A strange, if frustrating game. For the first 20 minutes, the men in black looked like the All Blacks usually do, particularly on New Zealand soil before their own crowd: imperial, unstoppable, invulnerable. In their traditional citadel of Eden Park, they were soon up 20-3 on the back of three tries, 80 per cent possession and an endless stream of penalties.

Up against any other team in world rugby, they might have expected to go on and rack up at least 50 points by full-time. After all, for that first half of the first half they were not only dominant on the ground, but also in the air. Time and again, they were able to retrieve their own box-kicks and swarm forward as an unstoppable black tide that at one point swept over our halfback, Tate McDermott, and spat him out, broken.

But were

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