All Blacks dazzled and dazed in Cape Town

Nothing about the All Blacks in Cape Town on Friday night was new. That is both the beauty of them and the problem for them.

Cape Town

Give the All Blacks turnover ball and they are devastating. Give them space and they are lethal. Allow them tempo and width and there isn’t another team in the game that looks more comfortable playing at pace.

The individual skill sets remain outrageous.

But put the ball in the air, put pressure on their scrum, maul them from the lineout and force them to defend physically and repeatedly, and these All Blacks look as vulnerable as they have for the past few seasons.

Their discipline against the Stormers was awful.

Three yellow cards, a penalty try conceded, penalised 16 times and 15 turnovers lost.

That is not a performance that will trouble the Springboks over four successive Tests.

The All Blacks beat the Stormers because when they could play, they played beautifully.

They made 173 passes to the Stormers 118, carried the ball 141 times to 98, made 417 post-contact metres to 243 and broke the Stormers’ defensive line seven times.

Stormers captain Ruhan Nel felt the difference from matches played in the United Rugby Championship and Investec Champions Cup.

“After the first 10 minutes, it’s really quick. They shift the ball well through the hands, and they find space easily,” said Nel.

“The ball whizzes when they pass. The way you tackle them, if you can’t create yourself two to three seconds in the contact, you’re immediately under pressure.

“When they get momentum … you know the kick is not coming, you know the run is coming. It’s definitely a cut from a different cloth than what we’ve faced over the last couple of years.”

Therein lies the threat of the All Blacks. But to reinforce the point, it is nothing new.

Equally, questioning the Test depth of the All Blacks is nothing new.

Only seven of the All Blacks’ match 23 in Cape Town played in the 40-21 Nations Championship win against Ireland.

This was not Dave Rennie’s Test team in Cape Town

But if this is the next best, then Rennie has problems because the weaknesses were not subtle.

The Stormers attacked them at the scrum. They attacked their lineout maul defence. They put the ball in the air and they found an All Blacks team without any appetite for the contest.

The kick numbers were almost identical, 16 from the Stormers and 15 from the All Blacks.

The difference was in the intent.

The Stormers kicked with purpose and the All Blacks, too often, kicked for sanity.

Rennie wasn’t hiding from any of it.

“We knew they would bring a lot of line speed and in quite dewy conditions that made life difficult, we weren’t quite clinical enough to really expose them,” he said.

“We knew they would come at us with their set-piece so we have to be better in these areas. We expected a lot of aerial attacks and again we didn’t deal with that as well as we wanted. These were all things we expected and things we would have hoped to have dealt with better.”

That last sentence is the significant one.

The Stormers did nothing that surprised the All Blacks.

Yet the All Blacks still couldn’t consistently deal with it.

The Springboks will bring more power at the scrum, more menace to the lineout and maul and considerably more quality to the aerial contest.

The Stormers were a warning, whereas the Springboks will be the ultimate examination.

Rennie described the discipline failures as self-inflicted.

“It’s exactly at those times that we were our own worst enemy,” he said.

“We don’t need to be giving away those penalties. We know how to defend the maul. We know how to scrum, it is just us doing our jobs well, and that should get rid of it because we didn’t plan to give away that many penalties.”

Of course they didn’t.

Nobody plans to concede 16 penalties, lose 15 turnovers, have three players yellow-carded or concede a penalty try.

Pressure creates those moments.

And the Stormers created enough pressure to show the Springboks exactly where to apply it.

Rennie will field the core of his Test team against the Sharks in Durban on Tuesday and the expectation is the All Blacks will win well against a home team missing as many as 10 Springboks.

Saturday in Pretoria against the Bulls should also be comfortable, given how many Bulls players are with the Springboks.

Neither result will define this tour because the business of Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry is the Test series.

The All Blacks remain exhilarating with ball in hand and sensational when a match loses structure.

But the Springboks won’t be interested in giving them the match they want.

Cape Town confirmed the All Blacks’ attacking brilliance but also confirmed their flaws.

*Mark Keohane Sunday Times and Times Live articles