The Final
What a fantastic game. The All Blacks playing with flair and imagination. Australia doing their damndest to stay in the game. It will forever be Dan Carter's final though. So calm and composed in the aussie fightback, tackling his way to the top of the stats and serenely dropping that goal from 40m to put us back out to a 7 point lead. Regardless of how well Dan played, every player brought their A game. It was a final with loads of points and should be remembered for all time. Maybe as good as the 1987 one.The Epic
Richie was Epic.
Pocock was Epic.
Dan was Epic.
Kaino was Epic. Player of the tournament?
The Good
Nonu - one last game, one last complete performance. Vied with Richie and Dan for MOTM. GO BOY!!! (How good is the commentary?! We had the ITV stuff over here and there wasn't one moment of excitement expressed during the entire World Cup).
Milner Skudder - so many runs, so many metres.
Nigel Owens - what a ref. An incredible understanding of the game and the players. Made every match he officiated in the best he could.
Whitelock and Retallick - so good. So beautiful. So dominant.
The Bad (but not really that bad)
- Conrad was clearly taken off too early. The first half was total domination and the Wobblies had no ball. But without him there were gaps everywhere. I know SBW set up the Nonunator for that great try, but Conrad could have done that too. It's overlooked how good Conrad is on defence - we will probably never see his like again. The player that is everywhere, plays as the fourth loose forward, and sets up attacks. Without him in the line and at the breakdown we were short and unable to compete with their loosies. I'm delighted that his last play in the game was to set up the try for Milner Skudder but gutted that he didn't get the standing ovation for his career he deserved had he come off in the second half.
- Ben Smith was a very naughty boy and his yellow card could have cost us the game. As it was, it was 14 points. Although, had he not been sent off, the score would probably have blown out to massive proportions. We were that good it would have been a 30 point margin. Ben's yellow card evened things up and made the game a greater spectacle.
- Kepu's multiple attacks on the neck and head of various players. A shit of a man. Not sure how he stayed on the pitch. Here's an uber nerd analysing just one of them on Richie.
And here's the screen shots of him high-tackling Milner-Skudder and then face raking / eye gouging him. Prison is the only place for this bloke.
The Tournament
The Good
The BAD
The bad bits about the World Cup were so bad that they can't really be glossed over. Ticketing was a joke. There were never any tickets available. Despite visiting the ticket site every day
The All Blacks tax was in full effect too. Prices were double to watch an ABs game vs the same opposition.
The Legacy
Hopefully the world will now rate the All Blacks a little higher. There's a lot of sniffiness about the ABs in the northern hemisphere. We only win at home (not any more!), Richie is constantly offside and cheats in every ruck (in the age of video refereeing and stadium reffing this is just impossible plus it just reflects on their lack of understanding of the laws of the game), we're chokers (not any more!), we're grumpy, miserable and bad winners (not any more! see SBW helping defeated foes from the turf , see Richie's girlfriend reveal that he's a human being too).
The rest of the world is very bad at rugby and the gulf is massive between us and the rest at the moment. Are they just in a lull? Were we at the height of our playing cycle? The possible legacy of this tournament is that everyone gets a little disheartened and we've put a bunch of kids around the world off playing (other than in NZ).
Small example but still valid. My boy is now at high school in the UK. He wants to play Rugby or at least try it. Their year had the rugby tryouts last week - 7 kids turned up. This was just 3 days after the World Cup final!! Despite a very well organised tournament, there is no passion for the game over here.
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