It has been a long while since the All Blacks lost in Auckland. Two decades, three years and three days, to be exact. But then, as Sam Whitelock said on Tuesday, “we shouldn’t have to lose to learn”, and in among all those victories, one seems particularly instructive right now.
It is the most famous of the lot, the 2011 World Cup final against France. A game a lot of New Zealanders assumed they would breeze through but which, in the end, turned out as close as they come, settled by a single point, 8-7. That match was a different order of magnitude again to the one being played on Saturday. But still, the third Test against the British & Irish Lions is, everyone agrees, the biggest that has been played in New Zealand since. “It definitely has that feel,” Jerome Kaino said, when he was asked how it compared to the World Cup final.
Three days out from the third Test, Steve Hansen sat down for a chat with a few members of the British press. He touched on a lot of topics in the 45 minutes we talked, such as his love of horses, his work as a policeman, and the business model of British rugby. Almost every last little thing, in fact, except the particulars of the upcoming match, which, he said, was a subject for another day. Hansen is a smart man, the type who does not put his finger on a piece until he is certain where he is going to move it. And at a certain point all this conversation, fascinating as it was, began to sound like a clever exercise in managing the pressure mounting on his team, a sleight of hand designed to shift the headline attention elsewhere.
“Whatever happens on Saturday is going to be great for us,” Hansen said at one point. “If we win it’ll be good, because we’ll have come through a moment. If we lose, we’ll have to look at ourselves again and say: ‘Righto, what can we take and learn from that?’ Yes, it will go down in history we lost the series, or that we won the series, but it’s really irrelevant in the long term of a player’s career. Because he’ll have to move on to the Rugby Championship. And there will be an expectation that we will play well in the Rugby Championship. Whilst in that moment it will hurt, we’ll let it go pretty quickly.” It is a fine sentiment but surely not one he will be sharing with his players. You do not get to be the best team in the world by losing the matches that matter.
Hansen pressed the point. “It’s like 2015, when we won the World Cup,” he said. “But then, OK, so what? You’ve got to win next year too, and you have to move on. So you get a wee moment to either sulk or celebrate but you’ve got to keep moving, because if you don’t keep moving someone is going to run you over. And there’s an expectation in this country that you keep moving, an expectation that we’re good at what we do. We understand that, so it doesn’t become a burden, it actually becomes a challenge.”
Hansen, who joined the All Blacks’ staff in 2004, has been around long enough to remember when the reverse was true, and the weight of expectation was a load the team struggled to bear.
This side, Hansen says, are still making that transition from 2015. It has been “harder than people realise”, he says. “You lose people like Keven Mealamu, Richie McCaw, Conrad Smith, Ma’a Nonu, Tony Woodcock. All of them, bar Conrad, have played over 100 games. And that’s a lot of experience.
“We’re very fortunate. We have a lot of people who play the game pretty well. But you don’t just snap your fingers and replace their experience. It takes time.” Time, he says, for the next group to have “their setbacks and their successes, their moments where you hang in, and the moments when you fail to hang in. Because you learn so much from that. That’s where we grow up the best, when we have adversity in our life.”
Add to that, Hansen says, “we’ve had ... adversity, with Ben Smith not playing, Sonny [Bill Williams] suspended, Ryan Crotty out, and they’re three people who play a big part in that experience, because they’ve all been there”.
“You’ve groomed them to take these other people’s places. And then bang! But what’s the positive out of that? You’ve got another group of people who have been exposed to something that maybe they’re not totally ready for, but they’re good enough to deal with it if we do things right.” He says the team is “in its infancy” but they are not as callow as all that. Kieran Read is about to play his 100th Test, Owen Franks has 93 caps, Whitelock 87, Kaino, 80, Israel Dagg 64, Brodie Retallick, 63, Beauden Barrett, 51.
Listen to Hansen long enough, and he almost manages to persuade you the All Blacks are the underdogs. “It’s 1-1. The whole world of rugby is pretty excited about that. They’re thinking: ‘Right, here we go, we’re going to knock the All Blacks off their perch.’ If that does happen, there’ll be a hell of a lot of people excited about that because they’ve got sick of us winning. That’s the reality, whether we like it or not. We don’t want that to happen, because we like winning.”
Then, with his next breath, Hansen says: “The coach’s job is not just about winning, it’s about maximising the talent and then making sure in the rest of his life that person has the tools to be able to be a decent person. If you can do that, that’s success. Doesn’t matter what else you do. Winning things, great, that’s a bonus. But the reason I coach is because I want to see your smile on your face when you can do something you couldn’t do before.” After all, he says, “it’s an important game, but it’s just a game, and don’t lose sight of that”. It hurts, he says, “to lose a game of footie”. Maybe more than he lets on.
