The Super Rugby Pacific playoffs highlighted both the brilliance and discipline issues of New Zealand’s players.
Pressure-induced lapses in discipline have plagued New Zealand rugby for nearly a decade.
Ill-discipline, illustrated by penalty counts, hinders New Zealand teams from reaching their full potential.
A dramatic and frenetic weekend of Super Rugby Pacific playoffs managed to simultaneously showcase both the brilliance of New Zealand’s elite players and the endemic flaw that has been at the core of most All Blacks’ defeats in the past six years.
It’s clear from the waythe Crusaders went about destroying the Reds’ scrum, to the instinctive and insanely creative way Beauden Barrett almost scored the try of the decade shortly before half-time when he chipped and dribbled his way through the Chiefs defence, that New Zealand has a strong mix of rugby basics and freewheeling genius in its midst.
But so too was the soft underbelly of the country’s professional cohort exposed once again, and the brightest and best New Zealand has to offer too readily and easily succumbed to their darker impulses.
The story of the weekend was how the pressure of the occasion induced a self-destructive lack of discipline that has haunted the game in this country for the better part of a decade now.
New Zealand used to be renowned for producing players who could stay calm and accurate under pressure, but these days, the big moments in big games too often bring out lapses in discipline and brain explosions.
They tend to be minor rather than major explosions, but they wreak the same sort of damage.
And perhaps because the trend is to commit dumb and avoidable acts rather than the massively dramatic, the full extent of how often New Zealand’s players transgress is never fully realised.
But the evidence was on show over the weekend to highlight how there is a culture within the highest echelons of the game to instinctively work outside the laws, and infringe first, think second.
In the first play of the game in Hamilton, Blues prop Josh Fusitu’a took an age to roll away after making a tackle – gifting the Chiefs three points.
The act itself was hardly heinous, but it signalled the desire within the Blues to slow down the Chiefs’ possession and a possible ambiguity about whether the mandate was to do so entirely legally.
Later in the first half, Ricky Riccitelli felt the need to block Damian McKenzie’s running line and effectively foot trip the Chiefs No 10 who was chasing a Shaun Stevenson kick ahead.
It earned Riccitelli a yellow card and the Chiefs three points – and when he looks back and sees that the danger the Blues faced was low as Beauden Barrett was going to collect the kick, his act will seem all the more ill-judged and pointless.
Referee Angus Gardner shows Blues hooker Ricky Riccitelli a yellow card on Saturday night. Photo / Photosport
This, though, is how things are in New Zealand – players too often appear pre-programmed to commit some kind of needless act of illegal disruption when they perceive their team is facing a threat.
It is a calculated approach – illustrative of a pervading mindset that the risk of infringing is always worth the reward.
Certainly, the Chiefs seemed to buy into that philosophy in the closing five minutes when they repeatedly infringed in their desperation to stop the Blues from scoring a try.
The logic seemed to be a conviction that the mathematical probability of the Blues not scoring would increase the longer they were denied.
It was bad maths, though, because the Blues weren’t foiled by the Chiefs’ ill-discipline - they were enabled by it.
The penalties that kept coming in the last few minutes swung the probability in favour of the Blues scoring, and the lesson the Chiefs – every New Zealand team in Super Rugby Pacific – must absorb, is that legal defence is always more effective than illegal defence.
Even in Christchurch, where the Crusaders were easy winners, Ethan Blackadder was yellow-carded for an impulsive high tackle on Lachie Anderson.
Blackadder obviously panicked that he’d charged up too quickly and was beaten on the inside – so he thrust out an arm and coat-hangered the Reds wing.
The Crusaders were 27-0 up with 12 minutes to go so the card had little impact, but again, it says something about the prevailing mindset and the inability of experienced players to resist their urges.
Ill-discipline doesn’t reward teams the way players obviously feel it will and if there is one statistic that came out of the weekend that best illustrates the endemic problem within the game, it is the 11-5 penalty count against the Hurricanes in their match against the Brumbies.
That figure of itself tells the story of how impulsive, needless and almost reckless decision making is preventing New Zealand teams and the All Blacks from fulfilling their potential on the international stage.
A country that was once revered for the way it could think itself out of a tight spot, is now more often than not putting itself in a tight spot for not doing any thinking at all.
