Wanted: All Blacks' plan B after imperious Ireland's famous win

It wasn't just that Ireland won, it was that they won in a way that left the All Blacks scrambling to resemble themselves.

It wasn't just that Ireland won, it was that they won with an almost patrician imperiousness - the swaggering dispatch that has so often been the modus operandi of the All Blacks themselves.

And, yes, it wasn't just that Ireland won, it was that they so thoroughly deserved to win - and (gulp) the All Blacks so thoroughly deserved to lose.

Not many years ago, you'd have expected that to happen - but in reverse. As recently as 2019, at the Rugby World Cup (RWC) in Japan, the All Blacks beat Ireland 46-14. Seven tries to two (seven!), in a World Cup quarter-final! It was Ireland's worst-ever defeat at a World Cup. And if you'd phoned a bookie straight after the game and put €100 on Ireland to beat the All Blacks in New Zealand within three years, you'd have spent Sunday filling a spa-pool with champagne.

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Of course, we all know what happened after that 2019 victory over Ireland. The All Blacks went into their semi-final against England and got, um, spanked. Not only did they lose, they were the scrambling, unrecognisable, victims of an almost patrician imperiousness, etc.

This is sounding familiar, isn't it? And not only because I keep saying imperious.

Ireland, twice, England, France - in the past three years all of them have beaten New Zealand in a fashion that has left the All Blacks struggling to resemble themselves.

What's going on here? (Because going on it most certainly is.)

Firstly, credit where credit's due.

As New Zealand rugby lovers plunge into that cauterising mix of gallows humour, sack-the-coach rage and stunned-mullet bewilderment that we hold so dear after a thumping defeat, it's essential to acknowledge how brilliantly our opponents played.

Looking back, that RWC semi-final against England is often cited as the moment when the All Blacks and their aura were ejected from Planet Invincibility.

When England so emphatically dismantled the All Blacks, the narrative goes, England coach Eddie Jones provided the rugby world with a gameplan written in kryptonite.

In short, England showed how the All Blacks could be beaten. Really beaten. Beaten into an identity crisis. Beaten into "WTF?!" And not by kicking seven penalties, in a game in which no English player further out than number 10 could describe what the ball was like to touch, but, yes, imperiously, etc… (Sorry.)

The language of the post-match reviews is golden with moment.

In The Times, Stephen Jones - who likes his All Blacks toasted - wrote: "This was one of England's greatest sporting days - and I am not just talking rugby here. The planning, execution, defending and attacking of this breath-taking England team made it arguably their greatest day… New Zealand lose occasionally, but they are never crushed… Forget the scoreboard. They scored one lucky try and for the rest of the evening they looked like little boys being bullied outside the sweet shop."

Notwithstanding the obvious error that it would have been a bakery, not a sweet shop, and we would have been buying pies, Stephen Jones was right. We were "bullied". And we were "crushed".

As we were in Dunedin on Saturday night.

To put this in context, and to save me from using "imperiously" again, it's worth visiting the website of the All Blacks Experience, an immersive tourist attraction located in downtown Auckland.

In the section 'Who are the All Blacks?', we're told: "Above all else, the All Blacks have developed a reputation for winning.

"In 591 Test matches, they have a 77.33% winning record. They are one of only two teams to win three World Cups (the other being South Africa). Since world rankings were introduced in 2003, the All Blacks have held the #1 spot 80% of the time. They have won 10 of 16 Tri-Nations tournaments; six of seven Rugby Championships; and retained the Bledisloe Cup for 17 years."

That's incredible. And true. And, very often, it's felt like a significant chunk of the rest of the rugby world, particularly in the northern hemisphere, not only believed it, they played with the expectation they'd experience it, first-hand.

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Less so of late.

Eddie Jones and England in Japan, in 2019. Fabien Galthie and France in Paris, last November. Andy Farrell and Ireland, last November, and on Saturday night. Joe Schmidt, Farrell and Ireland in Dublin, in 2018.

They've cracked the code - not only beating the All Blacks, but making the All Blacks look unlike themselves. Leaving them lost for an effective response. The crushing and bullying that Stephen Jones was talking about. (Outside the imaginary sweet shop.)

Eagle-eyed readers, rugby devotees, and the Irish, will justly point out that 2018 Irish victory in Dublin came before England's victory in Japan. So if it's a coaching template we're after, it was as much from Ireland's Joe Schmidt and Andy Farrell as it was from Eddie Jones.

That's very true. And that 2018 game in Dublin had uncanny similarities to the game in Japan the following year. (Including the highly unusual fact that the All Blacks didn't make it into double figures in either of them.)

Writing in The Guardian, Robert Kitson said: "Brutal does not even begin to describe the contest but, for Ireland, the outcome was as beautiful as any in their rugby history…. the world champions were hassled and harried to a virtual standstill by a home team as composed and clinical as they were physical and powerful", which sounds exactly like what happened outside the sweet shop, only not written by Stephen Jones.

In some respects, this is a form of flattery. For Stephen Jones and Robert Kitson to both describe victories over the All Blacks in terms that place those performances at the very pinnacle of English and Irish rugby history, is an acknowledgement of how hard the All Blacks have been to beat, and how special it is when it happens.

But let's not get carried away here, John.

Stephen Jones and Kitson were right. England and Ireland did reduce the All Blacks to something less than themselves. They did bully. They did crush. They did hassle and harry.

How? You're almost certainly asking the wrong person. I played rugby passionately, but at a level that makes me ill-qualified to comment on the best in the game. Indeed, my entire club rugby career was with a team called the Mixed Veges, playing J5 in Wellington, with a win-loss record that wasn't much better than 50 percent.

But like so many New Zealanders, I watch rugby with a kind of love. My Dad took me to Athletic Park to shout for Wellington, I take my son all over the place to shout for our beloved 'Canes. Some of the happiest Saturdays of my life have been spent watching James and his teammates, from the age of four, playing for Ponsonby and then for St Peter's. These are DNA connections. They make you cherish the game. And, mistakenly, they make you feel you're able to expertly hold forth on it.

So, ahem, what I've noticed, cough, is that when our opponents turn up, really turn up, imperi… …sorry (you know what I mean) we sometimes don't appear to have a Plan B ready. "Shit," we seem to be saying. "This wasn't meant to happen."

That's when the bombs go up. Garryowen, they're called in the Northern Hemisphere. High kicks into hopefulness. Sometimes they work. But not often enough to make them a reliable fallback position. And of late, when the All Blacks have put up bombs it's sometimes felt like a form of despair at their lack of running penetration. There was a bomb against England in 2019 that was so absent of due purpose it felt like a surrender note. We saw one on Saturday that wasn't much better. As a Plan B, it's got limited efficacy.

The problem is that Plan A was so successful. The speed, precision, speed game. Built first on an immensely skilled and mobile forward pack, who got to the breakdown super-fast, and recycled ball super-quickly, and then built on our halfbacks and their ability to clear the ball so rapidly it was with any number of gorgeously attacking backs before the defence could marshal. Woosh. Like big boy tiggy. "See ya, see ya later," as Suzy used to sing.

But speed isn't copyrighted. Precision isn't copyrighted. And defence, with the best coaches, and with players with big, brave hearts, can adapt.

And given the All Blacks had a Plan A that rugby players on Saturn knew was coming, Joe Schmidt, Eddie Jones and Andy Farrell concocted ways of coaching against it.

This is wonderful, by the way. What any sport wants, surely, is a team that sets the bar higher, and other teams that aspire to go over it, and who make that aspiration reality.

Magnificent.

But it leaves the All Blacks with the quandary of, what next?

There's a wonderful story of the All Blacks receiving a fax at the 1995 World Cup in South Africa that read: "Remember rugby is a team game, so all 14 of you pass the ball to Jonah."

Jonah. Bless him.

And while there will be few players, ever, who match him for superstar quality, and for his capacity to turn the impossible into flesh, the All Blacks have had so many brilliant attacking players in recent years that the strategy of speed, speed, speed, the creation of team as machine, designed to get the ball as quickly, as precisely, and as commandingly as possible, to any one of the super freaks who have made try-scoring look inevitable, was a game-winner. A World Cup-winner. It created an incumbency at number one.

Until their opponents caught up. So very admirably. And bullied and hassled and harried back. And lo and behold, there we have found ourselves, outside the sweet shop.

"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated," Mark Twain is (mis)quoted as saying. And everywhere you look now, someone is ministering the last rites over the reportedly expiring frame of the All Blacks' aura.

And the fact is the team of whom the All Blacks Experience so proudly (and truly) tells us "have held the #1 spot 80% of the time", is now number four.

The fact is Ireland and the All Blacks have played 35 times and Ireland have won only four of those games, but all those victories have come since 2016. The fact is that Ireland have only ever beaten the All Blacks, in New Zealand, once. And that was on Saturday.

Woosh. That's the sound of the All Blacks being caught and, sorry friends, possibly even overtaken.

But there is precedent for this, and for a recovery from it. Remember 2007, and that awful quarter-final loss to France in Cardiff? Remember all the New Zealand fans who'd bought tickets to the semi-final and final we didn't make?

I remember. I was going to the cup for TV3, but money was so tight that some wise and cautious owl booked my plane ticket for a few hours after that quarter-final, just in case we lost. Lost? There's no way we gonna lose, I said, as I packed my bag and researched Parisian restaurants.

Merde!

And remember what came next? The anger. The strident (to put it politely) insistence that Robbie Deans should replace Graeme Henry as coach?

"Make no mistake," Paul Lewis wrote in the Herald, "the 2007 Rugby World Cup campaign is as big a disaster as ever seen in New Zealand rugby." He wasn't alone in thinking that. We all felt it. "The NZRU need to replace the coaching staff pronto", he continued, "and begin again the business of building anew."

Four years later, with the same coach, the All Blacks won the World Cup.

Sometimes we're not as good as we think we are. Sometimes we are. Greatness lies in acknowledging the former and doing what's needed to get to the latter.

Hopeful bombs won't do that. Business as usual won't do that. Not even individual brilliance will do that, consistently. (Although, it would be helpful if Ardie was able to stay on the field.)

Honesty will do that. Humility, too. We're losing to teams that deserve to beat us. That's powerful motivation for the All Blacks.

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Ireland were brilliant on Saturday. France were brilliant last November. France are hosting the Rugby World Cup next year, and the All Blacks are in their pool. It's entirely possible we'll meet Ireland in the quarter-finals. We're going to have to be really, really good to advance.

Isn't that how it ought to be? Yes, it is.

Can we do it? I've no idea. (Although I find the prospect really exciting. And we've certainly done it before.)

Here's to what comes next. Here's to the greatest team in the history of rugby rising to the challenge of our magnificent competitors.

One thing, though. If we're playing Ireland in the quarters, if we're being brutally contained by a team bullying us as well as we now all know they can, if we're looking lost and rattled, and if a hopeful bomb goes up, it will be time to stop dreaming of steak frites on red check tablecloths, to stop practising the phrase "parlez-vous Anglaise?", and to very quickly put the semi-final tickets up for sale on Trade Me.