All Blacks forgetting the play calls against England doesn't inspire confidence

I can’t say the performances of the All Blacks, nor the utterances of their attack coach Leon MacDonald, have filled me with enormous confidence.

Good on them for beating England 2-0.

No, neither victory was entirely convincing but at least the All Blacks didn’t lose.

But I doubt I’m alone in saying I was hoping to see something a bit different now that Scott Robertson is in charge.

Especially because MacDonald said Robertson and the staff had “ripped up the playbook’’ ahead of the England series.

Didn’t look like it to my untrained eye but, hey, we’re only two games in.

MacDonald says the players are executing their new plays quite well at training. That’s nice.

It’s just that, as MacDonald went on to say after the team arrived in San Diego to play Fiji, the players forgot what the new plays were called once they had an actual opponent in front of them.

I’m not making that up. That’s what the man said.

Look, I get that teams have rehearsed plays from set pieces or to get out of their 22, but I kind of want players to play. This isn’t the NFL.

Yet I can’t escape the feeling, as I haven’t for a while, that this All Black doesn’t really understand that training and games are rather different.

That this is a team that has a menu of plays and runs them, regardless of how ineffective they are or how well the defence is reading them.

It’s not restricted to the backline, either.

Never mind that the opposition lineout knows where the ball’s going – and are regularly stealing or disrupting the ball – the All Blacks seemed wedded to throwing it to the same place or player.

And, why not? It works at training, after all.

If I have a consistent criticism of All Black teams of recent vintage, it’s that they run out of ideas – even heart – when Plan A doesn’t work.

They’ve rehearsed their plays, had them run like clockwork at training and genuinely don’t know what to do – other than kick – when they don’t work on Saturdays.

If I were the guy in the jersey, I’d be wanting to come up with my own solutions to problems. Solutions that I would settle on as the game progressed.

But I suspect we’re in an era where a backroom boffin has studied tape, decided where a defence can be breached and the players have been delivered a play by which to achieve that.

Only, according to MacDonald, pressure and fatigue caused the players to forget what those were against England.

Rugby is complicated which is why, I’m told, former players are fast tracked into prominent coaching roles.

Most of us watching are a long time removed from playing, never progressed to anything like Super Rugby and Test level and simply don’t understand the complexities of the modern game.

Only those who recently inhabited that playing environment are in a position to understand how difficult it is to get the ball from one end of the field to the other and score some points.

I have some sympathy with that point of view.

But, simpleton that I am, I still think that if you run harder and tackle harder than the opposition, you’ll win more games than you lose.

Yes, there’s more nuance to rugby than that, but you still need to earn the right to play.

For the time being, the All Blacks seemed determined to play their way. To run their prescribed plays irrespective of their effectiveness.

It’s not the plays themselves that broke down against England, apparently, just the execution of them.

Well, they’ll no doubt work a treat against Fiji, in what’s a glorified training run.

I’m just not sure it’s a recipe for success in real games.