Aaron Smith scores his team's sixth try against Italy. Photo / Getty Images
Aaron Smith scores his team's sixth try against Italy. Photo / Getty Images
By Gregor Paul in Lyon
An emphatic victory, the rest of the world put on notice, and yet veteran halfback Aaron Smith declared himself a touch grumpy that the statement the All Blacks made in destroying Italy was not bigger.
In what was generally a brilliant and cohesiveperformance by the All Blacks, where their pack delivered everything it possibly could, and the backs buzzed about as if it was the 1970s with skinny little guys playing against skinny little guys in acres of space and passive tackling only, Smith felt there was a 10-minute lapse at the start of the second half which will need to be at the heart of the post-performance review.
If it seems a little mean-spirited to be all Ebenezer Scrooge on a night when the All Blacks got so much right, Smith doesn’t particularly care.
He knows what it takes to win a World Cup and it’s the refusal to ever be satisfied that differentiates champion teams from the also rans.
Champion teams hunt for perfection. It’s the ghost that haunts them and however curmudgeonly it might be, it’s by focusing more on what went wrong against Italy than what went right that will help the All Blacks in their quest to win this World Cup.
“I guess it is a statement,” he said when he was asked whether the All Blacks had delivered a World Cup warning.
“But as a player, you are still looking at things we could have done a lot better. I am just thinking about that 10 minutes after halftime when we let them squeeze us a little bit and we let our discipline slip and our energy was a bit low.
“I am an old boy and a little bit grumpy about those things because there was a huge opportunity to send a bigger statement. We still sent one, but it could have been bigger.”
Those 10 minutes aside, the All Blacks’ performance was almost impossible to fault.
It had set-piece efficiency and brutality at the heart of it, and the backs played with freedom, confidence and vision.
The accuracy was stunning. The pass and catch was crisp, the timing of the scrum was Swiss-precision and the lineout didn’t have a single iffy moment.
But the facet in which the All Blacks were most impressive was the breakdown, where their cleanout work was ruthless and meticulous.
This World Cup produced unusual statistics in the first two rounds, where 60 per cent of the penalties were being awarded to the defensive team.
Referees have been happy to see defenders just get their hands over the tackled player to believe that the penalty has been earned, and so for the All Blacks to play their continuity game, to be able to hold the ball through 10-plus phases, those tasked with cleaning bodies out the way have to be there within a split second, pick the right person to shift and be technically perfect in the act of moving them.
Aaron Smith (second right) celebrates one of his tries with his teammates. Photo / Photosport
That the All Blacks went through 80 minutes without conceding a defensive turnover was the real highlight of the performance – good enough, even, to keep Smith happy.
“Joe Schmidt was talking hard about their breakdown and their loose forward trio going at the ball,” he said.
“It was key for us and when we were playing with lightning quick ball and you are playing people on the go, you have to be really sharp with your cleanouts.
“They were still getting men over the ball but our cleanout detail was pretty on tonight and we were also able, when we were disciplined, to steal a lot of ball, or cause spills in the tackle and then we won some key penalties.”
From Will Jordan’s vantage point on the right wing, the breakdown was indeed the area in which the All Blacks were most improved, and he felt that the platform to excel there was set by the defensive effort.
It was the consistency of the All Blacks tackling and their ability to knock back Italian ball runners that paved the way for the stream of defensive turnovers that were won and the counterattack opportunities which they presented.
Will Jordan in action against Italy. Photo / Photosport
“Footy can be a simple game when you are going forward and the boys set a great platform both at set-piece and general around the park,” said Jordan.
“I thought defensively they were real strong in the tight stuff. We saw a lot of dominant tackles that allowed us to go forward and get ruck turnovers and it was with turnover ball that we really started to turn it on. Obviously, the set-piece was huge but defensively it was a great shift.
“It was definitely how we wanted to play but I am not sure that is how we pictured it. We knew their attack shape with their guys swinging around would challenge us and we saw that a lot, but we scrambled well and on attack it was our breakdown being huge that allowed us to flow into it.”
Jordan wasn’t alone in not having any inkling that such a comprehensive destruction job was in the offing.
The pre-match hype was of a dangerous Italian side on the improve so to almost score 100 points was unimaginable.
But for Smith, the score doesn’t matter now – it is job done, on to the next one and imperative, he says, that the All Blacks reset and refocus immediately.
“We know what is coming and we have another tough game with a short turnaround against Uruguay,” he said.
“We need to get our bodies right, stay grounded and take the lessons from tonight because Italy put us under a lot of pressure with their attack and phase play and we need to clean that stuff up. When the scoreboard ticks up, we still have to be ruthless with offloads there are things we can always be better at it.”
