Around 10 minutes into Aaron Smith’s press conference, it suddenly became obvious that this was the very last place he wanted to be. It is not that Smith particularly dislikes journalists, faced any awkward questions, or had anything he was trying to hide, it is just that he was so keen for the weekend to come around. All he and his team-mates want to do now is get out on the pitch and try to put right what went wrong last Saturday. “I could play today, that’s how ready I am, I’m ready to go right now,” Smith said. “I just want to get to the end of the week, let’s get into it.”
Smith’s team-mate Brodie Retallick, sitting alongside, nodded his head. “It’d be good to go to Saturday right now,” Retallick said, “and not have to worry about the rest of the week.”
Steve Hansen, on the other hand, will be glad to have a little time in which to work. He has a few different problems to deal with this week. Like the way his team lost control of the second Test and the fact that they did not stress the Lions’ defence. He also has to figure out what to do with the All Blacks’ midfield now that Sonny Bill Williams has been banned for four weeks. Ryan Crotty, who started outside Williams in the first Test, is still recovering from the hamstring injury he sustained in that game.
Crotty has been doing some training with the team but it would be a surprise if he was fit to start. The doctors reckoned it would be between two and four weeks before he was ready to play again.
With Crotty and Williams out, Hansen has to find the best combination between Anton Lienert-Brown, Ngani Laumape, Jack Goodhue and Malakai Fekitoa, who was called up to the squad on Sunday. They have only 36 caps between them. Goodhue, 22, is one of the brightest young prospects around but has not made his debut yet. And this match, the biggest played in New Zealand since the World Cup final in 2011, is no place for a rookie.
Laumape gave a little reminder of that when he won his first cap last weekend. He came on after Williams was sent off, and good as he is with the ball in hand – a bee-stung elephant would be easier to stop – he made a crucial mistake.
It was Laumape who rushed up to close down Owen Farrell in the 69th minute, which left a large gap for Jamie George to burst through in the runup to Conor Murray’s try. Watch it again and you see that Johnny Sexton knew exactly what Laumupe was doing, which is why he put George through. Given that the Lions will surely play Sexton and Farrell together again this weekend, Hansen may well want to pick a midfield with a little more defensive nous about it. Which is where Fekitoa comes in. Lienert-Brown can play at both inside and outside centre, so he may move across to No12 and allow Fekitoa to start outside him.
Smith, who plays with Fekitoa at the Highlanders, describes him as “a very physical player, very confrontational” who is “very good on our defence” and “will go hard and do his job really well”. He gave a brilliant defensive performance in midfield when the Highlanders beat the Lions a fortnight ago. Fekitoa also, and Smith thinks this will help him, has “a bit of a chip on his shoulder”. He has won 23 caps for the All Blacks, but was dropped from the squad before this series. That decision led to a lot of speculation that he was about to quit the country to go play for Toulon in France. Midi Olympique reported that he was about to sign a two-year deal, something Fekitoa’s agent has denied. Now he’s back, he has a point to prove.
Fekitoa and Lienert-Brown is the most experienced combination Hansen has to hand. They have started three Tests together, the last of them, and this is key, the return match against Ireland in Dublin last November, a fortnight after the All Blacks lost in Chicago. There has been a lot of talk about that game lately, since it was the last time New Zealand had to play a second game against a team who beat them. But the All Blacks keep knocking back the comparison. “We definitely want to do it a bit differently to that second game against Ireland after Chicago,” Smith said. “We turned up with all the fight but didn’t perform as well as we wanted to.” The way he talks you would never guess they won 21-9.
Hansen believes the defeat in Chicago was because the All Blacks had a problem with their attitude. “While we had a couple of the big boys out, and won 18 on the row, we got to Chicago, a big sigh of relief after getting the record, and we may well have been starting to get comfortable.
“The Cubs had won the World Series the first time in however many years it was and we’d started to become tourists rather than a team on tour.”
Last Saturday “was totally different”, he said. “It wasn’t an attitude problem. It was that we were one short and we were playing a good side.”
If this week’s problem is a different one, Hansen will still hope the fixes he comes up with are just as effective.
