Don’t cry for me Argentina. Don’t cry for me Argentina, the All Blacks fans said Saturday in Christchurch, incredulous in front of the defeat of the (now little) Invincibles against the Pumas. But in Argentina we were crying, and how. Of joy, of emotion, for the first historic victory of the Albiceleste national team in New Zealand, in the presence of the strongest and most famous rugby team in the world. The All Blacks are considered one of the five most iconic sports formations ever, along with the Brazilian national football team, the Chicago Bulls (basketball), the Dallas Cowboys (American football) and the New York Yankees (baseball). Obviously, the New Zealand fans were crying too: they are struggling with the blackest year of the Tuttineri. Two victories in their last eight games for the All Blacks represent a catastrophe that has not been matched in recent times. Laurie Mains, who led the New Zealand rugby team from 1992 to 1995, left the team with the lowest budget in thirty years, 23 wins in 34 games, a statistic that most other teams can only dream of. No French coach has ever won more than 65% of the matches played on the Coqs bench and only Clive Woodward has led England, between 1997 and 2004, to 70% of victories. Over the past two decades, the All Blacks had stood well above 80%, the peak with ex-cop Steve Hansen as coach: 93 wins in 107 games, one defeat every eleven matches. Between August 2015 and November 2018, 18 consecutive successes. The records of the training with the fern on the chest are countless: the most striking, 509 weeks and six days at the top of the world ranking, from November 2009 to August 2019, not even the best Federer (310 weeks, second behind Djokovic, 373 ) came close to those numbers. All these results, last June, also gave an economic value to New Zealand rugby as a whole: two and a half billion dollars, according to the evaluation of the American investment fund Silver Lake, which has become a trading partner of the New Zealand oval federation.
Record-breaking crisis
Except that, since last November, the All Blacks no longer win, or very little: two defeats in the autumn, in Dublin against Ireland and in Paris against France. Then the catastrophe of July, again against Ireland, able to win 2-1 the series of three games played in the Land of the long white cloud, as the Maori called New Zealand. It was since 1994 that the Tuttineri had not suffered two defeats at home against a European team, then it was France. Most recently: Nelspruit’s beating against South Africa, 10-26, in the first round of the Rugby Championship, followed by a brief redemption in Johannesburg, again against the Springboks, before the new thud against the Pumas, the sixth national in capable history to win in New Zealand. The fans are asking for the head of coach Ian Foster, who after the defeats with Ireland had replaced his assistants in an implicit discharge of blame, instead of taking on his own. But beyond any tactical errors and the occasional unpredictable bounces of the oval ball, All Blacks fans are beginning to fear that the roots of the team’s malaise are deeper and come from further afield. Covid, of course, (who doesn’t blame Covid these days?). The pandemic has forced New Zealand rugby into long isolation, especially at the club level, which lasted throughout 2020 and 2021. In this period, the five franchises that power the All Blacks (Blues, Crusaders, Chiefs, Highlanders and Hurricanes) have played exclusively with each other, to avoid contact with the outside world, giving life to Super Rugby Aotearoa. The result was an event of great spectacular impact, appreciated by fans from all over the planet and which deluded many that rugby – based on extraordinary individual qualities, talent, talent and inventiveness – could also be the recipe for continuing to triumph on the international field. .
Standardization
The return to normality, on the other hand, put the All Blacks in front of the bitter reality: in front of very well organized defenses (South Africa, Ireland, but also Argentina), in the presence of rivals who during the lockdown have put on muscle and power from to be frightened by privileging the gym to the risk of contact in the collective game, the individual technique becomes sterile and does not produce victories. In short, by dint of reflecting themselves in their skills, the New Zealanders did not realize, as happened to the deer of Phaedrus, that in the thick of that fierce context that is the bewitched forest of international rugby, the beautiful antler box which was a source of pride in the clearing in battle it gives more problems than satisfactions, it does not help to win and requires a change of strategy if you want to go back to beating the best. The problem is that, in the meantime, following the rigid dictates of professional sports, even New Zealand rugby has begun to amalgamate its best forces, in schools, franchises, in the most prestigious clubs, losing much of those provincial specificities (Taranaki, Waikato, Otago, Canterbury, to name only the most famous) which constituted as many oval schools and each provided, in an emergency, a potential different response to the difficulties and challenges of the adversaries. From this mix of different approaches to the game of rugby was born the great legend All Black. Now that the standards have become (almost) all the same, with little comparison between different theories and practices, changing approaches and tactics in the moment of crisis becomes difficult but essential. South Africa is benefiting immensely from the permanent confrontation of its top teams (Sharks, Stormers, Bulls and Lions) with European rugby, and from their participation in the United Rugby Championship, a tournament in which Irish, Welsh, Scottish and the two teams participate. Italians, Zebre and Benetton Treviso.
Bye bye melting pot
In short, the mixture helps, as well as the hybridization produces champions, just think of Marcell Jacobs and the Kambundji sisters in athletics. South African rugby, after the long years of apartheid, wonderfully marries the athletic qualities of its black players, of African origin, with the toughness of the Afrikaners, descendants of the first European, Dutch, French and English migrations. France itself, which will host the next World Cup, makes use of numerous players born and raised in the colonies, the central trocar Moefana and the hooker Mauvaka even come from Wallis and Futuna and New Caledonia, the most distant overseas territories. For years, New Zealand rugby has been fed with robust injections from the islanders, Tongans, Samoans, Fijians. All realities where rugby is of great tradition: combat, physicality, fantasy. It is no coincidence that Fiji won the gold medal in men’s rugby (Seven) at both the Tokyo and Rio Olympics. But in a country of only 5 million inhabitants like New Zealand, the balance is precarious. Attracted by scholarships from the most prestigious schools in Rotorua, Wellington and Auckland, the boys of the Pacific Islands have found rugby an important instrument of identity and a means of social integration. Their enormous physical prowess has allowed them to impose themselves from the youth categories and in the face of this excessive power many young pakeha, the heirs of the Anglo-Saxon migration, have begun to prefer football to rugby (remember New Zealand’s draw with Italy at the World Cup of 2010 in South Africa?).
Investors’ expectations
Moral: even in the kingdom of Aotearoa rugby has become more “peaceful” (in the sense of ocean) rather than white. The powerful “farmers” of European origin, children of the first Scottish, Irish and British immigrants, were gradually replaced in the club formations, in the franchises and finally in the national team by the imaginative interpreters of a more carefree, less rigorous, more individual rugby than collective. In short, New Zealand has lost over time a part of that peasant, Western, European rigor that made it one of the cradles of the oval tradition. In football terms it is like saying Brazil (which has not won the World Cup since 2002) against Germany, attack against defense, which now counts so much in modern rugby: South Africa, winner of the last World Cup, has become its tutelary deity.
It may be that as early as next weekend the All Blacks will restore part of their domain. But to return to being the undisputed number one will probably take longer, with the right ability to dose environmental, historical, athletic and sporting resources. The France of football, in 2018, became world champion in Russia with the various Pogba, Mbappè, Kantè, but also with Griezmann, Giroud and Pavard. It may be that this mix of different cultures in 2023 will allow her to do an encore in rugby as well. 2019 saw the triumph of the South African Rainbow Nation. New Zealand seeks its identity between past, present and future. While the Silver Lake fund expects great returns from its millionaire investment, in a corner of the Earth where rugby is still a religion.
