The All Blacks genius and accuracy in exploiting space is not grafted on the training fields of professional clubs, but instead in school playgrounds, backyards, local parks, fallow paddocks and – much to the annoyance of parents – hallways and bedrooms.
The high-performance system has typically not been a place to upskill the elite, but to refine their strategic understanding of the game and learn how to use their vast portfolio of natural skills in context.
A decade or so ago, the All Blacks would regularly find that the Northern Hemisphere sides and South Africa probably bettered them for technical proficiency at set-piece, but the advantage those countries could accrue there was never great enough to outweigh the value of New Zealand’s natural affinity to execute the core skills of pass, catch, run and kick under pressure.
Titanic physical battles would play out, but in the end, the All Blacks almost always won courtesy of their naturally higher skill levels; they could improvise a pass, offload out of contact or pick an impossibly clever running line.
The All Blacks are effectively the apex of a development system that starts with eight-year-olds killing time in parks and ends with players like Christian Cullen twisting George Gregan into knots at Carisbrook.
But the scale of the New Zealand Schools defeat – and it comes after losing to Australia last year, too – is reason enough to wonder if rugby has squashed its talent pipeline because it has fallen victim to socio-demographic and technological change, as well as to the hubris of schools and their incessant desire to professionalise sport and play to the egos of a generation of misguided parents who have sucked up Disney’s saccharine messaging that everyone has greatness within them.
New Zealand’s population has been on a small but steady urbanisation grind for the past 30 years. Specifically, more people are flowing into Auckland and other major cities, where green spaces are harder to find, entertainment and sporting options are greater and economic pressures to find work and contribute to the family household are real.
While it’s not measurable, there has to be a strong likelihood that not as many kids while away as many hours as they once did throwing a rugby ball around – and of course there is modern slavery to the algorithmic forces of social media.
It seems a safe bet that most teenagers spend more time with an iPhone in their hand than they do a rugby ball, and the loss of those informal skill-development hours must be hurting New Zealand’s elite rugby fraternity somehow.
But the bigger problem highlighted by the 81-48 defeat in Canberra is the pervasion of adult vanity and ambition into the world of children’s sport, and this mad desire to treat First XV rugby as the first rung of the professional ladder instead of a supporting pillar in an holistic education.
Where once First XV coaching was the domain of teachers, it is now the place for ambitious former players to start the next stage of their careers.
They come in as directors of rugby, out-earning qualified teachers, typically with a licence to run roughshod over academic commitments or other interests players may have.
There’s an incentive for these people to not act in the wider interests of the school, but rather to hog the best athletes, make them commit exclusively to rugby and play no other sport, and ultimately be judged not on the experience they provide and the overall roundedness and life-readiness of the young men they produce, but exclusively on the results they achieve.
Results matter because so many schools use sporting prestige to sell themselves to prospective parents. For the coaches, their time in charge of a First XV is their ticket to a Super Rugby coaching role.
Dante would recognise that there is another circle of Hell in this inferno, which is the culture of entitlement it has fostered within the playing cohort, who have come to believe that their games should be filmed, if not televised nationally, so they can create the visual collateral they need to secure an agent and a professional contract.
There’s also a fully endorsed social-media world where schools themselves pump out content celebrating this and that, and while it’s no doubt not their intention to inflate the egos and distort the perceptions of their pupils about how good they are, anyone with an ounce of common sense would deduce that will be an inevitable byproduct.
It is, of course, a mass generalisation to say that the aspiring teenage All Black of today is too busy attending to their Instagram account and discussing their pathway with their agent to spend time refining the critical acts of pass and catch, but then again, the result from Canberra suggests that maybe it’s not.
Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He has won multiple awards for journalism and written several books about sport.
