South Africa may be back-to-back world champions and ever more established as the best men’s Test team on the planet but there’s a certain aura that accompanies the arrival of the All Blacks. “When was the last time we beat them?” Ben Earl replied, curtly, when asked after England’s win over Fiji if New Zealand remained the ultimate challenge. “It certainly feels that way.”
The answer, of course, to Earl’s question is the 2019 Rugby World Cup semi-final; to find a victory at Twickenham, one has to go back to that day in 2012 which perhaps still stands as the high watermark for an English performance on home soil. In fact, in a history of conflict that stretches all the way back to a lone meeting at Crystal Palace in 1905, one can find only eight defeats for the All Blacks.
