Hope and fear abound in New Zealand after 24 years of hurt

To BE in Invercargill and to witness the sense of World Cup anticipation is to be reminded of your childhood and giddy days spent in the back of the car heading for the seaside.

“Are we there yet?” asks the waitress at The Kiln.

“How much longer?” asks the lady at the City Library.

“This is taking ages!” says the bloke at the Balmoral Motel.

The wait is over, though. Tomorrow night in Auckland, Richie McCaw’s New Zealand and Finau Maka’s Tonga bring the curtain up on the biggest sporting jamboree that has ever hit this land. There are not many certainties in life but this game contains a few. The atmosphere will be electric, the margin of victory emphatic and the reaction to the expected landslide, bordering on the hysterical.

New Zealand will surely annihilate the Tongans and, in the aftermath, there may well be a rush to acclaim them as champions-in-waiting just as there was four years ago when they put 30 points on Italy in the first 20 minutes of their opening game – and 76 in all – and just as there was four years before that when they put another 70 points on Italy in their first game, a demolition job that had everybody swooning, a chilling try-fest that made the All Blacks even hotter favourites than they already were. And they were already red-hot.

We know how it ended in 2007, though. And 2003. And 1999, 1995 and 1991. Epic failure. Great All Blacks have come and gone with no Webb Ellis to their name. Olo Brown and Jonah Lomu, Christian Cullen and Josh Kronfeld, Tana Umaga and Jeff Wilson. It’s been almost a quarter of a century since New Zealand won a World Cup, a hard fact that is driving the nation to the point of madness and a truth that should temper the reaction to whatever they visit upon the Tongans tomorrow.

There are degrees of failure, though. When the Kiwis couldn’t defend their title in 1991, New Zealanders could rationalise it easily enough. The team wasn’t the best, there was a split in the dressing room, the head coach, Alex Wyllie, and his assistant, John Hart, didn’t get on. No wonder they flopped. In 1995, more logic. The team was poisoned by Susie the kitchen maid and the ruinous droplets of Indian Trick she supposedly dropped in the coffee two days before the final. Brian Lochore, the coach of the day, recalls taking his players for a wander in the park. “Some didn’t wander at all,” he said. “They just slumped down and leaned against the nearest tree.” Andrew Mehrtens played part of that final with double vision. Jeff Wilson was seen throwing up on the touchline. Craig Dowd had to be replaced such was his sickness. Even Colin Meads, the most indomitable All Black of them all and manager of the ’95 Kiwis, spent a day in bed after taking Susie’s potion. He said later that it was the only sick day he’d suffered in his entire life.

Every team runs out of excuses in the end, however. What has happened to the All Blacks in the last three World Cups has been far more troubling than in-fighting and sabotage because it has raised so many issues that serve as an affront to a nation that prides itself on the essential hardness of its rugby men. It was written that, when he was in his scary pomp, the ultimate All Black, Colin Meads, left the field one day with a battered and bruised testicle – but he didn’t know who it belonged to. Where, the New Zealanders have been asking every four years, is the spirit of Meads?

Meads didn’t know about “Brand All Black” in his day, didn’t have any dealings with sponsors or publicists or those using the sacred jersey to chase the corporate dollar. He’d have ripped their heads off. It’s been that way for years, though. The brand has been developed and the hubris has been vast. When New Zealand arrived in the UK in 1999 they did so in a Boeing 747 with paintings of the players on the tail of the aircraft. Before they played a match there was talk about the homecoming party. They left behind an expectant nation sold on their invincibility and the All Blacks couldn’t handle the pressure.

They have lacked heart. Their supposed leaders have turned out to be chocolate soldiers. Their travails at World Cups have long since ceased to be a story solely about a weak-minded rugby team. It has broken out of a sporting context and has caused an entire country to ask about the national psyche: “What is wrong with us?”

Before their fateful meeting with the French at Twickenham in the World Cup semi-final of 1999, New Zealand had played four games with an aggregate try count of 26-3 and an aggregate points total of 206-46. Jonah Lomu had scored six tries in those four games, Jeff Wilson had scored five. The havoc they created seemed to justify the hype that surrounded them. Leading 24-10 early in that second half against the French they looked an unbeatable force against a side they had already humbled that summer in a 54-7 mauling.

In their hour of desperation, France stuck their hand in the gutter and pulled out a gameplan. For the last half hour at Twickenham they gouged eyes and squeezed testicles and butted heads, they resorted to every foul tactic they could think of in an attempt to unsettle New Zealand. And it worked. John Hart, their coach, had told his players not to retaliate in the face of French intimidation, so they accepted the abuse meekly and didn’t fight back. For many, particularly the old dogs of war, it wasn’t so much that they lost the semi-final that infuriated them, but how they lost it. When Josh Kronfeld told Sean Fitzpatrick and Zinzan Brooke that the French had been gouging him and grabbing him by the balls they couldn’t believe what they were hearing, couldn’t believe that Kronfeld didn’t bring an end to it with some old school retribution.

Fitzpatrick could have told a hundred stories of the way it was and the way it should be, but the one he spoke of was from 1986, the year before the All Blacks won their one World Cup. It was a Test in Nantes. The French were “at it” in the scrum. Laurent Seigne, the home prop, was giving his opposite number, Steve McDowell, some sly uppercuts away from the referee’s line of vision. Having taken some blows McDowell looked Seigne in the eye and said, “If you do that again you’re going to be carried off on a stretcher.” Seigne did it again – and was carried off on a stretcher. The referee looked at McDowell in shock. “I warned him,” said the Kiwi, before walking away.

The French didn’t throw another punch all day.

The team of ’87 didn’t wait for the referee to sort things out, they did it for themselves. They did everything for themselves. But then they had leaders. In 1999, they had followers. When Justin Marshall, the scrum-half, collected his luggage at Christchurch on the way home, somebody had daubed “Loser!” on his suitcase. Hart got death threats.

Hart had a racehorse and the racehorse got death threats, too.

There is a fine line between passion and hate in New Zealand rugby.

Taine Randell had been an ineffective leader in 1999 and, by 2003, he was replaced by Reuben Thorne, another ineffective leader when the pressure was intense. In the relative peace-time rugby of the Tri-Nations the All Blacks once again looked imperious. A huge array of new talent had broken into the set-up in the year before the World Cup; Ali Williams, Keven Mealamu and Rodney So’oialo making their debuts in 2002, followed soon after by the arrival of Mils Muliaina, Joe Rokocoko, Daniel Carter and Ma’a Nonu. They put 52 points on South Africa in Pretoria in the Tri-Nations and 50 points on Australia in Sydney. By the time they faced Australia again in the semi-final of the World Cup they had out-scored their previous five opponents – South Africa among them – by 46 tries to six. And then they flopped again.

Talent was not an issue. These All Blacks had all the talent in the world, all the power, all the pace, all the try-threat, but little of Australia’s ability to embrace a big occasion and handle the strain. Full of fire in their earlier games, they fell silent when Australia put them under pressure. Thorne disappeared and nobody took his place as leader. George Gregan ended the game by goading the All Blacks.

“Four more years!” he laughed. “Four more years!”

The myth of the “greatest team in the world” continued anew. New Zealand played 12 Tests in 2005 and won 11. They played 13 Tests in 2006 and won 12. In 2007, just a few months before the beginning of the World Cup, they played France twice and destroyed them in an aggregate score of 103-21, then they won the Tri-Nations. They were never more desperate for a World Cup, never more obsessional and never more shocked when it all went wrong again.

The burden on the All Blacks had become immense. Before their departure in 2007 one of their sponsors gathered some soil from the birthplace of each player and put it in a bottle for them to bring to France. It was a gimmick and a measure of the madness that surrounded the team, who duly caved in again under the burden of expectation when the previously battered French got their noses in front in the quarter-final and forced the All Blacks to try and break them down, which they couldn’t.

They blamed bad calls from the referee, Wayne Barnes, and, sure, there were some terrible decisions against them. But there was also panic in the All Black ranks. There wasn’t a cool head among them. God knows what Meads made of it all.

“It was like a slow strangulation,” said the hooker, Anton Oliver. “I remember going back beneath the posts [after a French try] and quite a few boys were looking around up in the stand and that’s not a good sign. You want to just huddle in and stay focused, rally round the skipper or whoever was doing the talking.”

It comes down to character in the end. Substance. You only have to walk the streets here for two minutes to appreciate the hope and fear the New Zealanders have right now.

They have terrific players, but do they have the leaders? No matter what horror they inflict on Tonga tomorrow, that question will remain the key to this World Cup.