Opinion: Uncertain times ahead for the All Blacks

Opinion: The All Blacks are taking on the Wallabies in the fortress of Eden Park tonight, but their fate from next weekend on lies in the hands of the government, writes Jamie Wall.

It’s been a change of scene for the All Blacks this week. The ripple effect from the Covid situation saw them move from their usual haunt of the Heritage Hotel down to the Wynyard Quarter on Auckland’s waterfront, as well as their opening two Bledisloe Cup tests being pasted together at Eden Park.

They’re also in the unfamiliar setting of not being the talk of the town, it is an Olympic year after all, so this test match has been shunted into the background of the golden glow emanating from Tokyo.

So it was fair enough for them to be fielding questions about what Olympic sports they’d been enjoying the most, which was a nice change up from the usual rhetoric about taking one game at a time etc. Rieko Ioane talked of his desire to give handball a go, as did Richie Mo’unga about his weightlifting ambitions, while Brodie Retallick declared himself not strong enough for any Olympic event and Ian Foster laid on a myriad of platitudes for the men’s and women’s Sevens teams.

But other than that, it was business as usual. For this fortnight at least, the All Blacks have that luxury – staying put in Auckland is obviously a fantastic advantage against the Wallabies, given the Australians haven’t won a Bledisloe Cup test there since 1986. After that things start to look a lot different.

The All Blacks’ fate from next weekend on lies in the hands of the government. They are due to fly out to Perth for Bledisloe III afterwards, and unless there is a dramatic improvement in Australia’s Covid numbers, they probably won’t come back for quite a while.

As it stands, the chances of the Springboks being allowed into New Zealand quarantine-free after being in Australia look increasingly remote and SANZAAR’s fallback plan will be to just keep all the teams there to play out The Rugby Championship (ruining the 100th All Blacks v Springboks test preparations for Dunedin).

Foster confirmed on Thursday that the end of year tour plans remain in place, so the only way to avoid having to quarantine twice will be for the All Blacks to stay across the Tasman then fly on to Washington DC for their first tour match against the USA. This also means they could be on the road for the better part of three months.

Unless, of course, they opt to share the duties. If the bubble hasn’t reformed by late September we could see one All Black team head to the Rugby Championship and then another one go on the end of year tour.

It’s not unprecedented, as recently as 2018 Foster was the assistant coach of a 51-man All Black squad that went to Japan, then split in half to play a test against Japan while the rest headed off to prepare in London for a test against England.

The consequences of this will be a bunch of guys who get called up to the All Blacks much earlier than they thought, plus a few more getting recalled when they thought their window for playing test rugby may well have closed.

Not that you’ll get any inkling out of Foster and his team about any of this yet, though. The memory of last year’s first test ambush by the Wallabies in Wellington is still rather fresh so the job at hand is to lay down a marker at Eden Park on Saturday, and that’s all the coach and his players are (almost) interested in talking about.

Even then, cards are being closely kept to chests, with no reaction at all to the news that three Wallaby players have been stood down for an alcohol-related team protocol breach. Aaron Smith didn’t even want to talk about it being his hundredth test match.

Pretty soon though, it’s going to be time to face up to the serious off-field challenges the rest of this season may well bring with it.