They were outsiders. Apparently. The All Blacks — of all teams — relegated to long odds against a team that eight years ago had never known what it was like to beat them.
Aviva Stadium in Dublin somehow had ascended the staircase of epic rugby challenges to sit alongside Eden and Ellis Parks.
In the end, this abject nonsense was put to a stop by an All Blacks side that still hasn’t fully blossomed. In the end, there must surely be an admission that Ireland’s ability has been manifestly overestimated. They may have flowered briefly, but they do not look anything like the advertised perennial.
Great sides don’t lose games the way Ireland lost this one.
The All Blacks, a team that for this entire season (and maybe longer) had misfired and backfired like a Mazda engine experiment, were apparently for the chop on Saturday morning, like so many other sides that had foregone historical fact for a meek genuflection before the supposed superiority of the emerald green. Well, bah humbug to that.
The All Blacks had, for years, taken down Ireland simply by turning up.
Sure, the worm had turned in recent years, but the way New Zealand rugby fell under that foul spell is a mystery for the ages.
Maybe it was the shock of 2016, when New Zealand Rugby happily played along with its American Insurance partner and took a test to Chicago.
Unfamiliar surroundings, the chaos of a Cubs World Series, an eye off the ball – choose your poison and pick your weapon. What happened that day was an annihilation by test match standards, and certainly a meritorious win for the Irish. What happened afterwards was nothing short of a crisis of confidence.
The return fixture in Dublin that year was a fiery affair, but the Irish were outclassed by enough to suggest Chicago was, and should have been, a one-off; a mitigable result that had little bearing on the pecking order of the global game.
Instead, the All Blacks allowed themselves to be painted as Barbarians at the gate, as a blood lusting band of filth merchants still pissy that they had lost a game of footy.
It was a narrative put forward by the vanquished, and picked up by their many sympathisers, all of whom would have given a first-born child to have scored such an epic win against the most feared team in the world.
The All Blacks took the bait.
A shadow spread across the once fertile lands of New Zealand rugby’s much vaunted development system.
Apparently, more than a century of test match dominance was no match for a one-off exhibition loss in a foreign town in a strange land. The Dublin result, that 21-9 victory, didn’t dull the pain because apparently bashing the crap out of Ireland was not the way the game should be played.
According to Ireland.
Suddenly Ireland was not just a nuisance to be dealt with occasionally. Instead, its team became an obsession.
At the heart of it wasn’t Johnny Sexton, or Tadhg Furlong, or Peter O’Mahoney, or Rob Kearney – great players all, among a much longer list. No. At the heart of it was Joe Schmidt, the New Zealander who had engineered that first victory, and who the All Blacks coaching staff feared most of all.
This was an obsession that grew from coaching ego. The manifestation of that ego was an outsized respect for a team that had certainly improved, but which should never have become an all-consuming threat to New Zealand’s long-term domination of the contest.
The quarterfinal result at the World Cup in Japan in 2019 (a 46-14 hammering) should have made that clear, but the minor scars of 2016 and 2018 were passed down to the next coach like inter-generational trauma.
We know there was more pain to come. In Dublin again in 2021, in Wellington and in Dunedin the following year. There was so much pain that the All Blacks couldn’t wait to get the man who inflicted the first wound into the coaching lineup. If ever there was an admission that uncertainty was the prevailing state of the nation, that was it. Oh how the Irish must have loved that.
What they would not have loved was the result in Dublin on Saturday morning (NZT).
Everything was set up for the nominal world number one to prove that (outside world cups) they had New Zealand’s measure.
Instead, an All Blacks side missing two of its most experienced members out-thought and out-played them and, while at it, went a long way to reestablishing their dominance in a rivalry that looks good on paper, but may not be as genuine as you are led to believe.
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