All Blacks 2022

[Chris]

@kiwimurph said in All Blacks 2022:

@chris said in All Blacks 2022:

@crucial said in All Blacks 2022:

@chris said in All Blacks 2022:

@crucial said in All Blacks 2022:

Can someone please remind me what side Ainsley plays on.

TH

Cheers. Just surprised he wasn't being mentioned

he is around Moodey's age maybe its that.

Joe Moody is 33

Ainsley is 26

Wow for some reason I thought he was in his 30's

[Kiwiwomble]

@chris he was real young when he got his wallaby caps

[Chris]

@kiwiwomble said in All Blacks 2022:

@chris he was real young when he got his wallaby caps

He must have been, he has was in Aussie for a while I assumed he was a lot older.

[Kiwiwomble]

@chris actually he was 22-23 so not as young as i thought, 2018

[Crucial]

@tim said in All Blacks 2022:

@crucial If you think our current tight heads are limited, then what the hell would you want Mafileo in the ABs for? He may be a Harbour legend, but he is there to scrum and nothing else.

I said he enters the discussion.
If the plan is to have a scrummager first and foremost then he's an option and possibly a better investment for next year than Laulala.

[Crucial]

So when discussing players there is little expectation or demand for change from what I can see.
Does that mean we except who we have?
Question to ask then is whether things really are the fault of the coaches or is it the cattle they are working with?
Think about it, we often see coaches obviously frustrated that the players aren't doing what they want or aren't executing under pressure.
I totally agree that overcoming those aspects is part of coaching but there must also be times where the coaching staff feel they have set the team up for a win only for a dumb penalty or a dropped ball by a player has derailed the mission.

[get stuffed]

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[Kiwiwomble]

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[get stuffed]

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[Tim]

@duluth said in All Blacks 2022:

@crucial said in All Blacks 2022:

Don't we have a Fozzie thread somewhere?
Can we get this one back to discussing the 2022 ABs?

Yes

All off topic posts will get deleted after this one. It's the same 3-4 posters that want every thread to be about one topic. It crowds out the good conversation

[Billy Tell]

I’m less worried about our starting props then our bench. Karl T was fairly dreadful last year for example. If we select exactly the same props as 2021 then that will be ominous.

[Bones]

@nepia said in All Blacks 2022:

@chris-b said in All Blacks 2022:

@mariner4life said in All Blacks 2022:

@chris-b said in All Blacks 2022:

He's an import

nooooo

seriously?

an import? In the South Central Vikings?

I for one am shocked. Shocked i tell you

Pah!

If everyone else had produced as many good players as us, we wouldn't need to be having these fearful conversations about France and Ireland.

Frankly, if anyone else had....

You're pronouncing imported wrong.

You have amazing hearing

[Tim]

@billy-tell In the games against Ireland and France we were really dominated in the forwards in the first half.

Our bench props were not good, but it is odd to blame them more than the starters.

[Old Samurai Jack]

@dan54 Yeah, I understand but the fact of the matter is, and with no slight on the opposition, the ABs played poorly.

[MajorPom]

@old-samurai-jack said in All Blacks 2022:

@dan54 Yeah, I understand but the fact of the matter is, and with no slight on the opposition, the ABs played poorly.

Yes & No. Part of the reason we played poorly is because we played as well as the opposition would let us. The second reason is our decision making was average at best. Continued to try and play offensively when we needed to spend more time playing defensively. Chip kicks out of our 22 etc. WTF.

I'm not convinced that lf we had played as well as we could we would have won either match.

[junior]

@crucial said in All Blacks 2022:

So when discussing players there is little expectation or demand for change from what I can see.
Does that mean we except who we have?
Question to ask then is whether things really are the fault of the coaches or is it the cattle they are working with?
Think about it, we often see coaches obviously frustrated that the players aren't doing what they want or aren't executing under pressure.
I totally agree that overcoming those aspects is part of coaching but there must also be times where the coaching staff feel they have set the team up for a win only for a dumb penalty or a dropped ball by a player has derailed the mission.

Or maybe you don't play a game plan that relies on ball-playing and ball-carrying by props who are first, foremost and exclusively scrummagers who can't run and pass...?

That's to say, it's clearly a cattle and coaching issue - we just don't have the players to play the game plan that the coaches clearly want to play. One would have thought that, after spending many years (in most case) trying to upskill players to play that way, but without success, the coaches may have thought of changing the game plan.

[Dan54]

@old-samurai-jack said in All Blacks 2022:

@dan54 Yeah, I understand but the fact of the matter is, and with no slight on the opposition, the ABs played poorly.

They played exactly as well as the opposition let them play. Ireland didn't seem to play that well against French in 6Ns, that was because the French didn't let them. It is the way in our game often I think. I have seen good teams play ABs over the years and look poor, just because ABs have made them look that way. Same with a lot of teams, when they get beaten up in frowards they will struggle to look good. And so I give credit to the team that plays that well. I understand that we not used to seeing the ABs beaten, but it has unfortunately been a trait of a lot of our supporters the first thing we do in a loss we attck the ABs , and don't give credit to other team. It is not just AB supporters, a good number of supporters do it, just this is something that Kieran Crowley pointed out.

[get stuffed]

@dan54 said in All Blacks 2022:

@old-samurai-jack said in All Blacks 2022:

@dan54 Yeah, I understand but the fact of the matter is, and with no slight on the opposition, the ABs played poorly.

They played exactly as well as the opposition let them play. Ireland didn't seem to play that well against French in 6Ns, that was because the French didn't let them. It is the way in our game often I think. I have seen good teams play ABs over the years and look poor, just because ABs have made them look that way. Same with a lot of teams, when they get beaten up in frowards they will struggle to look good. And so I give credit to the team that plays that well. I understand that we not used to seeing the ABs beaten, but it has unfortunately been a trait of a lot of our supporters the first thing we do in a loss we attck the ABs , and don't give credit to other team. It is not just AB supporters, a good number of supporters do it, just this is something that Kieran Crowley pointed out.

That's a part of it, but the main reason we got done was because our forwards performed poorly.

Good teams over the years have looked poor against the ABs at times because of the fast paced game we played, due to our brilliant backs & athletic forwards that had the pace to link up with our backs to keep the momentum going... the forwards played a big part in that by playing with real aggression & cleaning out well at the breakdown.
The breakdown area is vital, it's by far the most contested part of the game, yet we consistently do a poor job there.

Crowley said the ABs wouldn't be in the top 2 or 3 favourites for the RWC, that is probably a fair comment going by the way we played last season... but for him to say NZ supporters are arrogant is a ludicrous comment, ABs have a better win/loss record than any other team & have set the benchmark for yonks, so of course NZ supporters expect them to play to a very high standard in all test matches.

[mariner4life]

IMO the ABs success over the past two decades has been built on

Defense, don't concede more than 20 points
Counter-attack. Ruthlessly exploit turnover and bad kicking to score the 23 points needed to win.

We're not a multi-phase structure sort of side, other than to pull teams ragged to open those counter-attack opportunities (why we used to win so many games late). We don't bash teams in to submission. At our best we were very pragmatic with our field position, doing fuck all in our half (except on turnover).

What helped us was the inherent quality of our backs, and the fact that all our forwards have ball skills so movements don't die with them. Our level of support play was also second to none, guys would be queuing up to score.

Which is why the keys to beating us have been the same for ages. Don't turn the ball over. Don't kick aimlessly.

Where i think we have fallen down is, we are still trying to play this game. But, we are generating far fewer turnovers and our slightly passive linespeed means there are less shit kicks delivered to our back 3.
Why are we getting less turnovers? Other teams are winning collisions, making turnovers very hard, and we don't have breakdown guys of the quality we used to have.
Our overall skills are down meaning we shell maybe one or two more opportunities than we used to.
And our defence has gone from our greatest strength to i think our biggest weakness. Could you see the current side trapping South Africa in their 22 and just keeping them there to win a RWC semi?
And there is your difference.

So where is plan B?

[Dan54]

@nzbloke said in All Blacks 2022:

@dan54 said in All Blacks 2022:

@old-samurai-jack said in All Blacks 2022:

@dan54 Yeah, I understand but the fact of the matter is, and with no slight on the opposition, the ABs played poorly.

They played exactly as well as the opposition let them play. Ireland didn't seem to play that well against French in 6Ns, that was because the French didn't let them. It is the way in our game often I think. I have seen good teams play ABs over the years and look poor, just because ABs have made them look that way. Same with a lot of teams, when they get beaten up in frowards they will struggle to look good. And so I give credit to the team that plays that well. I understand that we not used to seeing the ABs beaten, but it has unfortunately been a trait of a lot of our supporters the first thing we do in a loss we attck the ABs , and don't give credit to other team. It is not just AB supporters, a good number of supporters do it, just this is something that Kieran Crowley pointed out.

That's a part of it, but the main reason we got done was because our forwards performed poorly.

Good teams over the years have looked poor against the ABs at times because of the fast paced game we played, due to our brilliant backs & athletic forwards that had the pace to link up with our backs to keep the momentum going... the forwards played a big part in that by playing with real aggression & cleaning out well at the breakdown.
The breakdown area is vital, it's by far the most contested part of the game, yet we consistently do a poor job there.

Crowley said the ABs wouldn't be in the top 2 or 3 favourites for the RWC, that is probably a fair comment going by the way we played last season... but for him to say NZ supporters are arrogant is a ludicrous comment, ABs have a better win/loss record than any other team & have set the benchmark for yonks, so of course NZ supporters expect them to play to a very high standard in all test matches.

Yep I agree with what you say about AB supporters because of their success, but if you listened he actually said a lot couldn't name more than 3-4 of French/Irish team etc. I can kind of understand where he coming from, a hell of a lot of so called AB supporters are winners supporters and don't actually really watch a lot of the game, so think that everyone else should always be weaker than us. He's not talking about the proper rugby men so much, but by geez we have some so called AB supporters that know bugger all about game. I noticed it when I was living in Aus more than any other time, you talk to a kiwi in his AB jersey etc, and ask about a test match that had taken place not involving the ABs, and often had no idea of what had happened etc.. We get a lot of them on internet forums that learn all their rugby from reading forums and seeing the odd game on tv, but have no real idea of the game.