SUNDAY SPECIAL: Beaudy has his Joe Pesci moment
Razor gang passes first test in mostly unsatisfactory fashion
On Friday, I enlisted the help of AI to try to solve the riddles posed by the blitz, or rush, defence. The All Blacks instead resorted to good, old-fashioned coaching.
My way worked better.
After a bright, chaotic start, the All Blacks became utterly disjointed — even worse than the efforts under the roof in Dunedin. It was as if they had spent the week in Auckland playing hide-and-seek. They certainly didn’t spend it working on lineouts.
That would be why Scott Robertson, fresh off a 2-0 series win in his first series, cut an unusually forlorn figure in his must-watch, post-match, on-field conflab.
“We didn’t transfer what we had trained all week onto the field,” he said.
That must be the ultimate kick in the pants for a coach who has come from a Super Rugby programme where culture dictated that every Crusader was a mere role player in subjugation of a higher cause. He might find that ethos is a little more difficult to instil in a team where every player must feel like they’re still in the audition phase.
It will be fascinating to see which players in last night’s squad are jettisoned before these two teams meet again at Twickenham in November. Robertson’s right-hand man Jason Ryan has a reputation for being utterly ruthless when it comes to pink-slipping those who don’t or can’t follow instructions to a T. On the evidence of the past eight days, there are plenty struggling to keep up.
But we digress.
It might be painfully reductive to frame an 80-minute test match in this way, but the game was single handedly won by Beauden Barrett. Yeah, yeah, he couldn’t have done it without the platform being laid and all that jazz but not since Joe Pesci in Goodfellas has the show been stolen quite so comprehensively by a cameo.