Richard Loe: Rude awakening for All Blacks

Sonny Bill Williams of the All Blacks passes during The Rugby Championship match between the Australia Wallabies and the New Zealand All Blacks. Photo / Getty Images.

Well, that was a poor All Blacks performance. There's no getting around it. We were let down by catching, passing and tackling.

We didn't start well, but some of the old campaigners need to pick their acts up to stay in the game. Tony Woodcock and Owen Franks struggled and fell off tackles, something which was underlined when Nepo Laulala came on and injected some energy. When I say they had 'poor' games it was by their individual standards.

Listen back to Nigel Yalden, Rikki Swannell and Tawera Kerr-Barlow with the highlights of their call of the match.

The Australian scrum had parity or better throughout. The old cliche is that it starts up front and, in short, that's the point, it didn't start up front which is a worrying sign.

Australia have a new scrum coach, he'd done his homework and now Mike Cron will need to get his disciples to operate smarter.

'Messy' would best describe Aaron Smith's performance at halfback. He produced some uncharacteristic mistakes including that high tackle which saw him sin-binned.

Dan Carter's goalkicking was also a letdown, especially with the threat of those conversions getting charged down. He's either got slower or the Australians have finally woken up.

Sonny Bill Williams didn't show anything that suggested he deserved his place and Julian Savea was awful on the wing; as the match went on he got slower and didn't produce nearly enough.

Nehe Milner-Skudder was one of the brighter points. Why would you go back to Cory Jane when you see what he can produce with those two tries?

It's a chance now for the All Blacks coaches to stand up and be counted this week.

Going into the test all anyone was talking about was that the All Blacks were going to win and by how much. You can't get much more of a rude awakening.

We lost the Rugby Championship last night and the Bledisloe's on the line next week so the pressure's on.

They selectors have got less than 40 names to trim down but, if they have a failure like this next weekend, they might need to find some names outside that 40.

New Zealand Rugby expected to win, they haven't and another loss next weekend would be an awkward way to enter the World Cup. I have all these texts from a number of Australians who used to drone on about how good they were at cricket, saying rugby is their game now.