{"id":4298,"date":"2017-03-13T14:28:00","date_gmt":"2017-03-13T13:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=4298"},"modified":"2017-03-13T15:16:14","modified_gmt":"2017-03-13T14:16:14","slug":"a-question-on-rugby","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/4298\/","title":{"rendered":"A Question on Rugby"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tom Fordyce, Chief sports writer at the BBC, asks<\/a>:<\/p>\n

England equal the All Blacks – but are they on their level?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I can answer that emphatically: no.<\/p>\n

Don’t get me wrong, England are good – and I say this as a Wales supporter. Since Eddie Jones has taken over he has given what was already a talented squad the ability to both win games with some style and, if necessary, grind out a win by holding off defeat. England have become extremely difficult to beat as their 18-match streak attests, and they are by quite some margin the best team in the northern hemisphere.<\/p>\n

But there is one thing here that is not being acknowledged: there is the entire rugby playing world, and then there are the All Blacks. This has been the case for some years now: Australia has always been able to beat them in the odd match, but they haven’t held the Bledisloe Cup since 2002. Australian rugby is still strong enough to beat Wales, Scotland, France and on most days England and Ireland, but as I wrote here<\/a>, Australian rugby is in somewhat of a slump\u00a0and has been for a while. South Africa are in even worse shape, having taken a reasonable team to the last world cup but are\u00a0now fielding an embarrassment of a side ridden through with racial politics which are borne out in performances on the pitch. Meanwhile New Zealand have just gone from strength to strength as Fordyce notes on the way to answering his own question in much the same manner I did:<\/p>\n

The World Cup-winning All Blacks side contained arguably the two finest ever in their positions, fly-half Dan Carter and flanker Richie McCaw, as well as other superstars in Ma’a Nonu and Conrad Smith. They were the first team in history to retain the Webb Ellis trophy, like the Brazil side that won football’s World Cup in 1970 at a sanctified level, taking their sport to heights that none before had touched.<\/p>\n

When McCaw and Carter stepped away, the team continued to develop rather than atrophy. The XV that set the original 18-match mark with the 37-10 Bledisloe Cup win over the Wallabies contained eight players who would make most critics’ fantasy world team: Ben Smith, Julian Savea, Beauden Barrett, Dane Coles, Brodie Retallick, Sam Whitelock, Jerome Kaino and Kieran Read.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Most England fans don’t watch the Super XV rugby, and I suspect even fewer Wales supporters do. The Super Rugby is shown at odd times on Sky TV, meaning most people in the northern hemisphere won’t have the time to watch this tournament which produces something like eight or ten games per weekend. This isn’t a problem for me: lighthouse keepers go green with envy when they see how much time I have on my hands.\u00a0At least those guys have to polish the lamp every now and again.\u00a0Ever since I went to Nigeria in 2010 I’ve watched most Super XV matches in which at least one New Zealand team featured.<\/p>\n

I’ve also watched almost every Six Nations game played over that same period, and the difference couldn’t be more stark. I might have mentioned this on TNA’s old blog, but the basic skills of the New Zealand players are an order of magnitude better than those of their northern hemisphere counterparts. A Welsh side will be attacking the opponent’s line at the five metre mark and the scrum-half will, from the base of a ruck, fling the ball to the inside centre who has made a charge from miles back and is at full pelt. Only the ball will be either way above the centre’s\u00a0head or down by his knees, meaning\u00a0he will have to check his run and reach up or down for it. By the time he’s got going again, he’s tackled. Watch a Kiwi team in the same position and the ball will be taken right on the chest, nine times out of ten. That’s just one example, but it is representative of almost every aspect of the game. The Kiwis have not only mastered the basic skills at age ten, they’ve then gone on to master the secondary skills such as offloading in the tackle, passes out the back of the hand, and all the other little tricks that make for good viewing.<\/p>\n

The weekend before I went to Portugal I watched a Six Nations match with a foreign friend of mine, who (thanks to a Welsh ex-boyfriend) was not a complete stranger to rugby. Shortly afterwards we watched the Chiefs play the Blues in the Super XV, and even she noticed the difference in speed and skill. It really was like watching another sport. It wasn’t only the skill, it was the thinking behind it all. One of the things that frustrates me the most when watching Wales is how damned thick they are: there is no imagination, no inventiveness, no sneaky cleverness. They can’t even manage angled runs half the time: Jamie Roberts is incapable of doing anything other than barelling straight into his opposite number, who in the modern era duly tackles him with ease. England aren’t much better, with the geniuses running the show on the pitch taking an entire half to work out that Italy were playing within the laws<\/a>\u00a0during their recent Six Nations match. Watch Aaron Smith and Dane Coles for a while\u00a0and see how finely tuned their match awareness is, or track the off-the-ball movements of Beauden Barrett and Ben Smith. As my friend pointed out, they’re passing the ball without even looking because they know damned well a support player (or two or three) will be hurtling up on their shoulder.<\/p>\n

The All Blacks are beatable, very occasionally, as Ireland proved a few months back. The opening test of a series is normally quite close as the Kiwis overcome some sort of lethargy before obliterating their opponents in the final two matches. Anyone who has watched the All Blacks over the past five years or so will know that they can be beaten over 60 minutes without much difficulty. Only they bring on five or six world-class players from the subs bench and never let up on the intensity, which almost always secures them a comfortable victory by the time the final whistle blows.<\/p>\n

England are good, and they might even run the All Blacks close in a single game, and half time could well see the men in white leading comfortably. But over a three-match series we would see that, despite being top of the rest of the pile in world rugby, New Zealand are way off on the horizon and the distance is growing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tom Fordyce, Chief sports writer at the BBC, asks: England equal the All Blacks – but are they on their level? I can answer that emphatically: no. Don’t get me wrong, England are good – and I say this as … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4298"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4298"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4302,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4298\/revisions\/4302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}