Rugby World Cup: All Blacks bored by stoppages

Referee Romain Poite asks for timeout for the video referee. Photo / Brett Phibbs.

The All Blacks are keen to play the game at pace at the World Cup but are happy at the moment to put up with the frequent stoppages in order to get the right decisions from match officials.

Their victory over Namibia at the Olympic Stadium was significant only for the constant stoppages in the second half which all but ruined the game as a spectacle. It was so bad, All Blacks assistant coach Ian Foster admitted it looked like the players got "bored".

Television match official George Ayoub, like many of his tournament colleagues, was eager to get involved in the match which, combined with the Namibians' inability to stay with the All Blacks at scrum-time in the final quarter, meant the the match finished a stop-start affair - with the emphasis on stop.

However, All Blacks assistant coach Ian Foster was eager to stress the importance of the officials getting the decisions right at a World Cup which appears to the neutral in danger of becoming a victim of paralysis by analysis.

"That process has been pretty well discussed and they're working hard on that as a sport," Foster said. "I guess the second thing is when you tally things up when you're slowing down things with scrums, that's the perfect storm and we saw that in the second half. I'm sure we won't see that every week."

Chaos appeared to reign after Namibia, ranked 20th, struggled to stay with the All Blacks, but all that changed after the break.

"I was pretty pleased with the way we played in the first half," Foster said. "I thought we were incisive and scored three tries off some organised play, lineouts particularly. But it looked like we got bored, didn't it? And when the game got slow, we tried to make things up and that's when we lost our form and patience a little bit.

"That side of it we can work on and the other area is we got a little bit flat from phase play in the wide channels. If you look back to Argentina, we were probably a little too deep. And that's not necessarily the backs, but the team as such reading the pace of the ball and if the ball gets slowed down not creeping too much."

Foster said the TMO's input at this tournament, given the frequency of interventions, is taking away from the All Blacks' running game.

"We can talk as much as we like but, if teams think that's a tactic that's going to work against us, they're going to keep trying it.

"The referee is under instructions to keep the game moving and we've just got to keep an eye on that but it's up to the officials to keep the game moving on.

"If they believe a team is deliberately doing it, they have to try to speed it up. In some ways, that's outside our control. We can ask for the game to be speeded up but that's only our opinion."