By the very end the All Blacks were down to 14 men. Not because one of them had been sent off, or because they had run out of fit replacements, but because, well, they felt like it. Scott Barrett had been sent to the sin-bin in the 65th minute for slapping the ball out of the hands of Argentina’s scrum-half Lautaro Bazán Velez, but when his time was up again the coaches didn’t even bother to bring him, or anyone else, back on to the pitch. Apparently, they decided that it would be better preparation for next week to play a man short for the last five minutes. This, then, was a World Cup semi-final that ended up being treated as a practice match.
The All Blacks strung it out into overtime too, pitilessly running through the phases instead of kicking the ball dead as they tried to score one more try on top of the seven they already had. They were, at this point, already 38 points up. “Stop! Stop!” you wanted to holler, “he’s already dead!” That may, in fact, have been what the pocket of Argentinian fans down by the dugout were shouting out. It was the first time in 16 years that anyone has scored more than 30 in a semi-final, since Argentina were beaten 37-13 here by South Africa back in 2007, and the first in 36 that anyone’s won one by that many or more.
There are good players, proud players, in this Argentina team, and it is tempting to say that they deserved better. The crowd certainly did. The Stade de France, which was full of neutrals, was quiet as a night in the desert for long stretches of the game.
Days previously, Argentina’s head coach Michael Cheika explained that it was not motivation his team needed, but belief. They had travelled up late from Marseille, where they had played their quarter-final, so only had three full days in Paris to prepare for this match. Cheika spent them trying to instil what he called a “winning mentality” in the team. It was, he said, his job to “tell the players a story about why they were in with a chance against New Zealand”. Cheika is a good talker, and there were at least 10 minutes there at the beginning when it was possible to imagine that he really had persuaded them.
A good few of those minutes, it’s true, were before the referee actually blew his whistle, Argentina put in a fine performance at the anthems, when a couple of them broke down in tears, and were superb at facing up to the haka, when, they held their line, arms bound tight around each other, and stared down the New Zealanders. Confidence swelled in the opening moments, when they rolled through wave after wave of phases, and won a penalty off the back of a lineout after Jordie Barrett sliced his very first clearance. Emiliano Boffelli kicked it and gave Argentina a 3-0 lead.
They even began to bring the crowd along with them, and a great ululating cheer rose up from the scattered pockets of Argentinian fans, who had filled every stadium the team had played in but got a little lost among the masses of neutral supporters here.
And then New Zealand started to play, in the way only they can. Catch-pass, catch-pass, catch-pass, each one so close to the other that they seemed almost to become a single motion, and all of a sudden Argentina were scrambling back towards their own try-line. New Zealand didn’t just run rings around the Argentinians, but around referee Angus Gardner, too. He seemed to be so utterly hypnotised by the pace of their play that he simply stopped calling any penalties against them at all for a large part of the first half. Poor old Julián Montoya was left pleading with Gardner to please explain his decisions.
When Gardner did, he spoke in crisp English, which is Montoya’s second language. It felt like World Rugby had made a mistake by not giving the match to a referee who could also talk Spanish. Although New Zealand were so good it wouldn’t have made so very much difference if Gardner spoke it like Gabriel García Márquez.
The All Blacks played with ravenous intent, and pounced on every breakdown like hungry gulls swooping on fish and chips. In among it all, they were lit up by the odd wizardly touch from Richie Mo’unga, like the long loopy pass he threw to put Will Jordan through for the first try.
There was one last moment when it looked as though Argentina might just cling on, when New Zealand were leading 15-6 and conceded a penalty from a knock-on in kicking distance, but it came and went as quickly as the advantage Gardner awarded for it.
Shannon Frizell scored New Zealand’s third soon after, and that made it 20-6 at half-time. They could have called the game then. No one has ever come back from more than eight points down at the break to win a semi-final. And Argentina weren’t the team to break that streak. The pain of this defeat will, you guess, last a lot longer than the cuts and bumps and bruises it left them with.
