Aaron Smith plays down impact of last year's series defeat to Ireland

Any suggestion that the All Blacks might be less burdened by pressure approaching this weekend’s World Cup quarter-final lasted no more than a handful of minutes on Tuesday

OFF FEET: Aaron Smith during a New Zealand rugby squad training session at INSEP in Paris, France. Pic: Harry Murphy/Sportsfile

Any suggestion that the All Blacks might be less burdened by pressure approaching this weekend’s World Cup quarter-final against Ireland lasted no more than a handful of minutes on Tuesday at the Centre Sportif Jean Letessier, a building nestled into one corner of the French Olympic team’s base in the Bois de Vincennes.

Ian Foster’s team is not the one ranked number highest in the world. They are not the side that has already accounted for the world champion Springboks, or swept aside the Scots in Pool B. The Kiwis are not the collective that approaches Saturday night 80 minutes removed from a world record-equalling 18th win on the trot.

And they aren’t the ones looking to break a quarter-final hoodoo.

No. These All Blacks have already lost to France and they were embarrassed by South Africa in London in August. Nobody doubts that they remain supremely dangerous on their day, but there is a consensus that they are a hairline crack or two off previous iterations, not quite the consistently excellent collective of yore.

That might ease the weight of expectation on most sides - look at the resigned air about England for proof of that - but New Zealand is different. You can joke about the impact their losses have on the national economy but it is a cliché that speaks for the fact that there is so little in the way of mitigation when things go wrong.

This was made clear - not that it was probably needed - to Aaron Smith, Rieko Ioane, and forwards coach Jason Ryan after training when they were reminded about how Sean Fitzpatrick was haunted by the fear of failure in that famous jersey throughout a hugely successful career that delivered 92 caps and the 1987 World Cup.

And if that wasn’t enough to hammer the point home, there was the additional explanation that, given their Pool A defeat to the hosts, this would rank statistically as the worst ever New Zealand performance at any of the ten tournaments to date should they fail to overcome Andy Farrell’s side on Saturday.

“My energy is pushed more towards opportunity,” said Smith, the side’s star scrum-half. “The energy of what we can control. If you are held down by the weight of the past then you won’t be able to do anything, you won’t be able to play well.

“You will be too scared to do anything, to try things, to trust your instincts, being free and energised within the team, and there is plenty of intent so I don’t think there is the burden of statistics on us like that. It is a final of a World Cup for us and we are ready to go.” 

The psychology at play this week is fascinating.

New Zealand aren’t just challenged by their own rich history. The manner in which they have been usurped by Ireland since an historic meeting in Chicago in 2016 has flipped the narrative on a head-to-head which had seen the Six Nations side go 111 years without a victory before winning five of the last eight.

It was jarring to hear Smith, Ioane, and Ryan all parrot the same line about this last eight tie being a “final” on Monday, and having to play down the mental scars that were deposited on their psyche by that 2-1 series loss on home soil to Andy Farrell’s tourists two summers ago.

For Smith, in particular, this must all take some digesting.

His debut came against Ireland in 2012. His first three caps came in a three-Test series that year when they pumped the tourists twice and grabbed a lucky win in the other. That’s how it was for so long: the odd Irish uprising surrounded by punishment beatings. Not anymore.

“Last year matters in a sense of taking the learnings, but I believe we're a totally different team to July last year,” he claimed. “We've got new coaches, and as a group that series really galvanised us and I can't wait for Saturday to see what happens.” 

Among those new coaches is Joe Schmidt, the Scarlet Pimpernel of this week’s fixture who continues to shy away from the cameras but whose fingerprints are known to be all over the work done this last year.

If Schmidt serves as a unifying factor here then these are two teams who will boast no shortage of motivations as they re-engage a relationship that has blossomed into one of the game’s great rivalries in the last seven years.

Ireland have had the better of it but blowout wins for the Kiwis in Tokyo at the last World Cup and in Auckland in 2022, serve as reminders of just how quickly things can go wrong against the three-time winners.

“Everyone knows the stakes of what’s riding on this game,” said Smith. “I know in 2019, there was quite good camaraderie afterwards, connecting, so I wouldn’t call it a hatred or anything like that. There is a definite mutual respect.”