Why awe-inspiring All Blacks are so hard to beat
Bill McLaren never forgot his first sight of the All Blacks. That was in 1935 when he was a schoolboy in Hawick. It was only the third New Zealand tour of Britain and Ireland, though the first by the team that came to be known as the “Invincibles” had taken place thirty years before. Now they were in Hawick to play the South of Scotland. “They were captained,” he wrote in his Autobiography, “by Jack Manchester, a towering figure in a dark-brown scrum-cap who led out his team for the game carrying the ball in one enormous hand. I can still remember the hushed awe that pervaded the ground as he walked on to the pitch. We local lads had never seen anything like it.”
Familiarity means that this “hushed awe” may no longer be experienced. The days when a tour from New Zealand or South Africa or Australia was a rare and wonderful event are long gone. Now they flit in and out every autumn and we are also accustomed to watching internationals in the South Hemisphere on TV. New Zealand are almost as familiar to us as our friends and rivals in the Six Nations. Yet where New Zealand at least are concerned this familiarity has done little to diminish the respect – often fearful respect with which we regard them.
There is a mystique about them, a mystique so powerful that you feel that New Zealand start every match a converted try, 7-O, ahead. Alternatively, if a handicapping system was to be introduced, they would, depending on the rating of the opposition, start every match a score or two behind, and you would still back them to win. England have played them 41 times before this weekend’s World Cup semi-final and won just 7 of these matches. Only France of northern hemisphere countries have beaten New Zealand more often – 12 times – but then they have played more matches against them – 61 in all.
Even the name by which they are commonly known – the All Blacks – inspires awe. Unlike Springboks and Wallabies, which are quite friendly, even cuddly, names, it breathes menace. Actually there’s a theory that it came about because of a careless piece of sub-editing. When in an early match on that first famous 1905-6 tour a journalist was so impressed by the New Zealanders’ handling that he declared you might think they were “all backs”. But the careless sub inserted an l, and so the All Blacks were born. It’s a good story, but an unlikely one: the black jersey with the silver fern, black shorts, black stocking and black boots were surely the reason. Be that as it may, the name “All Blacks” dates from that first tour, and has such a menacing, even sinister, ring that Sir Clive Woodward when England’s coach insisted his players should never use it, but should always speak –and, I would guess, think – of them simply as New Zealand.
Actually, though we are accustomed now to think of New Zealand as the pre-eminent rugby nation, it wasn’t always so. South Africa first played the All Blacks in 1921 and, from then until 1981 when the NZRU somewhat reluctantly agreed that it was no longer politically acceptable to play South Africa while the apartheid regime lasted, the Springboks had the better of it.
As a boy, I could scarcely have failed to be more in awe of the Springboks than the All Blacks. The first time I saw South Africa was at Murrayfield in November 1951. They won 44-0. The try was then worth only 3 points. They scored 9 tries. Three seasons later New Zealand played Scotland who hadn’t won a single match since being slaughtered by the Springboks and won only 3-0, the only score a long-range penalty kicked by their full-back Bob Scott who was reputed to be able in practice to kick goals from half-way in his stocking soles.
Actually the 1953-4 All Blacks were a rather dull stodgy side. Bob Scott, by then a veteran, was a great player and they had a very fast left-wing, Ron Jarden, but their halves kicked a lot (as most halves did then) and they played a forward dominant game. They beat Ireland and England and lost to Wales and France.
The feeling that New Zealand played unenterprising rugby was confirmed by the First Test on the 1959 Lions tour. The All Blacks won 18-17, their full-back Don Clarke kicking 6 penalties while the Lions scored either four or five tries. Nor were the 1963-4 All Blacks very exciting. They did beat Ireland, Wales, England and France, but their match against Scotland was, I think, the last no-scoring draw in International history, and their biggest win was by 14-0 at Twickenham.
The 1967 All Blacks did much to change this perception, playing much more adventurous rugby, while the forwards rucked with extraordinary ferocity and accuracy. Their first-half performance at Twickenham when they scored more than 20 points was as fine an example of rucking as I have ever seen; truly awesome. The formidable lock Colin Meads was the dominant figure until he was sent off at Murrayfield for aiming a wild kick in the direction of the Scottish fly-half’s head. He was only the second player to have been sent off in international rugby and the silence as he left the field was one of these you-could-have-heard-a-pin-drop moments.
All the same, though New Zealand were developing a more expansive game it was the 1971 Lions coached by Carwyn James and starring the Welsh halves Barry John and Gareth Edwards that put the All Blacks on the way to playing risk-taking 15-man rugby, and made them what they are today.
It was no surprise when they won the inaugural World Cup in 1987. They were already technically and tactically ahead of every other country. The surprise is that they took so long to win the trophy again, despite, for instance, having in Jonah Lomu the sensational star of the 1995 cup in South Africa. But South Africa beat them in that year’s final when the All Blacks failed to sparkle. They lost a sensational semi-final to France in 1999, were outwitted by Australia at the same stage in 2003, and beaten again by France in the quarter-final in 2007, a match in which one could say that for once the All Blacks collectively and individually lost their head. They were generally acknowledged as the best team in the world, the one all others aspired to match and hoped to learn from, but they had developed the habit of losing their way on the big occasion. You might, in a sort of echo of Woodward, have said that when it came to the later stages of the World Cup, they weren’t the All Blacks, only New Zealand.
So the 2011 Cup was a real test. It was the first staged in New Zealand since 1987. Surely they were bound to win, but if they didn’t, where was the mystique? They would be labelled serial chokers. Then, as if the gods were really determined to test their mettle, things began to go wrong. They lost their star fly-half, Dan Carter, to injury. They lost his deputy and their third choice number 10, also injured. Stephen Donald, next in line, had to be called back from a fishing holiday. And then the All Blacks really didn’t play well in the final against a French team whose own tournament had been stuttering and unhappy, riven by dissension in camp. But the All Blacks got ahead, and spurred on by their indomitable captain Richie McCaw, held on, if only just. Neutrals might think that the referee as well as the gods favoured them, for France were denied at least two kickable penalties, one of which would have given them the lead.
No matter. McCaw lifted the Cup. The blank years were behind them. The best team in the world had conquered the world. Retaining the trophy in England four years later was almost a formality.
New Zealand rugby had been transformed. Only the will to win was the same as it had always been, but now the All Blacks were playing 15-man rugby at speed with such virtuosity and élan than you might sometimes suppose that there were more than fifteen men wearing the black jersey. So here we are with the best team in the world favourites to make it three in a row. The mystique is there. Anyone who beats them will have to be bloody good.