All Blacks v France: What mattered most in tight All Blacks win – Gregor Paul

Gregor Paul in Christchurch

The All Blacks talked all week about the importance of playing with optimism, but really their key task in the opening game of the new season under a new regime was to engender that same emotion within the fanbase.

If New Zealanders are honest, they know they have lost a little faith in the All Blacks these past few years – seen some of their hope eroded by too many confused and featureless performances.

And maybe saddest of all for a nation so used to rugby excellence, they have lowered – maybe not consciously – their expectations about how often the All Blacks will win and what constitutes a good performance.

With this general mood prevailing, the 34-32 win over France, in a game that the All Blacks were never properly in charge of or able to control to any convincing extent, may seem like a continuation of the recent past.

But to properly evaluate and make sense of this first outing, it was imperative to look at the macro and not the micro: to check the foundations and not fret about the finishings.

What mattered was the speed at which the All Blacks got to the tackled ball and the ruthless and accurate way they cleaned out French scavengers.

The average recycle time in the first half was less than three seconds – a figure almost unheard of in international rugby and one that says this All Blacks team are vastly different to their predecessors.

Just as mad was that 85% of their possession was recycled at that speed and that number speaks to the intent of this team’s conviction that the tackled ball area is the key to everything in test rugby – get that bit right and it determines the speed at which a team can play and how close they can get to playing in the style they want.

That incredibly quick recycled ball speed also spoke to the intense and relentless workrate, and the best take is that the All Blacks played at a tempo that their skill-execution and game management couldn’t quite keep up with.

They were a bit like a teenager, all long limbs and big feet – but everyone can see they will eventually grow into themselves and lose the clumsiness and awkwardness.

And everyone could see that because some of the execution was brilliant and deadly – created by structure and finished with instinct – and that the All Blacks, so unsure of themselves in the last two years, now seem to know who they are.

They are a team who play on their feet, bring a brutal and accurate approach to the tackled ball area and a team who are willing to keep the ball anywhere on the field.

This is indeed a new era – one in which the All Blacks have lowered their body positions in contact, restructured and simplified their attack patterns and given up entirely with the box-kicking.

The win was the priority, obviously, but after two years of vagueness where everything was blurry, it was almost just as important for the All Blacks to deliver a precise, cohesive attacking shape.

If nothing else, it would at least provide a sense that they knew what they were doing and drive some optimism that with more time together, the flow and accuracy will improve, and more victories potentially await.

Engendering hope was as much the mission as producing the win, and it would be overdoing things to say the All Blacks restored total faith in their likely direction of travel, but they certainly have everyone’s attention.

They borrowed heavily from the Hurricanes’ framework of having multiple runners lined both sides of a first receiver looking to pass out the back door and it was mostly slick enough and organised enough to create space and leave the French scrambling.

The accuracy was a bit hit and miss – but what mattered was that the runners knew where to be and who was meant to be doing what.

That may well be a low benchmark to celebrate reaching, but recent history suggests that shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Understanding is the key to everything. When players know the patterns and the systems and are clear about what they need to do in their individual role, then they play intuitively.

There’s no static messing with the brainwaves, no second-guessing what to do and no clunkiness.

And while there were some daft moments – Cam Roigard tapping a penalty early in the second half and then Ruben Love kicking it aimlessly two phases later – it was generally a performance that had flow, direction and certainty.

The decision-makers had time and space and the work at the breakdown meant that the French barely had a sniff at the ball on the ground and that was likely why they looked to box-kick more as the game went on, presumably hoping to pin the All Blacks into their own territory with no space to play in.

This was what teams regularly did to the All Blacks last year and it worked without fail. The old All Blacks would get sucked into a static game of box kicking tennis and inevitably lose it.

But the new All Blacks were firstly better at getting bodies under the ball and better at catching it – or at least retrieving it – and they didn’t feel obliged to kick the ball back in the same manner.

Instead, they were true to their brief to be optimistic and counter attacked relentlessly. Some times they were a bit loose, a bit too high risk but that’s maybe the nature of optimism – there are going to be a few mistakes made in pursuit of trying to keep the ball alive.