Eloise's Thoughts and Fancies

  Bledisloe Cup, Match Two The Build Up Last week, the All Blacks had a quiet first half, but then smashed the Wallabies off the park in the second, largely on the back of a great kicking game and a better kick chase that let them smash into the Wobs' 22 no less than 15 times compared to their opponents 6 entries. Both teams converted about half their chances into tries, but if you’re getting that many more chances, courtesy of reliably marching up the pitch on your kicking game, everything else becomes easier.  For this week, both teams made a few changes, mostly down to injuries. All but one of those were known by Monday; the All Blacks lost Jordie Barrett on the morning of the match, meaning they had to change five players. I think the Wallabies changed two, definitely Meredith was in for Donaldson, and I think one in the forwards too. The Match This game, loosely speaking, started like the last one finished. The All Blacks were an irresistible wave, running in six tries to...

  The Build-Up Before this match these two teams most recently both played South Africa, with wildly different results.  New Zealand lost a series, 3-1, in South Africa, to what we might call the Bokke senior side. Essentially everyone on the pitch had multiple World Cup winner's medals and about a million caps (neither part is quite true, but looking at the team sheets you get that impression). Gradually, as the attrition wore more severely on the All Blacks, the matches went from an All Black victory to a close Boks' win to a bit of a hiding in the final test. Although this isn't the place, I think the Kiwis will have learnt more from this than the South Africans. They know the areas where they have to improve, and despite the results getting worse, we saw them improve in some of them during the series, and as they have time to really develop systems I expect to see bigger improvements over the next year. I'm not sure the Bokke have much more they can wring out of the...