What do you call a 25-all draw against England at Twickenham after leading 25-6 with nine minutes remaining?
“A bit yuck,” was All Blacks skipper Sam Whitelock’s immediate reaction. “We’ll certainly be more disappointed than them,” was head coach Ian Foster’s.
Many more will have found it unacceptable because the All Blacks were heading to their seventh consecutive victory of the year and a hugely significant one against their World Cup nemesis from three years ago.
They lost two on the trot at the end of last year but snatching a draw from the jaws of victory at the end of this didn’t immediately hint at huge progress under Foster, regardless of how well they played for 70 minutes this morning.
England coach Eddie Jones said his team were “pulverized” in the first half, and that appeared a good description.
The All Blacks, powerful, direct, inventive, should have been up by more than 17-3 at halftime after Dalton Papali’i’s superb intercept try and Codie Taylor’s lineout drive special.
Rieko Ioane thought he had scored only for it to be rubbed out due to a neck roll on England skipper Owen Farrell, but it all went to pieces in the second half, even despite an excellent 75m try by Ioane after a Beauden Barrett cross-kick and a Barrett dropped goal which pushed the All Blacks to a comfortable-looking 19-point lead.
Barrett’s yellow card shortly after partly explains the defensive array in which the All Blacks found themselves but overall their meltdown has blighted what was otherwise a good northern tour at the end of a difficult year.
It also brought back memories of the All Blacks throwing away an 18-point lead against Australia in Bledisloe 1 in Melbourne, a Test in which Foster’s men were ultimately saved by referee Mathie Raynal’s largesse.
The Frenchman forced himself into the limelight again at Twickenham; handing out 28 penalties and two free kicks (split evenly between the teams) and officiated with apparent accuracy but little empathy for the players or game.
“We played some great rugby and in our mind should have walked away with a win and we didn’t get it in that last 10,” Foster said.
“Upon reflection… I loved the way we played for large parts of the game. We’ve made some good gains on some of the things we’ve been working on.
“It shows we’re not quite there yet and in some ways that’s not a bad spot to be in eight months, or 10 months out from a pretty big tournament.”
The harsh reality is that Foster’s post-World Cup future may have been more secure had the All Blacks won following suggestions yesterday in the Herald that New Zealand Rugby will decide on the next coaching line-up for 2024 and beyond in the first quarter of next year.
As it is, the same old frailties reasserted themselves.
Ardie Savea: “For 70 minutes we were world class.”
Eddie Jones: “I can’t recall a New Zealand side playing as well as they did in the first half – aggressive, sharp around the ruck, good attacking kicks, and we just had to hang in there.”
Foster hailed his “very strong” scrum, a lineout maul which has become an intimidatory weapon under the directorship of Jason Ryan, and a “kicking game and carry game that had adventure and we didn’t get dominated on the gainline”.
All true, but they lacked any number of clinical edges to make what should have been a highlight victory safe on the occasion of Brodie Retallick’s 100th Test.
A major talking point will be the decision by replacement halfback TJ Perenara to kick the ball straight to an Englishman in the final two minutes as the All Blacks defended a seven-point lead.
England, inevitably, ran the ball back against an alarmingly short defence who had been attracted to the breakdown on the assumption the pack were going to run down the clock.
Foster later revealed Perenara had been given a call to do so by Ardie Savea, but “by the time he kicked it he [Savea] was a metre in front so we were without one chaser… We weren’t as clinical as we needed to be but I’m happy with the decisions”.
The result was a second try in eight minutes by replacement prop Will Stuart, who, before this Test had never scored in an international.
To the All Blacks' surprise, England wanted no part of it from there, Marcus Smith kicking the re-start out to end the game, but it was difficult to blame them given their achievements over the preceding nine minutes and the way Raynal was officiating.
Of all the All Blacks, it was perhaps Papali’i who summed it up best. “It’s pretty tough," he said. "I think we played our best rugby all year in that first 70 minutes, but a yellow card – we usually have a plan but we didn’t execute in that last 10 minutes … it was poor footy from us.”
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