Rugby World Cup 2015: All Blacks prepared for ultimate challenge

New Zealand All Blacks captain Richie McCaw in action, during the Semi-Final 1, between New Zealand and South Africa, held at Twickenham Stadium. Photo / Brett Phibbs.

Among the many goals Steve Hansen set himself on becoming All Blacks coach, he still considers the holy grail to be following a great performance with another one.

He and Richie McCaw share a common view on that - both seeing greatness as being defined by the ability to consistently deliver peak performance regardless of opponent, occasion or what happened the week before.

The All Blacks now face the ultimate challenge in this regard. To win the World Cup, they need to surpass the sublime effort they produced against France in the quarterfinal.

They need to increase the intensity and physicality they delivered against South Africa and piece together an effort that all involved can safely say is the best produced in the last four years.

This was what the All Blacks failed to do in 2011. Coming into the final on the back of a superb and emotionally draining performance against Australia, the All Blacks didn't raise their game. They didn't go up mentally or physically - while the French did.

It made for a long night. A nervous night and maybe even a lucky night. The All Blacks were the heavyweight champion with nothing left, using all they had to avoid a sucker punch and stay in the game.

"You go back four years ago and we had a sensational performance against Australia in the semi," says Hansen. "And then we really didn't lift the next week when it was a final.

So coming off a good performance, it wasn't a great performance by any stretch of the imagination, I think we will lift.

"There will be enough excitement and also knowing in the back of our minds that we could have done better last week and we always seem to play better when we are like that."

They won four years ago, of course, but they won on the back of their skipper's sheer bloody-mindedness and refusal to let another tournament be confined to failure.

They won because across the team there were veterans from the failed 2007 campaign who had invested four years of their respective careers to make amends and that proved to be the intangible force that enabled the final score to be one point in favour of the All Blacks.

It's unimaginable the All Blacks would get away with winning two finals with poor performances and the nature of the victory against South Africa should provide enough fuel to ensure there is not a shred of hidden complacency within the players.

And that's essentially what the barrier is to backing up great performances. It is not a transparent or overt manifestation of over confidence or complacency. Hansen's view is that it is an embedded, almost impossible to detect bug in the system that relates to human nature.

Great performances inevitably lead to something being assumed by the players the next week: that there is a sense that it will all happen again just by turning up.

"When you have a performance like we had down in Cardiff," said Hansen, "it is really difficult mentally to get back into that same spot. One of the hardest things in sport I reckon is to go great to great because you expect things to be like they were.

"So we had a really tough, tight game [against South Africa] where we really didn't play as well as we could have - and the opposition had something to do with that. But some of our own stuff has to be looked at. "Rather than waiting on the game we have got to go and take it so we are on the edge of our seat.

"We will go into this game on the weekend now really hungry for it and we won't be over rating ourselves. Which will be good."