by Richie McCaw
The next 20, however, don’t quite go to plan.
Referee Wayne Barnes calls a marginal forward pass on Dan when he wraps around Carl Hayman. Then we wheel the French scrum, but Barnes won’t give us the put-in we’ve earned. Then we fluff a bomb—Byron tracks back and gets in Leon’s way. The crowd noise must have drowned Leon’s call.
From the scrum, Harinordoquy breaks right and Jerry gets trapped in their side of the ruck. Seems like a harsh call from Barnes, but he’s at least being consistent, nailing Pelous for the same thing, and me too, early in the game. Lionel Beauxis misses the shot, and Dan tries a fiddly drop-out that almost gets us into trouble, but at 30 minutes gone, 10 to go, our game is still tracking well.
But right on 30, Jerry’s carrying the ball up when Dusautoir hits him so hard with his shoulder and head that it charlies Jerry’s quad and cripples him for the rest of the game. As some compensation, we get a penalty from Barnes for offside at the ensuing ruck, and Dan nails it: 13–nil.
Luke doesn’t need me to help him score.
The last 10 minutes are wobbly. Anton makes a wild tip from the restart, Byron scrambles, and Joe Rokocoko clears. Then Traille kicks it dead and I sense French heads dropping. Shortly after, Dan attacks wide on the French 22, and we might have them if we’re able to recycle. But Dusautoir wins the turnover—another big play from him—and France runs at us for the first time. Mils stops Marty in his tracks, but Barnes gets a heads-up from assistant referee Jonathan Kaplan who reckons his tackle was high. Barnes also thinks Rodney So’oialo was late on the other side.
There’s nothing much in either, but Barnes insists I give the team a general warning. That’s frustrating, but I figure that if Barnes and Kaplan are going to be officious, that’s okay, as long as what goes around comes around.
The French penalty gives them an attacking lineout which Ali takes away from them. By the time Byron hooks it out, though, we’re back to square one. This time, the French secure the ball, set up a big drive in the middle, then come roaring back on the switch. Our tight forwards defend well on the blind, but Keith Robinson gets trapped in the ruck and is pinged by Barnes. Fair enough.
Jean-Baptiste Elissalde misses the kick from close in and just to the right of the sticks, and I think, That’s it. France has had a good period on attack, but we’ve shipped no points and halftime is only three minutes away. French heads should be dropping: they’ve got nothing for their endeavour.
Instead, we’re the ones who have a brain-fade. Maybe it’s these last three minutes that put the wrong pictures in Byron’s head, and make him say what he says at halftime.
Dan drops out long, Traille kicks high, and it’s back to aimless aerial ping-pong until we get messy and disorganised behind a defensive ruck. Dusautoir—who else?—charges down Byron’s kick, Harinordoquy chases and sets up a great attacking ruck. France have numbers right, set up another ruck, then swing back left, only to blow an overlap with a shocker of a pass to left winger, Cedric Heymans. We manage to turn the ball over, but again we’re disorganised. Byron throws a long pass to Leon, but he has no space and has to take it into contact.
We only just manage to recycle in front of our own posts, but we’re holding on, with halftime looming, when Dan decides on a delicate wipers kick 10 metres out from our own line. We’ve been encouraged by the coaches to stay positive and not get too conservative under RWC pressure, but that’s just about a step too far. Siti’s standing wide, manages to take the ball under pressure, still five metres short of our own 22. I get over him, bridge long enough for Mils at halfback to clear it to Jerry, an unlikely first-five, who has clearly had a gutsful of this carry-on and boots it into touch.
I look at the clock: 39.11. Less than a minute to go. Safe. I know the coaches will be out of their chairs and heading down to the dressing room. We’ve had 10 minutes of bad options, no options, and a drop in energy and concentration.
We need to get to that wrong dressing room and regroup.
Last play. Jerome Thion drives from the lineout on halfway, and Ali gets penalised on the wrong side of the maul when Barnes tells him to get out and he can’t. Thion has torn Ali’s headgear off trying to hold him in there, and throws it on the ground in triumph. Beauxis kicks from over 40 metres out. The ball crosses the bar at exactly 40 minutes and 30 seconds.
We’ve given the French a sniff.
Under the Welsh logo, Ted—coach Graham Henry—and assistants Shag and Smithy—Steve Hansen and Wayne Smith—talk about composure, and about the positives. We’re 13–3 up. Our scrum is dominant, our restarts are pretty secure, and our lineout is as good as it’s been in my six years with the All Blacks. So much so that we’re encouraged to kick it out and attack the French lineout instead of kicking to keep it in play.
The only other change we make is to narrow the attack a little. We want to commit them to the tackle closer to the set-piece, try to get our forwards hitting a narrower target, get us over the gain-line and create more space out wide for our quick guys.
Otherwise, Ted wants us to play our game, impose ourselves on the game, take that eight minutes between 10 and 18 where we scored one try and could have had two others, and extend that template across the second half. We’re playing the game at France’s tempo, he says. We’ve got to change that, lift it to a pace and intensity that they can’t live with, that no one else in world rugby has the skill-set or fitness to live with. Lift the game to an altitude where they can’t breathe.
That’s our game. That’s what we resolve to do. Impose our style. Keep the ball, hurt them, don’t let them breathe, be relentless, take their resolve away from them, find out whether they really want to be out there with us for every second of these last 40 minutes, being stretched, compressed, shunted, battered, pummelled, having their lungs seared, their bodies bruised, their confidence overrun with rats of doubt in the face of our indomitable desire to beat them. Find out whether they just want to compete with us, or whether they really believe they can beat us.
There’s a huge difference, and the last 20 minutes always reveals the truth. If somewhere deep in their souls they have a sliver of doubt about what they’re doing, we will find it in that last 20 and enlarge it into a black hole that will swallow them.
In the collision combat that is international rugby, we know this works for us. It has given us a whitewash over the Lions in 2005, three successive Tri Nations championships, a mortgage on the Bledisloe Cup and the number-one ranking in the world. It’s why we’re favourites for this RWC. But history shows it doesn’t always work. Other All Black teams have gone into the Cup as favourites, with much the same game plan, and lost.
France seems to be the All Blacks’ greatest fear, our bête noir. Not always. Not even often. Just when it counts, like ’99. I’d watched that game on television. One moment in particular stays with me. France have conjured a try out of nothing and taken the lead for the first time in the game. The All Blacks are standing under their posts waiting for the conversion. They’ve stopped talking. No one is saying a word. At one point the camera zooms in on Jeff Wilson, the All Black winger. I can’t put my finger on exactly what that expression is on Goldie’s face, but he looks frozen, bewildered at the turn of events. They all do.
That isn’t something I want to think about. Bad pictures don’t help the confidence. Bugger 1999. We have our plan. We have to get out there and climb into them.
But those pictures are stronger in some of us than I’d imagined, lying in wait under the surface. In the lull as we wait for the call to start the second half, Byron shouts, ‘Come on guys, this is starting to feel like ’99!’
What the hell does he mean by that?
If I’d known what he was going to say, I’d have told him to shut up, but who knew what Byron was going to say, ever? He’s a quick, brave, cheeky, feisty little guy, ideal halfback personality, but a man who never leaves a thought unsaid. No doubt he’s trying to gee us up.
The thought crosses my mind, as it must do
for others in the team: What has Byron seen that reminds him of ’99, f’godsakes?
No point in asking, no time. Trainer Graham Lowe is at the door, time to go. Forty minutes to kill or be killed.
As if to make amends, Byron scuttles away on the blind off a pass from Rodney after Carl gets his right shoulder up in the scrum. Byron flicks it to Luke, but Joe’s too flat and the pass from Luke goes out. Ali takes another lineout against the throw, and we crunch it up. We keep possession for over three minutes, but the French defence is consistent and brutal and we’re going nowhere. When we try to recycle under pressure on halfway, a stray French boot flays through the back of our ruck and hoofs the ball on the fly.
Their left winger, Heymans, wins the race for the ball, but Rodney makes a desperation tackle five metres from the line and somehow we get the turnover. Mils plays halfback, kicks it upfield, but not out. Harinordoquy takes it on the 10-metre mark, brings it up towards the 22 and spreads it wide. Vincent Clerc tries a grubber and it bounces off Leon into touch, 10 metres out from our line.
This isn’t the plan.
From the attacking lineout, we’re under the hammer. Thion sets up a rolling maul which we push sideways towards the posts. The inevitable happens as it crabs across: one of our players gets caught in Wayne Barnes’ sacred ground on their side of the maul. Barnes shows no mercy, calls the penalty against Rodney and plays advantage. Elissalde flicks it to Beauxis who nudges a little kick behind our goal-line.
As Leon and Byron smash heads diving in to cover it, Luke holds his ground on the turn, his opposite Jauzion runs into him and does a big sideways dive, all flailing arms and French expletives: 9.9 for execution, at least in Barnes’ opinion, and he’s the only judge.
You could say that Jauzion saw Beauxis’ kick was covered and did what he had to do. Cynical but clinical. You could say that Luke was too naive: that he shouldn’t have taken the risk of holding his line and presenting his shoulder to Jauzion. Whatever, it’s Luke who’s penalised for a cynical foul and gets 10 minutes in the bin.
We’ve had virtually all the pill in the five minutes since halftime and made almost all the play, but have posted no points and now we’ve shipped a penalty and a yellow card.
Standing under the posts as Beauxis formalises the penalty for 13 to 6, I’m trying to collect myself and keep the bad pictures at bay. It’s not the pictures from ’99 that I’m getting but more graphic and recent ones from June of this year, when we played Australia at Melbourne. We’d been lethargic after halftime, couldn’t get our physical edge, but still had the game won until Carl Hayman was sin-binned. It turned the game. In that 10 minutes, Australia scored the winning try.
For most of the next 10 minutes, we play some of our best rugby of the game, keeping the ball close, long sequences of pick-and-gos, hurling ourselves at the desperate French, who need to get their hands on the ball to exploit their numerical superiority. They can’t. Metre by desperate metre, we punch the ball up, using our bodies as fists, looking for an opening. It’s the trench warfare of modern rugby, not pretty, but for us it has a brutal logic: it’s low risk and hard to stop, legally.
At one stage, we camp 10 metres out from the French line. We go through 13 phases. Seventeen phases. Anton finally hits through a hole, goes five metres. We pile in behind him and I think we’re going to crack them, even with 14 men. On the twentieth phase, just two metres out, I’m screaming at Barnes about the French standing offside, when Woody—Tony Woodcock—throws a wild pass to Rodney on the short blind. Rodney has no chance of holding it and knocks on.
Wayne Barnes shows no mercy. Luke gets sin-binned.
Scrum France, but we’ve used up five minutes of the 10. Chris Jack comes on to replace Keith Robinson, new legs, a planned change.
Barnes finds his whistle, penalises us for an early engagement. Beauxis peels off a good touch, five metres on their side of halfway. Ali puts huge pressure on Harinordoquy at the lineout, forces him to knock on.
Caveman Chabal comes on for Pelous and Dimitri Szarzewski for Raphael Ibanez, but the two replacements don’t help their scrum, which collapses under big pressure from Carl, Anton and Tony. No penalty for us, so Rodney takes it off the back into contact, and we’re back into pick-and-gos, keeping it close, using up the clock. Seven phases later, Dan tries a drop-kick from our 10-metre mark. I guess it makes sense in the general scheme of things—if he gets it, it’s a bonus; if he misses, the restart eats up time. It’s wide. We turn, get ready for the restart, drop our guard.
The French finally have the ball: they realise their 10 minutes of having an extra man is almost up, they’ve got to do something. We’re not as vigilant as we should be and when they take a quick 22 drop-out, they retrieve it and pile into a ruck on our 10-metre mark, go left, then come back right and make big progress, breaking down to our line. We stop them two metres out, then Elissalde finds Clerc cutting in from his right wing, but Jacko—Chris Jack—and I hit him. They recycle, keep going left, and are stopped on the far side by Dan and Jerry. I have time to think—What’s Dan doing out there?
When the French come back right, Jacko and I drop Szarzewski, but when they go right again, it’s a numbers game that simply can’t add up for us. They have seven out there against four. It’s Dusautoir—of course—who surges through Leon’s tackle to score, but it could just as easily have been any of the three outside him.
The French go off. Dusautoir is mobbed by his team-mates. He looks as unruffled and unreadable as ever. He’s made all the big plays to get them back in the game, and I still can’t see a bead of sweat on his face.
It’s 54 minutes 30 seconds. Just 30 seconds before Luke comes back on. We’ve held them out for nine minutes 30 seconds.
Beauxis pulls the conversion, but it hits the far post and bounces back in. Bounce of the ball; we need it. That locks the game up at 13 all—unlucky for some. But that’s not what I’m thinking. The worst has happened and we’re still all square.
Twenty-five minutes to go. That leaves an awful lot of game still out there to be played. The last quarter is where we really ask the tough questions.
When we get back to halfway, Dan’s on one leg, and I realise why he was hanging out there on the sideline, with crippled Jerry. He was waiting to go off. We weren’t one man down for that last French surge, we were two, or three, counting Jerry, which helps explains the numbers the French had.
Dan limps off, replaced by Nick Evans. It’s musical chairs. Byron’s done his utmost to stop the bad pictures developing, but now he’s gone too, for Brendon Leonard. Anton’s gone for Andrew Hore, and Luke comes back on.
We regroup, back to a full complement, but Leon tries to push a pass in midfield, knock on, French scrum. In the back of my mind, I’m remembering how well we did with a really narrow focus, even one man down. We put in a huge shunt, the French scrum collapses and Barnes finally gives us something: the put-in, not a penalty.
Shortly after, I’m stunned by a trailing boot when I’m on the ground after a pick-and-go. It might have been friendly fire. For a second or two, I’m not getting any pictures, just a blank screen, but I go through the motions as we put together more pick-and-gos, make some progress, then get stalled by the French.
Twenty to go. Jacko makes real inroads, until the Caveman dives off his feet over to our side, handles the ball on the ground. Barnes is right there, puts his hand on Woody’s rump, yelling, ‘Don’t stop the ball!’—presumably to the French. The strict referee of the ruck seems to have lost his zeal to penalise. I’m hoping it’s a temporary aberration.
I hand off to Rodney, who takes it up a metre, but the French are right up on us—they have to be riding the offside line—and it’s almost static just outside the French 22.
From there, we go left, Luke cuts inside, and Szarzewski plays the ball on his knees, but loses it and we go left again. Mils ducks under two backs, but the Caveman goes in and wins—legitimately this time—a turnover, but then flops over to our side of the ruck
. Barnes whistles for a scrum, which I think is at least some consolation, until he gives the put-in to France.
The changes of personnel to the French and All Black packs haven’t changed the scrums: we’re dominant and put Harinordoquy under huge pressure at the back. As the French pack go backwards, he tries to pick it out of the tangle of sliding boots and is nailed by Jerry. Barnes blows it up, sticks his arm up and I’m thinking it’s our penalty until I see he’s pointing at Jerry for detaching early.
Back to a defensive lineout on our 10-metre mark. Ali steals it again. Nick Evans to Luke on the cut, I take it off Luke and get a couple of metres. We go short blind where quick passes from Jerry and Rodney put Siti away. They only just scrag him, but Jerry takes it on, then Horey—Andrew Hore—and we’re really making inroads, getting in behind them, forcing them to scramble, as Siti and Nick and Rodney come back left down the blind. Rodney sets it up 20 metres out. I take it round the side, get snotted by Bonnaire, but Brendon dabs right, makes ground, and we pour on to it 15 metres out.
We set up another series of brutal pick-and-gos. Crunch the bastards. It’s like lateral pile driving with a human drill. If we can’t do it by metres, we’ll do it by centimetres, doesn’t matter. I keep telling myself that if we’re hurting, the French must be in agony. Ali makes two metres, Horey makes three. Jacko only makes a pace, but by then we’re a metre from their line. Brendon flicks it blind to Rodney, who puts his head down and bulldozes through Thion to the line. Ali and Woody are on top of him: we know he’s made it, but Barnes is unsighted and asks for a replay.
There’s a long wait. Must be close . . . But it’s given. Try.
The last 10 minutes is always ours. We’ve pulled so many games out of the fire over the past couple of seasons. Though not at Melbourne back in June. Get that picture out of your head. Stay in the present.
