Missing the mongrel

With confidence in the All Blacks at historic lows amid fears they will be beaten up in their upcoming tests, can Ian Foster instil the intimidation factor back into his team?

- PAUL THOMAS

An obscure but enduring sub-subcategory of English literature is "Things Mark Twain didn't say or write but are almost invariably attributed to him.”

Twain's greatest mishits include: "History doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme." It seems authorship actually belongs to Austro-American psychoanalyst Theodor Reik, a protégé of Sigmund Freud. In a 1965 essay, Reik wrote, "It has been said that history repeats itself. This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes."

Some rhyming history: in 2004, the All Blacks ended their Tri-Nations campaign by losing to the Wallabies in Sydney and getting hammered 40-26 by the Springboks in Johannesburg. In 2021, the All Blacks wound up their Northern Hemisphere tour by losing to Ireland and getting hammered 40-25 by France.

The 2004 defeats were a hard landing for the new coaching group - Graham Henry, Steve Hansen and current Black Ferns coach and perhaps saviour Wayne Smith - whose stewardship had begun promisingly with back-to-back victories over the 2003 World Cup winners England. Back on home soil, they summoned captain Tana Umaga to help them pick through the wreckage of the failed Tri-Nations campaign.

Umaga came prepared: "I spelt it out," he said in his 2007 autobiography. "We were training too hard; we had nothing left for the games... I really stressed the point that we were training for too long and finally Graham said, 'Okay, I get it, it's sunk in, we can get off that now."