All Blacks v Scotland: Spooked All Blacks go from self-sabotage to magic finish – Gregor Paul
THE FACTS
- Damian McKenzie’s impact off the bench secured a win for the All Blacks against Scotland.
- Scotland levelled the score at 17-17, but McKenzie’s magic turned the game around.
- The All Blacks’ resilience and McKenzie’s brilliance kept their Grand Slam hopes alive.
He’s blessed with Scottish heritage and certainly stood up as a hero to be written into folklore, but Damian McKenzie was most definitely not the toast of Edinburgh after breaking local hearts with a brilliant 35-minute shift off the bench at Murrayfield.
For the fourth time in succession, the All Blacks were staring at the possibility of a first defeat to Scotland, having found themselves under siege from a rampant home team who caught fire in the 20 minutes after half-time.
There was a blue tidal wave surging at Murrayfield, with Scotland turning a 17-0 halftime deficit into 17-17 cliffhanger – and for the first 30 minutes of the second half, New Zealand didn’t appear to have a get-out-of-jail card.
Their luck in Edinburgh appeared poised to finally run out when Wallace Sititi became the third All Black to be yellow-carded in the match, signalling what seemed to be an incurable desire for self-sabotage.
The All Blacks were lost in that period. They couldn’t get the ball. They couldn’t keep it the few times they had it, and all they wanted to do was scramble it out and breathe for a bit before the Scottish onslaught began again.
Scotland didn’t get the result they wanted, but they did at least have the satisfaction of knowing that they reduced the All Blacks to nervous wrecks – spooked beyond recognition of their true selves and locked into a spiral of ill-discipline, unforced errors and no ideas.
It was a mad transition, because for the first 40 minutes, New Zealand looked comfortable and mostly in control.
They were moving the ball with the same sort of ease with which they were in the final quarter of Chicago last week, taking their half chances with a welcome precision.
Their rugby wasn’t magical, but it did look cohesive and almost effortless the way their big men took their time to pick the right pass, and the runners came hard and fast.
At halftime, there was a sense that New Zealand would blow the game open, but instead, they dropped the kickoff and seemed to let that one mistake drain them of confidence.
It was Scotland’s game to take when they levelled things up at 17-17 with 20 minutes to go, but that was until McKenzie snatched it from them.
He had a little help from Peter Lakai, who created a slight break in proceedings when he pulled off a stunning turnover, and then it became the McKenzie show.
He pulled off a brilliant, ball-and-all tackle on Darcy Graham that prevented Scotland’s wing from getting the ball away from a Finn Russell cross-kick, and then he popped up to drive an unlikely 50-22 that set up the lineout from which the All Blacks would then launch a sweeping attack to the left.
That appeared to have been snuffed only for McKenzie to miraculously twist, turn and plant the ball over the line.
It was the moment of magic the All Blacks needed to ensure history didn’t turn the way Scotland was starting to believe it would, and the moment New Zealand could turn the storyline from inexplicable collapse to gutsy but ugly win.
There was such a fine line between these two different narratives, but the victory can’t be used to gloss over what was a worrying void after halftime in which multiple weaknesses were exposed.
The old chestnut of ill-discipline under pressure reared its ugly head again, starting with Leroy Carter’s dumb trip on Graham, moving through to Ardie Savea’s cynical collapse of a driving maul (from which Scotland scored from anyway), to Sititi’s ill-advised attempt at an intercept.
The scrum never built on its early dominance, the defence of the driving maul looked creaky, and for long periods in the second half, the All Blacks were a ship with no engine drifting at sea.
They didn’t have any shape or direction. They didn’t seem to have much confidence or belief either and they would generously be described as fuzzy, but more accurately as shell-shocked.
McKenzie snapped them out of it with his near-perfect demonstration of what an impact performance looks like, and they found a way to reset their focus into pulling off one play at a time.
It worked for them. Lakai got his turnover. McKenzie kicked his 50-22. The lineout was solid. The drive good. And then McKenzie did his magic trick in the corner and that ability to find a way has to be recognised.
Sometimes, especially in this part of the world at this time of the year, it’s the quality of resilience that matters most.
The challenge is to absorb the pressure and win a few big moments, and as well as McKenzie’s brilliance in that department, there was a collective iron will about the All Blacks’ defence that was prevalent for the full 80 minutes.
Sheer desire to tackle and McKenzie’s brilliance on attack has kept the dream of a Grand Slam alive.