One thing New Zealand do very well besides always having a camera to hand whenever they’re being humble behind closed doors is exposing your bullshit.

If you’ve got any hint of bullshit about your attacking concepts or, more importantly, your defensive structure and transition systems, they will find that bullshit, they will rip through it and leave it before you in tatters. They do that to bad teams with a ruthlessness that verges on the unkind. They do it to good teams with a relish that almost seems to say you were an idiot for thinking it would go any other way.

This year they’ve put hefty scores on Fiji, Australia, Italy, Argentina and Wales without any of those teams necessarily playing all that badly in defeat. They traded wins with the Springboks, the current World Champions, towards the tail end of the Rugby Championship and that mini-series was the only set of games where the All Blacks weren’t able to play with the kind of freedom and, well, ease that had highlighted almost every other game they played in 2021.

Is the solution to play like South Africa? Perhaps. But that isn’t palatable to the rugby commentariat as a whole – not that it would matter what they think when it comes to winning games – or, in a much more realistic way, it isn’t even practical with the personnel available to us which is the other main issue.

No, if Ireland are going to beat this version of the All Blacks, we’ll have to do it on their terms while utilising the principles that have underpinned our recent successes against them in 2016 and 2018 – scrum dominance, lineout security, accuracy when chances appear – and they will – all combined with oppressive defence.

In November 2019, however, Ireland had none of these. We were blown away on the biggest stage in the game and we would have been hard-pressed to complain had we been nilled. Similar underperformance here will lead to an even heavier defeat. New Zealand are better today than they were then. By the same metrics, I think we will need to overperform on 2018’s levels to win here.

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The vibes coming into this week are good.

Johnny Sexton could hardly have asked for a better 100th cap against Japan, could he? Scored a try, picked up a sweet samurai sword after the game – for free! – and got a hefty Five Star rating from me. Everything is coming up Johnny.

The reaction to the manner of Ireland’s win over Japan has been remarkably good. For the first time in years, Ireland are getting praised for their style, rather than merely accumulating more points than the opposition over the course of 80 minutes. That has sent Ireland into a six-match winning streak after a poor spell at the start of 2021 that saw us lose twice on the bounce to Wales and France*.

* As an aside, Luke Pearse will referee this game and he was the guy in charge of that game against France earlier this year.

When you add in the emphatic, stylish nature of last week’s win to that winning streak, you could be forgiven for feeling that the build-up to this game has had an almost two-pint buzz to it. We’re happy, we’re giddy, we’re thinking about things like 18 offloads and 14 linebreaks.

Will that translate to higher-level opposition? That’s the question. We absolutely battered Japan everywhere – physically and at the set-piece on both sides of the ball – and, as a result, we could play any way we wanted without any worry about what Japan would bring. Lineout? They, for all extents and purposes, didn’t have one. They had nothing for us in the maul and they lost every other collision. Anyone can look good in that environment.

The All Blacks will be a different beast. They are bigger, they are more physical, they are capable of the kind of brutality that Japan were not interested in. The most underrated component of playing the All Blacks is how physical they are in contact on both sides of the ball.

That alone will be a massive shock compared to last week and change the complexion of… everything.

New Zealand: 15. Jordi Barrett, 14. Will Jordan, 13. Rieko Ioane, 12. Anton Lienert-Brown, 11. Sevu Reece; 10. Beauden Barrett, 9. TJ Perenara; 1. Joe Moody, 2. Codie Taylor, 3. Nepo Laulala, 4. Brodie Retallick, 5. Samuel Whitelock (c), 6. Ethan Blackadder, 7. Dalton Papalii, 8. Ardie Savea

Replacements: 16. Dane Coles, 17. Karl Tu’inukuafe, 18. Tyrel Lomax, 19. Tupou Vaa’i, 20. Akira Ioane, 21. Finlay Christie, 22. Richie Mo’unga, 23. David Havili

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The All Blacks kick the ball a lot more than they’re given credit for.

I wrote about this a few weeks ago so I won’t go into detail on why they kick so much but, on a broad strokes basis, the All Blacks kick to add verticality and spacing to the game. Against Wales, New Zealand kicked 11.8% of their possessions. That goes some way to explaining why Wales only had 27 seconds less possession than the All Blacks in that game, which is notable given that they lost by 38 points. I’m not saying that the All Blacks kicking was the difference in the game, but it played a significant role in my opinion.

The individual breakdown of the kicking against Wales is interesting too.

Ball Played By Hand Percentage vs Wales

• Anton Leinert-Brown – 100%
• Will Jordan – 92%
• TJ Perenara – 91% 
• Rieko Ioane – 87%
• David Havili – 84%
• Jordie Barrett – 77%
• Beauden Barrett – 59%

Anton Lienert-Brown carried or passed the ball 100% of the time but every other back kicked the ball in ever-increasing amounts. Notably, TJ Perenara – the starting scrumhalf against Wales and here – only kicked 9% of his possessions. These would be box kicks and other exits. As a comparison, Herschel Jantjies had a BPH percentage of 79% against Wales last weekend.

So New Zealand don’t really box kick but, I would argue that most teams will move away from box kicking as the season progresses because it is a less valuable strategic play in the era of 50/22 and Goal Line Drop Out than it was even last season. Scrumhalves will still exit through the box kick and, occasionally, hoist one up further up the field but the value in kicking off #10 or others has increased exponentially. The All Blacks embody this at the moment.

The most notable BPH percentage against Wales belonged to Beauden Barrett who, at 59%, kicked more than Handre Pollard did against the same opposition. Now, a lot of those kicking scenarios came on transition, where you’ll mostly see Beauden Barrett but those transitions were deliberately generated by those same kicking actions. The All Blacks will kick until they get the picture they want, which is often another kick.

The point is, the All Blacks are most dangerous and eminently comfortable in transition states – transition defence and, in particular, transition attack. They will often keep the ball active for long periods during phase play where they move the ball down the field with a lot of length to fill up the memory cards of the players most affected intellectually by long periods of play in the modern game – the wingers.

Most wingers enjoy short sequences of defence, especially wingers who could be described as “not natural defenders”. When you have short phase sequences, your positioning can be stressed, sure, but the longer a sequence of phases goes on – both from a time perspective and a distance covered perspective – the easier it is to get caught out of position.

The All Blacks are very good at shaking up the positioning of opposition wingers by increasing the distance they have to defend horizontally over a period of phases – usually 3+ but if the distance covered is long enough, they’ll strike if they can get access to the ball on a turnover.

Look at this try against Wales as a further example. The key point for me is that the play was created by three long All Blacks kicks – let the whole thing run through and watch who gets targeted at the end of the sequence;

How do you mitigate this? It’s no shock to me that the team that pushed New Zealand the hardest this season is also the team most likely to out-kick them – the Springboks. South Africa have no issue playing conservatively on longer kicking sequences to avoid falling into the usual traps that playing against New Zealand’s kicking game brings. The All Blacks love to prey on teams who are not as organised as they are in transition. If you are hyper-focused on one playmaker, if you overplay, if you over-extend, they’ll hurt you.

The Springboks are really good at balancing the risks of kicking back to the All Blacks and pressuring them just enough to stay alive. Watch this long sequence and see where the weak points are.

Watch it again – see how the Springboks ensure the game is played where they want through their own kicking game while balancing the threat of the All Blacks finding the most advanced wing.

If you don’t match kicks with the All Blacks, they’ll hurt you. The Springboks know this and play accordingly. When South Africa beat New Zealand earlier this year – and pushed them close a week later – they pretty much matched them kick for kick and carry for carry.

What was the key point of difference? The scrum and lineout.

South Africa dominated their own lineout, dragged New Zealand’s below 80% completion and then pressured them relentlessly in the scrum.

Wales vs New Zealand was actually pretty tight on-field and likely would have been much closer had Wales not conceded so many scrum penalties and botched so many of their own lineouts. If you can stress New Zealand in the scrum and maul – we have the power to do the latter but the former is a concern – we can actually limit the scope of their kicking game.

Essentially, if they fear our lineout, we can go a long way to limiting other parts of their overall attacking game. That puts big pressure on our callers and hooker, while the other part of their game puts major pressure on Lowe, Larmour, Ringrose and Conway.

It’ll be tight – I hope – but we have the recipe to repeat 2018, even while the threat of another 2019 lurks in the background.