Regardless of the France result Razor's All Blacks have proved something

I’ve seen enough to judge this All Blacks season a success, regardless of what happens against France.

It’s a belated success, but a success nonetheless.

The positive results help, but it’s more the way the team is now playing which encourages me most.

To my untrained eye, the All Blacks started this campaign by playing in the same ineffective way as their predecessors. They sought to be brilliant – and to blow teams off the park – without ever earning the right to.

If head coach Scott Robertson and his team had brought any new ideas to the table, they weren’t evident.

I see the team’s win over Australia in Sydney as a tipping point. Having raced out to an early lead, the All Blacks were simply awful in the second half.

First five-eighth Damian McKenzie lost his starting role after that match and the game plan was simplified significantly.

And, why not? After all, the strength of the team this year has been its forward pack.

They performed well enough against South Africa, for instance, to have won both tests in the republic. It was only the scatterbrained backs that let them down.

This team might run in the future but, for now, they’re content to walk. To do the simple things accurately and to eliminate the margin for error.

It’s not thrilling, but it’s working.

Fans had yearned for change, following the Ian Foster years, and in the tests subsequent to Sydney, against Australia, England and Ireland, they saw it.

So much so that McKenzie could resume duties at first-five without disrupting or undoing all the progress that had been made.

That’s huge. That suggests that the team has a coherent and cohesive method of playing, which everyone has bought into. The individual personnel might change, but the collective performance doesn’t.

France might turn around and beat the All Blacks now. Who knows? That’s the beauty of a head-to-head contest.

But recent All Black teams had nothing to fall back on when the going got hard. They had little structure or substance and did desperate, irrational things in an attempt to play their way out of trouble.

We’re not seeing that now.

Ireland assumed they could bully the All Blacks in Dublin. They set their stall on exerting pressure and waiting for the All Blacks to fold in the face of it.

When that didn’t work, Ireland became the team that ran out of ideas.

That’s hugely heartening, even unexpected.

Many of us had come to the sad conclusion that the All Blacks had decided it was beneath them to be anything other than brilliant.

Assistant coach Scott Hansen said as much, when asked about Harry Plummer and the game plan implemented by the Blues this season.

Yes, it worked, Hansen said but, no, it wasn’t the type of footy the All Blacks wanted to play and, therefore, Plummer wasn’t the kind of first five-eighth the team needed.

Well, I’d wager Sydney changed that thinking. I think everyone involved with the team was so thoroughly embarrassed by that second half, that they finally accepted change had to come.

That signifies a successful campaign in my book.