by Richie McCaw
In Cardiff, even after we’d lost, I still felt we were the best team there. That’s what made the loss so frustrating. We didn’t play to our potential.
This time, for the first time, I have a thought in my head that I can’t remember ever having before about any All Black team I’ve been in.
Maybe we’re not as good as we thought we were.
Maybe, no matter what we do, we’re not actually good enough.
If a week is a long time in politics, it’s an eternity in sport, particularly after a demoralising loss. We fly to Wellington on Sunday, and it’s a difficult day; I’m just hating it. That night I don’t sleep, and at 6 am on Monday morning go for a walk around Oriental Bay to try to clear my head, sort myself.
Need to be positive, I write in the Warwick when I get back to the hotel, and keep belief with boys in what we’re doing.
There’s a shit-load of criticism coming down on the coaches, and a lot of agonising over the course of the week leading up to the final test of the Tri Nations against Australia.
It might be sheer desperation that drives a performance which turns out to be more than enough.
We whack the Wallabies 33–6 in Wellington. The edge we felt in training last week before the Boks is delivered on the field this week, and we hammer the Aussies in the breakdown, but also in the set-pieces. Even our lineout delivers, with Tom Donnelly featuring, having been brought in for this test.
Tom’s great virtue is that he hasn’t been infected by the loss of confidence that pervades the rest of us. Tom has a ton of experience, is a pretty phlegmatic individual and has an expectation that if he does what he’s always done, he’ll win most of his ball. Simple. And that’s exactly what happens, apart from the first throw which goes over his head and has the rest of us a bit jittery, including Reado who’s now making the calls. But Tom isn’t fazed and the next throw goes to hand and we’re away. It’s gratifying to see Tom play well. He played against me for Rotorua Boys’ in the New Zealand Schools First XV final in 1998, and he’s a great example of someone who stuck around to pursue his All Black dream when he could easily have gone overseas.
If defence is about attitude, we have it in spades. It’s also my best game of the season, which helps.
But we wonder how much can be read into the win. It must be the lowest moment of Robbie’s tenure as coach, as his players ‘capitulate’—his word. There’s now a feeling that the Aussies, while always worthy test opponents, are no longer the gold standard in terms of their physicality and tactical approach. On what we’ve seen this season, there are two sides we’ve got to benchmark ourselves against. One is obviously the South Africans and the other, on the strength of what they did to us in Dunedin and Wellington, is the French.
Sheer desperation against Australia at Wellington in 2009. Wallaby tackler is Mark Chisholm.
We don’t play the South Africans again until next year, but there’s a game against France at the end of our impending end-of-year northern tour.
That’s the game we decide to target. Beating a full-strength France in Marseilles would finally put Cardiff 2007 to rest. We’d like it to be the first step towards RWC 2011.
We know we have to start looking forward, not back, but before that we have to put the Aussie win in context, look at our abysmal season and make some clear-eyed decisions about how much that test really meant, and where we’re at.
We might have retained at least one cup in the NZRU trophy cupboard, the Bledisloe, probably the one that means the most to us after Old Bill, but losing four out of nine tests is never going to be acceptable for any All Black team. Chief Executive Steve Tew voices a common concern when he says, ‘I guess we can all live with defeats if the performances have been good. I think we can all see they haven’t been up to the standard we have achieved in the past.’
That hurts, but we have to suck it up.
Ted’s quoted after Hamilton saying there are no plans to change the All Blacks’ tactics. But at a leaders’ group meeting in early October at Clearwater, just to the west of Christchurch, everything is up for grabs.
We look at ourselves first. A lot of the senior players were out for the first couple of tests, so the leaders didn’t set the direction of the team and lead it properly. Then when we rolled back in, perhaps we thought it was just going to happen. We agree that we haven’t been playing as well as we could have, and we haven’t really been tight and driven the team like we should have. It’s been the coaches doing it because they had to do it, and we just allowed it to happen rather than saying we’re driving this team too.
We feel we need to get right back to basics and drive the team, and have good conversations with the coaches, so we all really are on the same page—no doubts.
We pick apart the season from an individual point of view, then look at the team environment and issues.
The same things keep coming up for both coaches and players. That sometimes we feel we’re on a treadmill, not getting the same enjoyment as in the past, we’ve got a bit stale.
How do we get the meaning back, so it isn’t just the same old stuff?
We might have found one of the keys to that in South Africa after our losses to the Boks in Bloemfontein and Durban. They were playing with great character and heart, so when they invited us to their changing rooms for a beer after the game in Durban, we said too right. As much as we appreciated the beer, the coaches also wanted to read what they had on their walls and generally have a wee nosey. It soon became apparent to us that the South Africans were playing for transformation, they were playing to advance the cause of the Rainbow Nation, they were playing for something bigger than themselves.
For Ted and Smithy and Shag, it reinforced the need for us to meet them emotionally. The Boks were putting their bodies on the line for something other than the game, whereas we were very task focused. So we began talking about using emotional triggers for big games.
I’ve got to say that when it was first touted, I had some doubts about this. I believed that All Blacks should be able to find sufficient motivation within themselves and from the All Black legacy. People say that they’re playing for their country or their family, and yes, I do that too, but mostly I play for me. It might be really selfish, but that’s what I do. I know that if I do that, if I live up to my internal drivers—pride in myself and my performance—then I’ll also serve the team. I was also worried about what happens when you’ve used up all your emotional triggers. What happens when you roll them out the second or third time?
However, part of being in a team is recognising that not everyone works the way you do, and most of the other guys thought it would be helpful to give it a try.
The coaches have also come up with a radical change they want to run past us, and get our buy-in. They tell us they want to change roles: Ted from defence to the forwards, Shag from forwards to back attack, Smithy from attack to defence and counter-attack.
We’re a bit thrown to begin with, but can see the logic once they explain to us that while they were putting a lot of pressure on players to make personal improvements, to get up every day and try to be the best in the world, they felt that they themselves were stagnating a bit, plateauing. They felt that by changing their roles, they’d force themselves to learn again, and to work harder on getting better.
The coaches are aware that the role changes will provoke all kinds of speculation—as indeed they do, one journalist inevitably hauling out the hoary old ‘changing the deck-chairs on the Titanic’ cliché—about who had precipitated the changes, whether they had been mandated by the NZRU or whether they’re an indication of player power. What I know is that player power is a product of the changes, not a driver of them.
Ted hasn’t coached the grunts for a long time and that means me and Horey and the guys all of a sudden have to really make sure we know what’s going on, rather than just meandering along. When Ted sits us down and starts quizzing us on different aspects of the forward effort, we start talking about th
ings we’d just taken for granted. Details, assumptions. What are you trying to do there with that lineout call? Where is the space? Where’d you think it would be? His questions force us to re-evaluate, and take more responsibility for the solutions.
Once we’ve been through that process, we feel like we have more ownership, which is hugely important.
Ted and me at training. He hasn’t coached the grunts for a long time . . .
It’s the same for the backs with Steve, who himself played at centre.
Defence won the Crusaders two Super championships back in the late nineties, and it was Smithy who’d set up those systems, so he was delighted to be back in charge of that aspect of our game and throws himself into it.
The big question underlying all that is said and done at Clearwater is how do we play South Africa? How do we combat their game plan? What is broken and needs changing? What isn’t broken and is worth keeping?
Clearly, we aren’t that good at a kick-and-chase game. That’s where we’ve come to grief. The Boks were putting bombs up, chasing like hell, forcing us to cough the ball up in our own half. Once they got the ball back on the front foot, that’s when their big guys got into the game. Then we were defending, and in desperation were giving away penalties too easily under the new tackled ball rule interpretation. Pretty bloody simple to analyse, but difficult to combat.
Our strength has always been to use the ball. We want to counter-attack; we want to have a crack. That’s fine when it’s on, but what we’re not getting right is timing—when to counter. Dan and I are pretty pragmatic: we want to do whatever it takes to win, and it’s clear that throwing it around willy-nilly won’t work. But the coaches want us all to be aligned and for that alignment to be around keeping the faith in our traditional game of athletic, running rugby. Yes, we have to be able to mix up our game, play a bit of their game, but still be able to take our opportunities with the ball in hand. They urge us not to get too bound up in changing our game to meet the current interpretations: they have an inkling that despite Paddy O’Brien’s assurances that there won’t be any changes before the RWC, rugby globally has become so stodgy and kick-dominated that there’ll have to be changes.
Sometimes the opportunities to play the way we aspire to play weren’t there because our set-piece wasn’t good enough. We couldn’t rely on winning our own ball at lineout. That really stuffs up your ability to work to any kind of a game plan. We’ve got to fix that. And we want our scrum to be feared.
What’s the formula for great All Black teams? I write in the Warwick. They dominate physically up front. They have great decision makers, and they have the pace and power to kill teams if the chance comes.
For all the talk-fest, it’s Brad, never a man for over-analysis, who provides the biggest moment of clarity. He’s been marking Bakkies Botha at the front of the lineout in the Springbok tests. I’d been giving Brad a bit of shit that he was Bakkies’ twin, and they do have a certain resemblance, helped by their reliance on God, presumably different incarnations, to bless them in creating mayhem against one another. But Bakkies is an even bigger man than Brad, maybe five centimetres taller, and yet Brad relished going up against him. Absolutely loved pitching himself in there, and had done reasonably well winning his own ball in an otherwise dysfunctional lineout.
At Clearwater, Brad decides he’s had a gutsful of what he’s hearing. ‘We’re always talking about how good the bloody opposition are,’ he rasps. ‘What about us? I reckon it’s about time we started talking about how good we are. We’re big, we’re strong, we’re skilled, we’re fast. Let’s talk about that.’
So we do. It’s a moment of clarity that helps change our mindset before we embark on the end-of-year tour.
When the team gathers at the Heritage, I’m conscious of the lack of direction earlier in the season and get them together at one of the meeting rooms, lay out an All Black jersey on the floor in front of us and ask them a question:
Will you do what’s expected of you as an All Black?
Maybe some of us don’t know exactly what that is. Or why there are expectations of this team.
It’s simple. Over time, the All Blacks have been the best, the winningest team in rugby, setting the standard for the world. There’ve been some great men who spilt blood for this jersey, made sacrifices, dating back to amateur days when pride was all they were playing for. We can look at that legacy in two ways: as a burden that inhibits us, or as something we can embrace.
The great thing is that this group has an opportunity to add to this proud history, to be a part of it. I’d be bloody disappointed if our own expectations of ourselves and each other were anything less than that.
How do we ensure we do that? What does each of us need to do each week to ensure this happens?
I talked last year about toughness and the state you need to be in when you turn up to play. Bone-deep preparation, not skin deep. You can turn up and do your thing, do what you have to do, put in another day at the office. Or you can put your body on the line, empty the tank. Or you can go one step further, spill some blood, have one of those big, big days, and leave a piece of yourself out there.
For this team to perform, we need the whole team to empty the tank each and every time they pull on the black jersey. Four or five of us have to go that step further. It won’t be the same guys every week.
That’s where we have to be.
That’s not where we’ve been these last three games.
You might think that’s an unreasonable expectation, but there are plenty who’d be willing to give that. We’re the lucky ones who have been chosen to wear the jersey.
When you look at that black jersey with the silver fern, yes it’s unique, but it’s just a piece of cloth sitting there. It only becomes something special when it’s filled by men who have the right to wear it, men who are prepared to do things that others aren’t prepared to do.
This jersey will show up the frauds, the imposters. It’ll squeeze those who look for short cuts. You won’t last in this jersey if you’re not prepared to do the things you need to do to fill it.
What we’ve done well in the last three games is learn our roles, get structures right, done our homework. But that’s only 20 per cent of it.
It’s the other 80 per cent that we need to deliver. The toughness, ruthlessness, power, pace. The want. That’s got to come from within, that inner desire to spill some blood if that’s what it takes.
That’s how the All Blacks have been successful, that’s how trust in each other is earned. You’ve gotta know that when you go to the well, your mate beside you will do the same. Every time you pull that jersey on. That’s what filling the jersey is about.
It’s not about wearing this jersey, it’s about filling it.
Love every minute of it.
Tokyo is this year’s joint All Blacks/Wallabies fund-raiser venue for the NZRU and the ARU.
Tokyo, Hong Kong, Milan, Paris . . . to some extent, exotic and unique venues are wasted on us: we move from the inside of a hotel which is much the same as international hotels everywhere, to a training venue which is much the same as training pitches everywhere, and back to the hotel, staring out through the windows of the bus at a world which we can’t get out and lose ourselves in. We have some downtime and go for walks in the vicinity of the hotel if it’s safe, and sometimes we’re taken out by locals to see the sights, but you never really forget the countdown to the job you’re there to do, when you take the bus to a stadium of light, where you’ve got to deliver.
There are a lot of places I’d like to go back to when I don’t have to be preoccupied about team dynamics and delivering a performance.
Which we do in Tokyo. Fired by Brad’s words, we challenge in the air, attack the Aussie lineout, and reduce it to indecision and errors. Apart from a shaky 10 minutes before halftime, when Siti gets sin-binned and the Aussies score their first try against us in 260 minutes, we’re better than solid. 32–19 is a bit of a walloping and ma
kes it seven in a row over Australia. So far so good, but that doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know after Wellington six weeks ago.
The following three weekends in Europe are a better indication of where we’re at: frustrated.
Courtesy of Smithy, we’ve put out a stifling defence in each of the tests against Wales, Italy and England—extending our European clean sheet from way back in 2006—but we’ve been stifled in turn.
Wales are tough, but we manage to keep our noses in front from go to whoa, and there are good signs in critical combinations, like Ma’a’s power and Conrad’s nous in the centres. They’re now being talked about as the best in the world. Kieran starts at No. 8 over Rodney, and with Jerome at No. 6 and Adam Thomson doing well in Tokyo, the loosies are starting to gel as we play together more. Which means the end is in sight for Rodney, who hasn’t been able to get the fire back.
There’s a real sadness over the demise of Rodders. He’s had a lot of injuries and is fighting a neck problem that won’t go away, and he’s fighting the rise of Kieran. Rodney’s been one of our best for so many years, always combative, super-fit, tough. I’ve become used to him being there and doing what he’s always done. It’s been a surprise that, like Jerry, he’s hit the wall so fast. It’s not through lack of willpower, but sometimes the conscious mind seems unable to force the unconscious mind to go to the painful places any more. I hope that if that time comes for me, I’m the first to see it.
Italy turns out to be another painful place for Rodney, when he captains the side at San Siro, the great stadium in Milan which serves as base for AC Milan and Inter Milan. The game is supposed to be a showpiece for rugby in front of 80,000 Italian fans, but it turns into the worst possible advertisement for the game. Ref Stu Dickinson allows the Italian tighthead Martin Castrogiovanni to bore in on Crocky and for minutes on end the game stalls as scrum after scrum collapses and has to be reset on a pocket handkerchief of turf near the All Black line. A complete waste of time and opportunity, and Paddy O’Brien does the right thing by publicly lambasting Dickinson.
