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I got this in an email today, attributed to Sean Fitzpatrick:
Subject: Enjoy the Semis!!
And so it all ended in Cardiff on Saturday. For the All Blacks, the World Cup came to a shattering, juddering, incomprehensible halt. When the final whistle came, I had to pull myself together for the post-match TV autopsy but in truth, it is now two days later and I am still in the process of getting to grips with the whole thing.
But whatever it feels like watching a match like that, I can tell you from bitter experience that those guys who pulled the shirt off (and for some of them, that was the last time they will ever do it) in the utter silence of that stunned, disbelieving Cardiff dressing room will feel it deeper, and for longer. They will carry that defeat with them to their rugby graves, and I don't envy them their burden.
Swimming against the popular tide, I'm not going to put things on the ref. I think that is too easy. Painful though it is we have to look to ourselves for answers, because the truth of it is we should have left the French for dead by half time. We didn't close them out, and we paid dearly. The score looked good at 13 up, but in retrospect the little individual tell-tale signs of impending disaster were there. Too many little things weren't done properly, there were too many loose ends, and whilst we looked good in patches, it just didn't knit together to deliver the killer blow.
And then in the second half it all unravelled. The situation got away from us so quickly that I think the boys on the paddock just couldn't manage things. The tide visibly, audibly turned on a sixpence, with the yellow card, Chabal coming on, the French gaining a foothold. Between 40 and 60 minutes we lost our grip, our cool and our focus. In the face of a French team fired with self-belief, the team found themselves overloaded; decision-making became inconsistent; the fabric and cohesion of the All Black structure frayed and fell away; momentum stalled.
So was this the best prepared team in the World Cup tournament? On the face of it, the resting and the rotation sounded sensible. The 48 month build-up was hypnotically, metronomically on-the-money. The squad purred into the tournament like a sleek black Rolls Royce. The group stages presented no problems. It all seemed so meticulous and organised
- and then came Cardiff.
It takes more to win the Webb Ellis trophy than perfect preparation. In the single minutes when it mattered, the fear of failure simply became too much to bear and the All Blacks found themselves in a crisis for which they could not have been prepared under the current set-up. Look at the way the players have been handled over the last four years, and compare this to what happens in the Northern hemisphere. They have been protected from the excesses of brutal bruising club competition - lots of the players were taken out of the first half of the Super 14s to undergo a conditioning programme; there were no warm-up tests before the tournament; individuals have played in single games and then been rested for the next one; the boys in the squad have had little exposure to winner-takes-all sudden death formats. All of this has a big up-side in terms of how fresh, honed and focused the team are physically, but it now seems that this approach may have been detrimental in terms of the mental resilience of the team.
Fear of failure is ever-present in the sudden-death phases of the tournament, and it is a definitive catalyst. It either enables or disables. The question for the All Blacks now is two-fold. How do we expose our players to this type of situation more regularly? And secondly, how do we get them to handle it individually and collectively? How do we get our team to be able to use that fear of failure to generate the strength, power, resolve and belief (as the French did) to close out results, rather than turn us into the rabbits-in-headlights that we ended up as during those last tortuous minutes in Cardiff? I think that it is there that we have to look if we are to build something from the ruins of this World Cup. We won't move forward just by talking about coaches and refs, grey shirts and holidays and all that stuff, because maybe we might have done one or two things differently, but overall I think we were all pretty much of the same opinion -this squad was physically and technically ready.
This came about not because of our technique, but because of our psyche. And in 4 years time we'll be back, where the ghosts of previous failures will rise up to meet us -bigger and more compelling after Cardiff. Everyone will be looking for the Kiwis to choke. People will insist we can't do it. Our challenge now lies in facing down those fears, and in enabling our players to handle the searing white heat of sudden-death rugby, to develop the steel and inner strength to feed off fear and to manage the situation - to turn fear into results. The biggest game of all now has to be played in our heads. And every step of the way, I will be cheering on what I still passionately believe to be the best rugby union football team on earth.
One final thought after reading some of this weeks press: I am thinking lets not through the baby out with the bath water which we are so good at. Graham Henry I believe is still the best coach available to the All Blacks. With Steve Hanson and Wayne Smith we have the best coaching team. If there is a better set of coaches available please tell me who they are??? And we have remarkable talent for them to take to another level providing that they are willing to honestly address their shortcomings.
Enjoy the semis!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sean Fitzpatrick
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