Razor has to come up with a Plan B for the England defence - I reckon we need to move Perofeta in more often to create doubt, even if we skip him. Ioane was barely used in Dunedin and even then our two tries were when he was bypassed.
I also think that our scrummies were too slow clearing the ball giving the English plenty of time to set their defence.
Call it line speed or call it rush defence, it’s the puzzle the All Blacks are trying to unlock as they prepare for their second clash with England this Saturday at Eden Park.
They won 16-15 the first time around in Dunedin, but their only points after the 25th minute were a pair of Damian McKenzie penalties.
Having scored two tries in the early stages – first when McKenzie kicked to a wide open Sevu Reece out on the right, then when Stephen Perofeta stepped around his onrushing marker, before releasing Ardie Savea down the same flank – they were kept out for the next 55 minutes.
“It’s exactly what the aim of it is, isn’t it?” was how assistant coach Jason Holland summed it up this week. “They can put pressure on time and space and skills.
“If you get things wrong – if you haven't got your little things around your skills right or your depth right – then you can get really hurt.
“But we've got a couple of ideas around how we make sure that it's hard to bring line speed, as in you have to go backwards to come forward.
“We've got to get balance with what to do, we can't be predictable. We've got to make sure that we've got a little bit of that in our game – maybe a little bit more than what we had down in Dunedin.”
There were only brief glimpses of Mark Tele’a’s attacking threat last Saturday and he said England’s line speed had posed quite the challenge.
“It's always a hard thing, because you feel like you see so much space and you're just like, oh, can we try to get the ball there, but then that space just goes like that – so fast.
“That's the kind of defence that we're facing and as players you're just trying to adapt to try to get better.”
McKenzie’s kick for Reece caught England out early, but as Holland noted, it’s not as simple as getting the ball as wide as possible as early as possible, with visiting defence coach Felix Jones marshalling his troops well.
“If you start throwing big wide balls over, they're really good at recovering, as you would have seen in the weekend, with our wingers having to chop back in once we threw out to them.
“It's a form of ‘D’ that Felix loves and he's got the English boys really buying into it.
“We've just got to make sure that we're going to wherever the space is when it's there.”
England’s defensive approach has given the new All Blacks coaching group, led by Scott Robertson, a big early test in a year that will be full of them, and loose forward Luke Jacobson stressed the importance of being patient as new methods were blooded in.
“We’ve got a lot of new coaches, and they’ve got different ways they do things and different ways they want to play. There’s new terminology, new strikes … there has been a lot of adjusting.
“The first couple of weeks have been pretty full-on, but as the weeks go on it will get lighter as you don’t need to learn so much.”
As for what they’ve been practicing this week as they prepare to play at a stadium where they haven’t lost since 1994? There’s no secret – it’s dealing with England’s line speed.
“We're working on it,” Telea confirmed. “And we'll see what happens on the weekend.”
I drink and I forget things.
