All Blacks: New Zealand\'s storm blows away Springboks

Tag : bearing ball

On a day when gale force winds and snow swept through both islands,it was amazing the weather couldn't claim to be New Zealand's mostdestructive force.
That honour belonged to the All Blacks, who extended theirphenomenal home run to 30 wins on the back of a performance thatwould rank up there with the best produced during the Graham Henryera.
At the heart of their effort was good old-fashioned brutality. TheBoks don't do subtle and the All Blacks took them at the collisionand just about edged it.
Ali Williams, in his 50th test, played as if he had inherited superpowers after wearing his Spiderman outfit earlier this year. He wasthe everywhere man even though it looked as if he was playing withonly one good leg.
Jerome Kaino didn't shirk a thing and played well enough to suggesthe has a long All Black future and Rodney So'oialo deliveredeverything he needed to in the No 7 jersey.
That effort in the loose was nothing compared with what happened inthe set-piece, where the All Blacks took the Boks on at the scrumand destroyed them.
Behind the scrum, the All Blacks had that little bit more tacticalcomposure, that little bit more passion in the tackle and thatlittle bit more determination when they chased kicks.
All those tiny gains added up, inch by inch, until the Boks slowlylost heart and felt the weight of history bearing down on them.When they needed to find another gear in the final quarter, theycouldn't.
And they couldn't because the All Blacks didn't let up. Theforwards kept hammering into contact, the lineout didn't go throughits usual wobbly phase and Daniel Carter kept a firm hand on thetiller.
The killer blow appeared to be delivered by Kaino with 15 minutesto go when he beat the defence to pounce on a Carter grubber but itwas ruled that the No 8 was in front of the ball. It was a closecall and yet another sign that the All Blacks were making gooddecisions.
That's what will worry the Boks most when they sit down today andplot a way to exact revenge in Dunedin. The All Blacks weren't justintense, they were smart and mostly accurate.
They shamelessly ripped off the Crusaders' tactic of hoisting theball high up the middle and then blitzing the catcher.
As admirably as the impressive Conrad Jantjes coped with the firstpart, he and Bryan Habana were often guilty of not knowing what todo next and were frequently caught and turned trying to run theball out.
They will say that approach was justified, as it led to theirfirst-half try when Jean de Villiers swept past Sitiveni Sivivatu'sweak tackle and then timed his pass perfectly to Habana.
It was clinical stuff but only a flash. The Boks couldn't sustainanything and it felt, surprisingly, as if they had been a bitrattled by the ferocity of the exchanges.