It was in the seconds after they had seemingly lost to South Africa that the All Blacks finally started to play like they really believed they could beat them. They had been mediocre for the first 30 minutes, as poor as they had been all tournament. All of a sudden they found themselves a man down and nine points behind after the referee Wayne Barnes confirmed that the yellow card shown to their captain, Sam Cane, had been upgraded to red, and, then in the very next second, Handré Pollard kicked his third penalty to put South Africa 12-3 up. Nobody has ever come from behind at half-time to win a World Cup final. And New Zealand weren’t going to do it playing this way.
They had already played 10 minutes with 14 men, after Shannon Frizell was sent to the sin-bin in the second minute. Worse, they had bungled two lineouts in South Africa’s 22, which was as many as they had lost on their own throw in the entire tournament before the final. They had been sucked into trying to beat up the Springboks. And it was costing them. Maybe it was the spectre of the seven South Africa forwards waiting on the bench, maybe it was the memory of that 35-7 beating they took at Twickenham before the tournament. Maybe it was both.
On Thursday, their head coach Ian Foster was asked about that warmup match. Foster laughed it off. His team had two players sent to the sin-bin in the first half, he explained, and a third sent off early in the second. “We played that game with 14 men, and 13 for parts of it,” he joked. “We tried that clever strategy and decided we didn’t like it so we’re going to try a different strategy this week.” Well it was different in as much as this time it was just the one yellow, and the red came 10 minutes before the interval rather than five minutes after it.
It made Cane the first man ever to be sent off in a World Cup final. It was a cruel decision. Cane went in high on Jesse Kriel, but he had precious little time to work in. Thing is, the injuries these kinds of blows contribute to are even crueller. It was only on Tuesday that a new landmark study was published which demonstrated an association between the increased risk of the brain disease CTE and the length of a playing career. Among the group of 31 ex-players studied, it went up by 14% each year. This game may have turned for the worse in that moment, but the game will be better for it.
And besides, now they had nothing left to lose, New Zealand started to play the kind of rugby that might have won them the match, the kind these men have been producing since they were kids, playing for schools and clubs in the wind, rain, and mud, in city yards, and country fields, on the pitches in front of Christchurch Boys High, and Auckland Grammar, and Feilding High, and Ponsonby and Otago University, and all the other corners of the country where children grow up dreaming of being All Blacks and playing in games like this one.
Catch followed pass followed catch followed pass, the two so tight together now that they came to feel like one movement. It was Mark Telea who sparked it, stepping through tacklers like he was treading across hot coals, left, right, left, right, from one foot to the other, it seemed to need three men to bring Telea down every time he was on the ball, one to miss him on one side, one to miss on the other, and the third to actually catch him. It was the game of Telea’s young life. Inside him, Richie Mo’unga was roused into the kind of wizardly rugby only he can, all darting runs, and tricks, and flips of the wrist.
Between them, Jordie Barrett was causing havoc, flying wild Hail Mary passes one minute reaching out to pluck in someone else’s wayward returns back to him the next, he had Beauden on one side, and Scott on the other, the three of them almost telepathic in their understanding of where each other were heading. When Siya Kolisi was sent to the sin-bin, South Africa were down to 14 men themselves for a 10-minute stretch, and the All Blacks, sensing their moment, came on stronger. They spurned penalty shots at goal to kick to the corner and try to maul their way over.
And then, glory be, in the 55th minute, they did something nobody has ever done, not even Jonah Lomu’s team in 1995 – Jeff Wilson, Zinzan Brook, Frank Bunce and all the rest of them. They scored a try against South Africa in a World Cup final. It was the first the Springboks have conceded in more than 300 minutes of cup final rugby spread across 30 years. Or that’s what everyone thought. Then Barnes called them back for a knock-on in the lineout. But three minutes later they really did, when Telea came on again and Beauden Barrett swooped on his off-load. And this one actually counted.
That made it a one-point game. Then came the cruellest twist. New Zealand had two kicks to win it, one from Mo’unga’s attempt at a conversion, another from Jordie Barrett’s long-range penalty. When you’re a kid playing the World Cup final against South Africa in the backyard, you never miss those. Adult life, though, doesn’t always play out that way. In the end this final was someone else’s fairytale.
