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'The All Blacks didn't want to admit to ourselves that we were chokers at the World Cup'
By Ned Lester
Three Rugby World Cups may equal the tally for the most ever won, but you could easily argue that trio of trophies are shy of a just reward for the legendary record that the All Blacks lay claim to.
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Since 1903, New Zealand’s national men’s rugby team has won 77 per cent of their games. No other team comes close to that record.
84 years of prominence came to a head in 1987, when the first-ever Rugby World Cup was kicked off right in the All Blacks’ backyard.
They won. Then, they didn’t
We went from Nirvana to One Direction, from the World Wide Web to the iPhone 4, from Margaret Thatcher to David Cameron before the All Blacks lifted the Webb Ellis Cup again.
The 24 years between drinks were not because the All Blacks relinquished their rank, the winning continued, but not when the sport’s prized jewel was on the line.
In a deeply insightful and reflective interview, legendary All Blacks coach Sir Steve Hansen discussed what it took to break that drought, specifically how he and Sir Graham Henry empowered the players to live up to the moment at the 2011 Rugby World Cup.
“(The players) thrive under pressure because they prepared for it,” Hansen told the High Performance Podcast. “It’s not the pressure that’s making them thrive, it’s the preparation that’s making them thrive.
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“They plan for, when this gets hot and it’s a tug of war, in the heat of the game, they’re not worried about the scoreboard.
“Their plan is forget the scoreboard, their plan is to stay right here where my feet are. Stay in the now, what’s the job I’ve got to do? Let’s do that job as really good as I can and hope like hell the guy across from me, he’s worrying about the scoreboard, or he’s worried about the mistake he’s just made.
“And I think that’s the difference, having those mental skills.
“For a long time, the All Blacks didn’t want to admit to ourselves that we were chokers at the World Cup.
“The reason we didn’t is because the people at the top didn’t have to own it, because you got the sack. So, the next guy coming in says ‘well it’s not my fault, I didn’t choke so I’m not a choker’.
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“But in ’07 we got the opportunity to do it again and we had to sit there and say ‘well sh*t, what are we going to learn from this? What can we take out of this pain and put it into a wee parcel that’s going to make us good?’
“We won two World Cups because of the fact that they allowed us to have another go, we took the learnings and Bob’s your uncle, Spongebob got there and got the job done.”
Not only did the All Blacks win the 2011 Rugby World Cup, but they did it having “lost more first-fives than most teams have hot dinners” as Hansen put it.
Being in a mental space that is prepared for, and anticipating the need to respond to the inevitable adversity of a World Cup was a huge focus in the 2011 campaign.
The team took the time to have conversations that defined exactly what the pressure they were under looked like.
“We have to admit to ourselves that there is a lot of pressure, so how are we going to deal with the fact that we haven’t been in a final before? What is that pressure doing to each of us individually, that we haven’t been there before? Walk towards it.
“We get into trouble because we don’t expect some things to happen so we feel threatened by it. Then we get aggressive, either fight, flight or freeze. We all understand that term but we don’t know how to deal with it.
“The simple thing is, we go there every day, something will threaten us that we didn’t expect so the more things we can plan that might happen that we don’t want to happen, the better off we’ll be to react to it when it does happen.”
Hansen is a great mind and I wonder why they don’t bring him in to talk to the chaps. He was part of an era where, mentally, I don’t think any other team in sports were stronger than the ABs.
I said it somewhere that the ABs are currently struggling with the mental aspect of the game. You can see it in the body language. You can see it in the decision making. Confidence. Not dealing as well with the pressure.
I haven’t spent 5 minutes with Foster. But I’m not sure he is getting this aspect right and the ABs are coming off a very uncharacteristic up and down four years.
Then the risk of Foster getting fired after Mbombela, bringing in new assistants - to me the message could be that foster (and by extension the team) needed chaperones. The way Plumtree and Co were discarded as if they were the problem?
The way Robertson’s appointment was done - also not good on team psychology - I don’t think. Foster more ore less even said so.
To me these things would create doubt, fragile confidence. The opposite of boosting confidence.
When they beat the boks convincingly in Auckland, I believe the pressure immediately mounted and expectations grew immediately. The ABs are back. Watch out world. But when the pressure has been on, uncharacteristically, they have been fragile. And lost.
I’m making these observations not to criticize, but to point out that the ABs need to sharpen their mental edge. And NZRU needs to recognize the role they play in this process.
Mr Hanen's: 'Their plan is forget the scoreboard, their plan is to stay right here where my feet are. Stay in the now ...' reminds me of the Richie McCaw film: Chasing Great, in which he describes the 'panic' at the 2007 World Cup and a scene from The Last Samurai:
Nobutada : [after Algren is defeated in fencing pratice] Please forgive; too many mind.
Algren : [puzzled] 'Too many mind?'
Nobutada : Hai, mind the sword, mind the people watch, mind enemy - -too many mind.
Nobutada : No mind.
My theory is the 24 years was due to extremely bad karma for the "suzie" excuse they made after losing to a very valiant Springbok side in 1995. That is karma for you, works in mysterious ways.