Rugby: When you accept mediocrity, this is what happens

Analysis – There is a certain type of New Zealander on social media. Chances are they are commenting on this very story right now, probably making spelling errors and thinking that they represent a modern, common sense attitude towards the All Blacks and rugby in general. Chances are they haven’t and won’t actually read this either.

Some of the All Blacks after last night’s 32-22 defeat in Wellington meaning they lost a three-test series at home against Ireland 2-1.
Photo: Photosport

These are the people who are here to tell us that it’s just a game. That the All Blacks are bound to lose a few games. That the sun will come up tomorrow. And so on and so on.

They might be from Auckland, or Christchurch, or Whangamōmona. They might be old, young or somewhere in between. There is only one certainty about these people: they have got their wish.

Congratulations to all of them, because this All Black side represents them now, and their proud and stupid acceptance of mediocrity. It’s this attitude that got this team, this side that has built its entire being on winning and excellence, to where it is now: losing four of their last five tests and now a solid case for the worst All Black side ever.

What are they up against? A 1949 team that left some of the country’s best players at home for a tour to South Africa because the NZRFU decided to voluntarily practice the same apartheid system their hosts were rolling out. Even still, 0-4 test series loss was blighted by dodgy refereeing and three of those losses were very close.

The other black year? 1998, a case study in how not to do succession planning. Five test losses in a row, but again the All Blacks were only truly well beaten in one of them and all were against very, very good Springbok and Wallaby sides.

This… this is something else. Crushed in Dublin and Paris, then again in Dunedin and Wellington.

Ireland have gone from being a fun little sideshow to a team that now possesses a majority of players that have beaten the All Blacks more times than they’ve lost to them. A child born last year in New Zealand has had to endure more All Black losses to Ireland in their lifetime than a 100-year-old who passed away in 2019.

All Blacks coach Ian Foster and captain Sam Cane.
Photo: PHOTOSPORT

And it’s the way the All Blacks lost. Nothing seemed to be learned from Dublin, no forward thinking about how to counter their speedy work around the ruck and link play between the forwards. How to nullify 37-year-old Johnny Sexton. How on earth Jamison Gibson-Park was allowed to be a better halfback than Aaron Smith. How a team on a five match tour would obviously get better and better like the Lions did in 2017.

That is not how the All Blacks have ever operated. New Zealand was the innovator, the ones that are one step ahead.

Losses have happened, for sure, but have almost always been followed by extreme backlashes to restore what had been taken away the weekend before. This run of fixtures has seen them bleed dry, run out of ideas and focus, relying on individual brilliance to simply bring some respectability to the scoreboard.

Irish flanker Peter O’Mahoney even felt bold enough during the second test to call Sam Cane a ‘shit Richie McCaw’, a comment that should have seen him served with some sort of retaliation. Instead, it is now something that probably just rattled around in the All Blacks’ heads as they made visit upon visit behind their posts.

When you accept mediocrity, there’s never a Plan B. There’s only the erosion of the one thing that the All Blacks have that makes them so universally feared and respected. They have to win, they have to do it all the time, otherwise they’re not the All Blacks anymore. They’re just another team.

People are to blame for this. The coaching staff, absolutely. Anyone who thinks otherwise has no idea how professional sport works. The players, although really the squad and selections haven’t been a million miles away from what most would have picked anyway.

But mostly, this falls on the organisation. This is an institutional failing by NZ Rugby, who have let everything under the All Blacks wither and die, then presented the team as some sort of infallible, unimpeachable group that can never be questioned.

They have accepted mediocrity, they are no better than the fools commenting on Facebook about how ‘we tried our best’. All they have done in the last period has been wrong, wrong, wrong – from what happens on the field to the amateur way the All Blacks are promoted as something they’re not.

Because they’re still trying to tell us that the All Blacks are the greatest rugby team in the world. That simply isn’t true, and until they start looking back and reconnecting with the ruthless, win-at-all-costs attitude that made them that in the first place, the sun isn’t coming up at all.