The row between the Lions and the All Blacks escalated on Monday, when Steve Hansen accused Warren Gatland of being “desperate” after the first Test and said that his remarks about the All Blacks’ tactics had taken the gloss off the Lions’ performance.
Gatland complained that New Zealand had been “dangerous” in the way they had targeted the Lions’ scrum-half Conor Murray, that their tacklers had “dived blindly” at his standing leg while they were trying to charge down his kicks. So Hansen, who loves to have the last word, hit back in an interview with Radio Sport NZ, in which he said he thought Gatland’s remarks were “really, really disappointing” – but no less than he expected from him.
Hansen felt the comments were “predictable”, the latest in a series of similar complaints. “Two weeks ago it was that we’ve cheated in the scrums, last week it was blocking and now he’s saying this.”
These comments, he said, were particularly offensive because Gatland should understand the “New Zealand psyche” is “not about intentionally trying to hurt anybody”. He said he was not sure why Gatland made them but guessed “he might be a bit desperate or something” after the Lions’ defeat. The first Test, Hansen said, had been a great match but Gatland’s criticisms had “taken away the gloss of not only the Test match but his own team’s performance as well”.
Hansen pointed out that neither the TMO nor the referee had felt the need to penalise the All Blacks on Saturday. “There’s a guy who is watching for foul play all the time and if he thought it was foul play he would have indicated it to the referee, and he would have done something about it in the course of the 80 minutes.”
Of course, the fact that the referee and TMO did not think there was anything there to address is one reason why Gatland felt the need to flag it up on Sunday night. Because there was some truth in what he said. New Zealand did hit Murray with a couple of shoves after he had kicked the ball and at least one late tackle.
Jaco Peyper, the referee in the first Test, may not have spotted this, or thought it worth penalising, but his colleague Jérôme Garcès will now be that much more wary of it this weekend. It just so happens that, by discussing it publicly, Gatland also helped take a little pressure off the Lions because it meant that, for the first part of this week at least, everyone would be talking about his comments rather than how his team played last weekend and how much pressure is on them now. He has been in this game for a long time and knows exactly what he is doing.
As does Hansen. The thing that particularly irritated him was the implication “that we’re trying to hurt the guy”. They were not. “Rugby is about playing within the laws”, the All Blacks had been trying to charge Murray’s kicks and tackle him but “both those things are legal”. Just because Murray is one of the Lions key players, he explained, “it doesn’t mean to say that he has the right to go about the park without being charged down or tackled.”
The All Blacks prop Wyatt Crockett picked up on this in a press conference on Monday afternoon. “We try to put a lot of pressure on every kicker, we’re trying to force them to do a poor kick,” Crockett said, “that’s what we’re trying to do, get it so that we can attack off that kick. I think every team in the world is trying to do the same thing.” Otherwise, Crockett said, the players were not interested in talking about it. They would rather leave the coaches to get on with their squabble. “That sort of stuff is not really our focus.”
Hansen’s response seems to have been, as much as anything else, an attempt to put Gatland back in his box. “It wasn’t [foul play] and it never was, and it never will be as long as I’m involved with the All Blacks because, yes, we want to play hard but we want to play fair,” he said. “It’s just not the way we work in our world and, as I say, it’s pretty disappointing.”
There is a suggestion that this tour is doubling as an audition for Gatland, who wants to take over as the head coach of the All Blacks down the line. You guess Hansen, who has spent 10 years building the All Blacks’ team culture, is not too keen on that idea.
