has any ref ever chatted as much in a test? He was in such constant dialogue with the players there were times he was more like a talkback host than a referee.
When he wasn't discussing the issues with not only the captains but also with any player from either side who wanted a yarn, he was forever checking in with the television match official, to second guess himself.
Referee Luke Pearce enjoyed his big day out in Dublin. Photo / Getty
If it had been a mediocre test, and not the nerve tingling one it was, extending the contest out by an extra 20 minutes would have been excruciating.
As it was the match was so good you could just laugh at the crazy moment in the second half when the All Blacks stopped playing because, even though there had been no whistle, they seemed to feel a knock on against Will Jordan had been called.
While everyone stood around and, of course, chatted, the final ruling, that they'd pretend nothing had happened and start again with an All Blacks ball to a scrum, was almost the perfect Monty Python capper to Pearce's big day out in Dublin.
