The All Blacks have been out at Saint-Cloud this week, staying in a country club by a racecourse in the western suburbs of Paris. The bright lights feel a long way off out there, even the searchlight on top of the Eiffel Tower doesn’t stretch that far. Which has suited the team just fine. They have moved quietly through this tournament, putting one win in front of the other after they were beaten by France in the opening game way back in early September. Namibia, Italy, Uruguay, Ireland, Argentina. Now, as Saturday’s World Cup final nears, the party is winding down, the hosts are in bed, the other guests have already left, and the last two left downstairs have had very different evenings.
The South Africans have been the life and soul, centre of everyone’s attention ever since quarter-final week. They’ve staggered through two of the greatest matches in the history of the tournament, beating France by one point, then England by another, they’ve weathered controversies about their use of the head injury assessment system, accusations that their hooker racially abused one of the England team, and made headlines again this week with their decision to drop both their starting half-backs and pick seven forwards among their eight replacements. The All Blacks, meanwhile, have been watching on from the corner.
You don’t need to ask the South Africans about the emotional currents that run through them, they will tell you all about what it means to be the national side of the rainbow nation. But New Zealand’s head coach, Ian Foster, seems grateful to be given the opportunity to talk about what it all means for his team. “We get it from the history and the legacy of the jersey,” he says, “and all the people who have walked the journey we are walking now. Then you can expand that out to our country. Because the All Blacks have always had a special place in New Zealanders’ hearts. The amount of support we have got from our country has been quite overwhelming.”
Foster admits, with a rueful laugh, that it hadn’t always been like that. In 2022, after his team were beaten at home by Ireland, Foster was nearly hounded out of his job. He chuckles about it now, but there is, you sense, still some pain underneath his laughter. “We are generally a conservative bunch, we are generally a little bit cynical at times. We show our love and support by criticising,” he says with a smile. “And yet that has swung around a little bit and suddenly there is a lot of excitement from our country. So we get our motivation from the people we represent, our families, and our past, all that’s critical.”
Important as all that is, he explained, it wasn’t really what was driving this team on. “The other part is what happens when we shut the door and get in a circle,” he says. “It’s about that group of people there, and the standards we have set ourselves.” The last year has been hard going for a team, and a country, that are used to winning. In 12 months they were beaten by Ireland, twice, Argentina, France, South Africa, and drew with England. “There’s been some tough times, particularly last year, but we’ve come out of that fire,” says Will Jordan.
The motives they’ve used to do it are the same ones good rugby union teams have always drawn on: the man standing next to them. Many of them are playing their final games. Sam Whitelock – who could be the first man to win a third World Cup – his great mate Brodie Retallick, Aaron Smith, who leads the haka, Richie Mo’unga, Dane Coles, Foster himself, all of them are moving on after the tournament.
“People only really see the game on Saturday, they don’t see the connections and the bonds we share not only between players but with management,” Mo’unga explains. “There are plenty of laughs. Pranks, jokes, coffees, feeds, kava. All that stuff energises me and is a huge reason I want to try so hard for the person next to me. I’ll miss it. And hopefully it means that when I do look back on this it will be on the game of my life, and the biggest achievement of my rugby career.”
They used to talk about the All Black aura, the marketing team at the NZRU was happy for everyone to believe there was a mystique about the team, but really all that humbug had very little to do with their success, and, after a run of defeats like the ones last year, it wouldn’t have been much use to them anyway. What they were left with in the hard times, what Foster’s drawn on to get them through this tournament, was something simpler and more straightforward.
“Really there is no magic formula, is there?” Foster says. “There’s a bunch of very talented young men who play for their country with all their hearts, and they need to be empowered to go out and do what they do very, very well.” This is the message the old players around the team – Dan Carter, Richie McCaw, Tana Umaga, even Whitelock – have been passing on this week. Do your job, and trust in the man next to you to do his, too. “Just like club rugby.”
Being an All Black “is not spoken”, Foster says, so leave all the talking for everyone else, “it is just done”.
