All Blacks forwards coach Jason Ryan and hooker Dane Coles are not keen to repeat history of being knocked out in the 2019 semifinals as they look to take on Argentina this Saturday. Video / NZ Herald
There was, apparently, a point in time during these last two years at which Ireland and New Zealand swapped rugby identities.
This fact was only discovered last Saturday night when the All Blacks, uncertain, inconsistent, riddled with dramas and racking up all sorts of unexpecteddefeats, produced their best performance in four years to win a World Cup knock-out game.
That this victory came against Ireland, the team who have dominated for the last four years and who had beaten the New Zealand side three times in the current World Cup cycle, and produced a definite sense of the two nations having traded places.
For 24 years it was the All Blacks who knew how to consistently win, but never at World Cups.
They would be untouchable at times during a World Cup cycle, everyone would tell them they had the tournament in the bag, and they would turn up and be knocked out long before anyone imagined they would.
Half a second before Sam Cane imortalised Hugo Keenan in Rugby World Cup brutality. Photo / Getty Images
Usually it would be a team they had trounced, often several times, in the last four years that would undo them, as if the All Blacks believed they had earned the right to be world champions on the basis of what they achieved before the World Cup.
They were not a tournament team. They didn’t get that the World Cup ran to a different rhythm and required a different approach.
The All Blacks, for 24 years, simply didn’t understand that the tournament had nothing to do with being the best team in the world, but was all about being the best team for a seven-week period.
The agony of believing so much and failing so hard was a peculiar and lasting purgatory for All Blacks fans, one that was unique to them - until now.
Because the All Blacks of 2023 have shown they are a tournament team: that in Ian Foster they have a coach who, as may be slowly dawning on even his harshest critics, is one of the most astute strategists in the game.
It would be patently silly to suggest that he has masterminded the last four years as a long and elaborate hoax to fool everyone into gathering the wrong impression of the All Blacks.
He wasn’t sitting back last July plotting a series loss just to lull Ireland into a false sense of security ahead of a probable World Cup showdown.
New Zealand wing Will Jordan scores his team's third try during the Rugby World Cup match against France. Photo / Getty Images
But what is true, or at least is starting to feel like it may be true, is that for the last 15 months he has been resetting the All Blacks with a meticulous plan to win the World Cup.
As has been revealed, the All Blacks started building a new defensive structure in August last year - one that was designed with the specific goal of stopping Ireland.
There were signs of how they were operating defensively against Italy and Uruguay and then when the moment of truth came, they unleashed the full system against Ireland, and a team that ripped them apart in Dunedin and Wellington last year couldn’t find the same holes to exploit in Paris.
But so too have there been other little clues as to the tournament mindset the All Blacks have adopted.
When they played France in the opener, Beauden Barrett and Richie Mo’unga kicked everything back to the French in a game of aerial ping-pong that seemingly told the world the All Blacks didn’t want to counterattack.
Against Ireland, Barrett’s first major act from the backfield was to chip ahead into space, regather and set-up a breathtaking counterattack try.
Ian Foster and Sam Cane following the quarter-final. Photo / Getty Images
It’s not that Ireland underestimated the All Blacks ahead of their quarter-final, it’s more that they didn’t fully know or understand what was coming their way because the full noise version had never been seen.
Everyone thought the All Blacks had revealed their true selves in the opening game but it’s obvious now they hadn’t, and while they didn’t set out to lose to France, they also knew that defeat would be a cross they could bear.
Win or lose, the most important thing was to get through that opener without having given too much of their real battle plan away, and when Foster shrugged off the defeat as inconsequential to their ambition of winning the tournament, it wasn’t an act or wishful thinking.
He gets the art of the tournament, and his strategy has been based on ensuring that the All Blacks are a team on the rise in the knockout rounds.
His vindication is surely that both France and Ireland went through their pool games undefeated and now are both out.
Being this strategic at a World Cup is new territory for the All Blacks, and it’s certainly been hard for New Zealand’s rugby fraternity to grasp what is going on.
Too many people failed to see Foster as a strategic mastermind, or simply refused to believe it because of the turmoil the All Blacks were in last year.
And that’s understandable because as the All Blacks went through their rebuild last year, and even at times this year, they didn’t look like a team capable of winning the World Cup - or even of just getting beyond the quarter-finals.
Here they are now, though, building momentum week by week as they slowly unveil their true selves and prove they have become the antithesis of the All Blacks between 1988 and 2010, who knew how to dominate the global game but not how to win a World Cup.
