As the clamour for a change of coach in New Zealand intensifies, it is perhaps pertinent to cast the mind back to about this time in 2021, for it is pertinent.
Before the All Blacks played their final two Tests of the 2021 Rugby Championship against SA, they were riding the crest of a wave. They’d lost to Argentina in what became the Tri-Nations because of the absence of the Springboks in the first Covid-19 season of 2020, but subsequent to that they had swept past all comers and had great momentum.
The only problem for them was that “all comers” was limited to Australia. They hadn’t played any other top tier nation since the 2019 World Cup, but they beat the Wallabies so comprehensively that the All Black coaches and some Kiwi rugby critics thought they were justified in sniping at the Boks for being boring in their series win over the British & Irish Lions.
It is true the All Blacks-Wallaby clashes were more spectacular from a try-scoring perspective, but that was because they were playing against a team that was duped into playing something akin to touch rugby against them. The Wallabies started to tighten up when they played the Boks, but before that they were playing loose rubbish that was easily punished by New Zealand.
I wrote at the time that the All Blacks’ lack of exposure to the physicality of the Boks and the “real Test rugby” played by SA and top northern nations would bite them, and it did. The two old foes shared their two match Rugby Championship miniseries one-all but had the Boks been a bit more adventurous in the first clash, they would have won both.
Subsequent to their loss to the Boks in the final Championship clash of 2021, the All Blacks’ stocks have plunged to the point where at one point on Saturday they were listing sixth on the world rankings. Those rankings shouldn’t matter to them that much, and as former All Blacks skipper Sean Fitzpatrick stated at the weekend, at least now the Kiwis aren’t making the mistake of peaking too far away from a World Cup.
But four defeats in their past five starts, with the losses to France in France and Ireland in Dublin being comprehensive, and followed by a first home series defeat to Ireland and their first series defeat on New Zealand soil since 1994 makes damning reading.
It would be unprecedented for the Kiwi rugby authorities to sack an All Blacks coach in midseason and ditto an All Blacks captain. And it would be a big call less than a year and a half out from the World Cup. Both Ian Foster and Sam Cane are under threat though ahead of their tour to SA, where they play the Boks in Mbombela on August 6 and in Johannesburg a week later.
If the All Blacks recover from a series defeat by beating their fiercest foe, it would not be the first time it has happened. I was in New Zealand at the start of the 1994 Bok tour when the All Blacks lost their last home series to France. The backlash was as ferocious and as vicious as it is now, and Laurie Mains was lucky to continue as coach.
A 2-0 series win (one Test was drawn) over the Boks though was enough to keep him his job until the following year’s World Cup in SA. The Boks should be wary of that history repeating itself, and complacency against the All Blacks will be punished. Just as SA has made a habit of raising their game even in their worst times when playing their long-standing foe, so the All Blacks do the same.
But the Boks are never complacent against the All Blacks, and if they were going into the game, the Haka will wake them up. My money says the Boks will win both Tests and my reasoning isn’t just based on what happened two days ago in Wellington, but on the argument that was forwarded last August.
There are areas of the New Zealand game that have regressed since the regular contact with SA that used to come in Super Rugby was halted. Playing against just Australia and Pacific island teams hasn’t helped their game, and on the evidence of all three Tests against Ireland (the Irish dominated possession in the first even though they lost) they don’t have a pack that can live with the Boks.
The Irish provinces have only been playing against the top SA franchises for one season of the United Rugby Championship, but already Ireland appear to have started to absorb some lessons from that. Their physicality has ratcheted up a bit and their attacking game has improved considerably.
In short, the All Blacks problem might not just come down to who is coaching their team. It could come down to the change that was wrought when they told SA to voetsek from Super Rugby in early 2020.
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