Ronan O'Gara: The key tour takeaway? All Black mystique is now a thing of the past for Irish rugby

One of the cornerstones of All Black rugby heritage is the ability to score from anywhere or off anything. I don’t see it now

OUT IN FRONT: Tadhg Beirne of Ireland makes a break away from the defence during the International Test match between the New Zealand All Blacks and Ireland at Forsyth Barr Stadium in Dunedin, New Zealand. Pic: Joe Allison/Getty Images

WHEN the All Black and Ireland players head down the tunnel in Wellington on Saturday and out of this test series, their respective seasons go fore and aft. The scrutiny on New Zealand and their management will continue into the two-test series against world champions South Africa. And doubtless, beyond.

Ireland’s players will have their kit and kin ready when they arrive home to head off on family holidays. As much as they would want to compartmentalise their professional lives, the result and performance in Wellington will linger well into their summer break.

That’s a fact.

Ireland’s New Zealand tour has been a qualified success to this point, but Billy Beane wasn’t far wrong in ‘Moneyball’: If you lose the last game of the season, no one gives a sh*t’.

What the Irish players cannot contemplate if going on holidays after a four-out-of-ten display that sees them undone by a vulnerable All Blacks in Wellington. As a rugby player or coach, this is the taste you have in your mouth for the whole summer.

La Rochelle won an historic European Champions Cup in June, but next week we are not coming back to pre-season as European champions - we are coming back as the team subsequently beaten by Toulouse in the Top 14 play offs. That was the last game of the season.

These Irish boys won’t be together again for the guts of three months. When they reconvene, they want to kick off with ‘my last game was a series-clinching victory in Wellington’. Not a defeat. Not a lost opportunity to create history.

It’s been another uncomfortable week for New Zealand rugby and the facile narrative is that they will bring fire and brimstone to the Cake Tin on Saturday. For sure, there is a more balanced look to their starting XV for the third test. The return of Sam Whitelock and Nepo Laulala in the pack removes some of the question marks and whiff of experimentation. However, it’s not like all their wrongs have been righted in seven days.

For the first time ever, I am looking at a New Zealand rugby team and am not especially anxious about their capacity to strike off scrum attack or lineout attack. One of the cornerstones of All Black rugby heritage is the ability to score from anywhere or off anything. I don’t see it. At this moment Ireland look more capable of manipulating New Zealand rather than the other way around.

Whitelock will secure possession out of touch, but set up and strategy, innovation and special plays are something different. This week, Ireland are more likely to score off one of those special plays than New Zealand are.

With the form Will Jordan has shown at 15 this year, shouldn’t it be Jordan Barrett on the wing tomorrow? Are there any real counter-attacking opportunities for Will Jordan on the wing? Thriving in open space, killing opposition in one-on-ones, that is 100% his thing. His footwork isn’t exceptional, but it’s his top-end speed and the capacity to maintain that speed that separates him from the norm. If you put him in enclosed space, he won’t run over you or he’s not extremely powerful. But fast and lethal he most certainly is.

When I was down in Christchurch, ironically it was David Havili who was keeping Jordan off the Crusaders. With Ryan Crotty at 12 and Jack Goodhue at 13, the preferred option at the time was to accommodate Havilli at full back. He is a player that is greatly appreciated by his team mates because he goes to the well on big occasions. But he’d be behind Robbie Henshaw in terms of big-game experience and top-level play at inside centre.

WE are into unprecedented territory here for New Zealand. And it’s taking some time for those down there who have become sated with success to realise that this is no longer the brave and plucky leprechauns they face. That this is longer the All Blacks of Carter, Nonu, McCaw, Read, Cullen, Wilson, et al. That they are gone and haven’t been successfully replaced.

The All Blacks couldn’t go beyond two phases last Saturday in Dunedin. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen it. Their discipline was wretched to the point of wondering had they a proper grasp of the rules and the way the game has changed. It all pointed to a group in a state of flux.

What hasn’t been spoken about this week is Ireland’s winning margin and the fact that had it been forty points, it wouldn’t have been a surprise. Within that, is a tacit criticism of Ireland, its execution and game management. New Zealand had 14 men, were woefully inaccurate, but Ireland weren’t especially clinical either. Andy Farrell’s men didn’t kick on as they should.

In Wellington, it’s going to be closer, New Zealand will be a lot better, but there are still many entries into the game for Ireland against this particular All Black outfit in the areas of discipline and defensive shape.

In affording them the presumption that the All Blacks will be greatly improved for the third test, it is difficult to eradicate the disaster in Dunedin where players were guilty of crass errors I have never seen in my time watching All Black rugby. Basic catch-pass handling errors, like hitting midfield and one of the forwards dropping the ball off second phase.

Like, what is happening here?

The game starts at zero again. That is the message from Ian Foster and the New Zealand management. The vaunted second row pairing has been reunited and Savea, Cane and Scott Barrett is a good back row. The key is they can’t go trying to play with seven forwards, much less six, like last week.

These are challenging times for the most successful rugby nation in the world. And unprecedented times in respect of public and overt pressure on management, Joe Schmidt is a very significant presence within the group, but I have no idea if he is on the pitch coaching. Then there is the looming presence of the Crusaders’ Scott Robertson, a readymade, ultra-successful coach-in-waiting. What it amounts to is a weight of consequences riding on this test match, and the following two against the Springboks, for Foster and co. 

For Andy Farrell and his group, the tour has been mixed in pure results terms, but unlike his NZ counterpart, the metric for a worthwhile series are somewhat different. Even at this stage, it’s been a worthy expedition for the benefit of the depth chart and crucially to finally put to bed the mystique around the All Blacks for Irish rugby players. That is over now for good – this tour has confirmed as much, and that is all upside for the future players in green.

We have said often in this column that a week is a long time in sport. The opening pair of Irish displays in Auckland seem a lot longer than a fortnight ago. Ireland’s improvement in Dunedin was significant, albeit from a low bar. But the midweek team rode the wave last Tuesday. They fronted up.

The most intriguing aspect for me will be the early exchanges in Wellington, and how Ireland handle same. Maybe they go hard and early themselves. Meet fire with fire.

On Wednesday morning, I saw for the first time in my life what facing a raging fire actually looks like. For real.

It was a scary experience on the Algarve as gorse fires swept across the region, whipped up by winds and razing all before them. Jess is the calm one in our house so when she urged me to look out the window, I saw a rare panic in her face. 

Little more than 200m away was a raging fire in an adjacent field. We’ve been unfortunate enough to be too close to tragedy in the past in Paris and Christchurch and instinct took over as we hooshed everyone into the car and as far away as the road out of there could take us. 

We never looked back til we got to Albufeira. 

I can still hear the sirens going in the background as I send this. There are ominous black, smoke clouds lingering but we’ve been assured the immediate danger has passed.

The smouldering aftermath of these intense, barely cotrollable blazes are all around us still as holidaymakers stare, fraught and bewildered.

On Monday, in a parallel universe to an inferno-ed Algarve and a windswept Wellington, pre-season training resumes back in La Rochelle.