Two middle-aged blokes chat about the final

The Week That Was and a Momentous Weekend That Will Be

Full steam ahead. Getty Images

For myriad reasons, Sunday morning sees the most important All Black test in the past 12 years. To help me, and hopefully by association you, make sense of it all, I’ve co-opted veteran rugby scribe and Breakdown producer Jim Kayes.

DC: Okay Jim, we’re two sleeps from the World Cup final. At the start of the tournament I picked the final to be a replica of the opener on September 9 (NZT) and while I’m half right, I’m taking zero credit because… I lost confidence in my prediction and picked Ireland to beat the All Blacks in the quarter-final. And this is where it gets a bit strange for me: I actually took some comfort in anointing the All Blacks as underdogs a fortnight ago and, as back-to-front as this sounds, the fact that I think the All Blacks will be a little too good for South Africa on Sunday makes me far more edgy and anxious. How would you describe your general mood to the readers of The Bounce, the most discerning sports audience in the country?

JK: I’m feeling good mate, but then again I was confident ahead of the 1995 final, the 1999 semifinal, the 2003 semifinal and the 2007 quarter-final!  There’s a few ways to look at this. One mate suggested the All Blacks have played only two tough games - France and Ireland - and lost the first one. “They really haven’t done that much,” was his view.  Equally, the Boks have had tough pool games against Tonga, Scotland and Ireland, then two really hard playoff games. Are they knackered while the All Blacks are fresh? 

Who do you think has had the better lead-in to the final?

DC: The All Blacks. Both had brutally intense quarter-finals, two of the best games of rugby I’ve ever watched, but it doesn’t matter what way you slice it up, the All Blacks didn’t have to put the pedal to the floor to beat Argentina, while South Africa had to go into the red to beat England last weekend. Put the extra day’s rest on top of that and it’s hard to argue that the preparation cards haven’t fallen in their favour. Having said that, no team goes to such lengths to mitigate against fatigue than the Boks.

Circling back to that semifinal, I appreciate as much as anybody that there is more than one way to win a game of rugby and that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but on a purely personal level I hated every minute barring the final 10 of the South Africa-England clash. Even so, I remain deeply suspicious of the narrative that the All Blacks need to win this final for the sake of rugby as a ‘product’.

What do you make of that?

JK:  Well, no one cared how the All Blacks played in the 2011 final - just that they won - but I get the point.