Gregor Paul: Ireland highlight tactical need for All Blacks to evolve

When Ireland had the temerity to almost draw with the All Blacks in the second Test of their series in 2012, they paid for it in the third.

The All Blacks, irked at Ireland’s resistance in Christchurch which lasted for a full 78 minutes, responded with a 60-0 thrashing in Hamilton the following week.

When Ireland did the unthinkable in Chicago and recorded their first win in history, the All Blacks responded with their most brutal performance of the last decade two weeks later in Dublin and literally smashed their way to a 21-9 revenge win.

The pattern continued at the World Cup in 2019: Ireland had seriously hurt New Zealand by beating them 16-9 the previous November and so the backlash was furious in Japan – the 46-14 quarter-final demolition stacking as the last truly awe-inspiring performance by the All Blacks in a Test that truly mattered.

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The point not being missed any more is that the All Blacks are having to respond to catch Ireland not the other way around

Having secured a third win last weekend, Ireland, according to coach Andy Farrell, are aware of this thrust and parry cycle and are bracing to meet a highly motivated All Blacks side in New Zealand next year in a three-Test series.

It’s a series which, in the wake of Ireland’s 29-20 win last weekend, has suddenly taken on enormous significance for the All Blacks because there are now quite reasonable, steady, sensible types with genuine pedigree wondering if New Zealand has lost its place as the world’s most innovative and creative rugby nation.

Ireland have won three of the last five and Kiwis have had enough of it taking the bear to be poked for the All Blacks to muster the sort of performance they need to win.

The point not being missed any more is that the All Blacks are having to respond to catch Ireland not the other way around.

Now that the All Blacks have lost three, it has become hard, if not unfeasible, to continue to see these losses as the exception rather than the norm.

When the All Blacks lost in Chicago they were without their senior locking pair Brodie Retallick and Sam Whitelock and so they could square that one away – put it down to a bad day when they were missing key players.

The defeat in November 2018 in Dublin came when the All Blacks were trying to bed in a new tactical system and at the end of what had been a ridiculously long season, during which most of the squad made two separate Super Rugby trips to South Africa as well as to Argentina and Japan.

Again, they could find mitigating factors to make peace with the loss, something which became yet easier to retrospectively do the following year when the All Blacks delivered on that new tactical system and hammered Ireland in Japan.

But here we are again, Ireland having proven to be the smarter, more innovate, better coached team who produced all the rugby and while the All Blacks were miffed that Akira Ioane’s late try was disallowed, they would be kidding only themselves to think they were robbed.

Ireland looked like they were the better side by at least 15 points and if they had won by 20, it would still maybe not have reflected their superiority.

The cold, galling reality for the All Blacks is that this time, there is nowhere to pin the blame for this defeat anywhere other than on Ireland’s deservedly puffed out chests.

Where once it was the All Blacks who used to wow the northern hemisphere with the ball-playing ability of their forwards, it was the brilliant Andrew Porter, Tadhg Furlong, Iain Henderson and James Ryan who showed Ireland are the new leaders in bash and dash.

Perhaps even more confronting for the All Blacks was the tactical command of Johnny Sexton, who managed to simultaneously cut New Zealand to shreds and referee the game.

There’s an undercurrent which suggests the All Blacks have never truly rated Sexton; that they have considered him to be lacking the magical qualities of either Beauden Barrett or Richie Mo’unga.

Yet there was the veteran Irish man, wielding three times the influence of either of New Zealand’s vaunted No 10s.

It seems that the All Blacks are stuck in an old mindset that they can win games by living off the mistakes of their opponents

Sexton may genuinely have been irritating the All Blacks with his endless chit-chat, but they spent most of the game trying to take his head off not because of that, but because they had run out of legitimate ways to stop him orchestrating such a sublime performance.

Ireland had vision and certainty. They had variation and subtlety, none of which came at the expense of their physicality and they produced exactly the sort of rugby that All Blacks coach Ian Foster wants his team to play.

Former All Blacks coach Steve Hansen used to talk about confronting inconvenient truths and for Foster, that means accepting that his team needs a major tactical reboot because it looks awfully like Ireland have worked them out.

And that is effectively what the series in July will be about: the All Blacks need to reinvent themselves – move away from the ruck and run game plan they have used for the last decade.

It seems that the All Blacks are stuck in an old mindset that they can win games by living off the mistakes of their opponents.

That works against Australia because the Wallabies play a similar high-tempo, high-risk, ruck and run game.

They take chances which opens the game up and the All Blacks, as they showed in Dublin, are still the masters at turning a quarter chance into a try.

When Ireland have beaten the All Blacks, they have been defensively astute with enough streets smarts to not give the All Blacks the counterattacking opportunities that they crave.

Ireland need to be broken down by a mix of brutality and creativity and the All Blacks don’t yet know how to do that.

But while there is a rising tide of anxiety sweeping through rugby circles in New Zealand, so too is there an almost equal, counter-balancing optimism that the All Blacks have resourcefulness and innovation in their DNA and they never trail the world for long.

Ireland have highlighted a tactical need for the All Blacks to evolve, a process that will be accelerated by the return next July of some world-class performers.

The brilliant Aaron Smith will be back in the No 9 jersey and his return will enable the All Blacks to play faster and with an accuracy that was beyond them in Dublin.

Sam Cane will be back as captain and openside flanker, bringing bruising defence, punchy ball carrying and leadership.

Jack Goodhue, a versatile and thoughtful midfielder who ruptured his knee earlier this year, increasingly looks like the best option to solve the problem position at No 12 and the sensationally powerful Caleb Clarke, having tried to make it to the Olympics with the Sevens team, should recover his form and fitness to provide 107kg of raw, sprinting power on the left wing.

New Zealand need to make an emphatic statement in July, clean sweep the series and leave their visitors as perplexed and shocked by their brilliance as the All Blacks were by Ireland’s last week.