UPDATED: 6:10am – These days, there isn’t a current All Black who has known life without the Bledisloe Cup.
The closest they get is that veteran flanker Jerome Kaino can remember touring with the All Blacks in 2004 and seeing for himself what having the trophy meant to the likes of Justin Marshall and Anton Oliver, who had been through the dark period of 1998 to 2002.
Those older players of that period had felt the pain of seeing the Wallabies out play them. They knew what it was like to give everything and still not be good enough to win.
Between 1998 and 2002 the Wallabies had this magical ability to conjure the miracle moment; to find a way to get to the 80th minute as winners, breaking New Zealand hearts each and every time.
When the All Blacks took back possession in 2003, the emotions of those who had long-suffered, were real, raw and strong.
The likes of Marshall and Oliver knew life without the Bledisloe and life with it, and didn’t need to spend a lot of time thinking about which they preferred.
But this current group of All Blacks have no such pain in the system.
All they have ever known is endless victory: that the Bledisloe is tough, that the Wallabies throw a lot at them and occasionally grab a test win, but haven’t been good enough or resourceful enough to do it the necessary number of times in a season to take back the trophy.
Having experienced this pattern for so long, is there some kind of acceptance within young All Blacks minds that this is just how things are?
Repetition to this extent creates expectation and while the All Blacks take the Wallabies hugely seriously, without ever having known what it is like to lose a series, there does often feel to be some kind of slightly manufactured element to their stance.
Nothing is more powerful than sampled experience and who doesn’t wonder if the best thing for the longer-term future of the Bledisloe Cup and for this emerging All Blacks side, would be for the Wallabies to defy all predictions, buck every trend and pull off a classic win in Sydney and then somehow do it all again in either Dunedin or Brisbane?
Goodness knows Australian rugby needs that miracle to happen, but so too, for different reasons does New Zealand.
An entire generation of Kiwis probably doesn’t believe that Australia ever held the Bledisloe Cup. That same generation must wonder why everyone talks up a rivalry that they can’t see actually exists.
Selling tickets to Bledisloe tests down the track could become impossible rather than hard if there is no credible sense of fear or unpredictability around the outcome.
From an All Blacks perspective, defeat would fast-track the emotional education of a young team.
Give them exposure to genuine pain and with it, that deeper desire to push that bit deeper into their preparation knowing that defeat is a real rather than imagined entity.
And above all else, a Wallabies series victory would restore faith in sport’s ability to surprise and to not conform to logic or sensible analysis.
-NewstalkZB
