Rugby: Park hoodoo alive and kicking

Perhaps Eden Park is cursed after all.

It's otherwise hard to explain how else the Wallabies, under the tutelage of 'Aussie Rob' Deans, could start the match looking like a finely tuned Ferrari and end it looking like a Robin Reliant.

Against a ring-rusty All Blacks who had been singularly unimpressive during the June internationals, all the odds appeared to be Australia's favour. All but one, that is.

Going into last night's match Australia had lost their previous 10 visits, last winning in 1986. That matched produced a huge mismatch in the backs where the patchwork All Blacks fielded Kirk, Botica, Stone, Stanley, Green, Kirwan and Crowley. Australia, led by Farr-Jones and containing the talents of Lynagh, Papworth, Slack, Campese, Burke and Leeds, were way too slick.

There was shades of that mismatch again last night, for the opening half hour at least.

While Australia was getting direction and cunning through their five-eighth combination of Matt Giteau and Berrick Barnes, New Zealand initially got muddled thinking and a lack of rhythm from Stephen Donald and Ma'a Nonu. It was only the ill-will of the rugby gods and profligacy by the Wallabies that kept the scoreline at a manageable 10-13 at the break.

"If I had my time again, I would have passed it," said Barnes of one particularly glaring faux pas, where he ignored his skipper Stirling Mortlock coming back on the angle and with a free run to the posts.

"We built a lot of pressure and created a lot of opportunities but did not come out of it as well as we would have liked in terms of turning that into points," said Deans.

"It kept the All Blacks close and allowed them to play that conservative sort of game and grind it out."

The fact the Wallabies turned to face the breeze with just a three-point lead appeared to spook them. They came out an inferior side in the second half, while the All Blacks seemed to have taken confidence from the fact they had been bent early but not broken. Donald, in particular, was gaining a presence at pivot that looked beyond him in the first 30 minutes.

By contrast the Australians had lost the enterprise they showed. With the scrum a mess - something Deans was privately fuming about post-match with the target of his ire the officials and not his underperforming front row - and unable to lay any semblance of a foundation, the time and space for the backs was cut down and they looked as harried as the All Blacks had earlier.

Once the All Blacks got their nose in front, they squeezed the life out of the Wallabies, who then started to run across their least favourite ground, rather than up and down it.

"It wasn't straightforward coming into the breeze. As we started to chase the game, we became a bit lateral perhaps, which you tend to do when you're chasing the game. For all of that, there was very little in it."

If you're the mystical type you might wonder, if they had been in a different arena, whether they would have scraped the win.

Asked during the week why it had proved so hard for the Wallabies to win at Eden Park, captain Stirling Mortlock replied: "It shouldn't be. The reality is that some sort of hoodoo has been created. But they do get broken."

But not last night, it didn't.

As far as hoodoos go, it rates fairly low on the epic scale.

While The Curse of the Billy Goat has prevented the Chicago Cubs reaching the World Series since 1945 and The Curse of the Bambino haunted Boston's hapless Red Sox for 86 years, the Wallabies' 23 years of futility in the City of Sails is mild by comparison (after all, Scotland and Ireland have been trying to beat the All Blacks, anywhere, for more than a century).

While we're talking rugby curses, has anybody mentioned that 1987 was the last time the All Blacks earned possession of a certain piece of silverware? The final will be back on this ground in two years. If these same teams meet on October 23, 2011, what are the chances of the Wallabies' woeful record here getting an airing?