LONG READ ‘The All Blacks are back… and they are most certainly World Cup contenders’

Regardless of how the last Test of Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry series plays out, there is enough reason now to be confident that the All Blacks are back.

They are the All Blacks again. Behaving like them, training like them, preparing like them and playing like them. Once again, New Zealand are a genuine threat to every team they play and good enough to beat everyone on any given day.

They are, most certainly, World Cup contenders and just how strong a chance they are of winning in Australia depends on how far they progress along their current trajectory in the next 12 months.

Based on the first six Tests the All Blacks have played under new coach Dave Rennie, there is enough reason to believe that New Zealand are a team with the ability to surprise, adapt and grow.

They couldn’t claim the 2-1 ‘series’ win in South Africa they were after in Soweto, but they have shown across the three RGR Tests in the Republic that they can play: that the margin between them and the Boks is wafer thin.

They scored 13 tries, notched what was their biggest margin of victory at Ellis Park and even in the two Tests they lost, they stayed in the fight to the death.

This assessment may seem to be guilty of over-reach given the All Blacks have had trouble coping with the Springboks’ power game – particularly their scrum and driving maul – but there isn’t a team on the planet that could deal with that right now.

This Boks team is special and playing with an unprecedented amount of scrummaging and mauling horsepower that makes the All Blacks’ first three Test performances deceptive.

Look what the Boks did to Ireland last year in Dublin, and how easily they swept aside England in July. Scotland had them reeling for a bit, but it was such a vastly-changed Springboks team from the one the All Blacks faced that it’s hard to make fair comparisons.

It is unlikely that any other team – maybe France – could do what New Zealand have done and win one Test and come so close to winning the other two in South Africa.

You can’t hide from it. Their set-piece is pretty damn dominant, and they get a gravy train of penalties from it.

There is bitter disappointment within the ranks about not winning twice in South Africa, but for the All Blacks, the whole point of the RGR series was to provide them with a definitive gauge of where they sit – what they need to fix, what is working and how they need to adapt.

Winning was a nice to have – not the marker by which they would measure themselves.

Top of what they have learned about themselves is that they need to improve their scrum, defence of the driving maul and their general physicality in collisions.

As assistant coach Neil Barnes said after the 29-24 loss in Soweto: “You can’t hide from it. Their set-piece is pretty damn dominant, and they get a gravy train of penalties from it.

“I’m not going to say they’re all legit but we’ve got to change the perception for the officials as well so we get a fair rub of the green. They’re good at what they do and we’ve got to counter it.

“On our ball there’s hardly a penalty, the ball comes out to play. That’s the mindset. Over here the set-piece is there to create penalties to get yourself down the other end of the field.

“We had one maul try against us which hurt but the scrum penalties – we’ve got to find a way to stop that. For Jason [assistant coach Ryan] and myself, we’ve got work to do.”

The other major area for the All Blacks to work on is their retrieval of contestable kicks – both offensively and defensively. They got better at it as the series went on, but not to the point where they have generated confidence that they can deter teams from kicking to them for fear of not getting the ball back.

But the series so far has shown that the All Blacks are getting more right than wrong. Their attack game is building. Scoring 13 tries in three Tests is irrefutable evidence that Rennie’s ruck-and-run plan is working.

The All Blacks, in a way no other team has done for years, were able to stretch the Boks and find space on the outside. They are starting to build a deeper understanding of the attack patterns Rennie wants and they are proving effective.

They will feel they got their strategy right and that they are well enough conditioned to play their high-tempo, aerobic game. But they aren’t yet capable of executing with the accuracy they need

“All of us envy the way they [New Zealand] can handle the ball, and they are certainly brilliant at that,” Springboks coach Rassie Erasmus said in Soweto. “None of us can say they don’t keep the ball alive, and they play to their strengths.”

The All Blacks are still guilty of small execution or decision-making errors at critical times, but they know that they ran over the top of the Boks in the final quarter at Ellis Park, just about again in Cape Town and had them huffing and puffing in Soweto but couldn’t pull the trigger to put them away after they had taken a 17-12 lead with 20 to go.

The point is they will feel they got their strategy right and that they are well enough conditioned to play their high-tempo, aerobic game. But they aren’t yet capable of executing with the accuracy they need.

“We have been together 10 weeks and there are lots of little things that we think we will get better with in time,” Rennie said. “Being able to change our lineout on the fly… We don’t have hugely experienced guys like Brodie Retallick and Sam Witelockock who can say, ‘They are doing this, so we need to change’. The set-piece has to be better and we can’t hide from that.

“We are creating a lot of opportunities. We have got to turn more of them into points, and I think we have got a game that can putlock them. They will have their moments because they are such a good side. We can’t let them stack their moments on top of each other.

“We have scored 13 tries in three Tests; there are not too many teams scoring that many tries against South Africa.”

It could be argued there is a certain similarity between the Rennie era and that of his predecessor Scott Robertson. Both men built All Blacks sides that were not that far off South Africa.

In 2024 and 2025, New Zealand were operating at a 74 per cent win ratio. On those figures, it is legitimate to question when it was exactly that the All Blacks stopped being a genuine top-tier threat?

And why did NZR feel that it had to make a coaching change and remove Robertson to replace him with Rennie? After all, in those two years the All Blacks beat every top 10 team at least once.

Compare the work-rate, the energy and connectedness at Ellis Park with the way the All Blacks so readily fell apart in the final 25 minutes against the Boks in Wellington last year.

But what’s becoming apparent, as the All Blacks lock horns with the world number one South Africans, is that there were deep and untenable issues in the previous regime.

People close to and connected to the team have noted how much happier the players are now; how they are united, cohesive and playing for one another.

This genuinely matters. It’s not whimsical or intangible. The All Blacks won at Ellis Park because they had an esprit de corps – a willingness to defend with everything they had and hold their line even when the Boks were exerting intolerable pressure in the 10 minutes before half-time.

Compare the work-rate, the energy and connectedness at Ellis Park with the way the All Blacks so readily fell apart in the final 25 minutes against the Boks in Wellington last year.

Comparing those two games is maybe the best way to understand how much the All Blacks have changed under Rennie.

They showed in their three Tests in South Africa that there is not only genuine resilience, but that there is also a review-learn-and-adapt culture.

There is more cohesion and flow and the All Blacks have got their counter-attack mojo back. There is no counter-factual here to know how the All Blacks would have fared in South Africa had Robertson remained at the helm, but every metric suggests not as well as they have under Rennie.

There is definitely a gap – albeit small – between the Springboks and All Blacks, but come November, it’s likely everyone will get a better appreciation of how good this New Zealand team is.