Sunday Special: Subs stop the sinking feeling

A nod to a Sweet 16 in this ABs newsletter for $ subscribers, PLUS: high times in the ratings department

Richie Mo’unga in Escape to Victory. Getty Images/ Peter Meecham

We’re going to keep this Sunday Special very, very brief. My daughter was born on this very day 16 years ago and locking myself away in the office for hours in a bid to summarise the Big Talking Points from a low-consequence test match will leave me open to all sorts of “you-could-have-at-least-made-an-effort-Dad” types of recriminations.

Early on in the piece my youngest made it clear she was bored by my sports chat (and, yes, I’m going to pay for this).

In all honesty, while the game ended up being a cliffhanger, I’m not sure there’s a lot to unpack. That is not an All Black XV that will ever see the light of day (see what I did there?) again and the first-half effort reeked of a game plan that said: “Let’s throw some s*** at a wall and see if anything sticks.”

So to mark this auspicious day in our household, I’m going to limit The Bounce’s appraisal of this test to a 16 loosely related, one-sentence points (in doing so, I may have to stretch the norms of grammar and syntax¹). 

***

While the starting personnel used for this test was wildly experimental, Ian Foster and the coaching staff will take comfort in the knowledge that a more conventional post-substitutions lineup dug them out of a deep hole.

As might have been mentioned once or twice, the knockout phase of a World Cup is an exercise in strategy and problem-solving, and problems don’t come a lot bigger than playing atrocious rugby and finding yourself 3-17 down.

It is hard to say who endured a more miserable first half, Damian McKenzie or Shaun Stevenson - but only the latter got a chance to redeem himself.