The All Blacks three tries to one victory over England came with plenty of missed opportunities as errors and handling plagued the side when searching for the final touch.
The visitors finished with 23 turnovers lost as they chanced their arm with a lot of ball-in-hand rugby against England’s defence.
When they did find open pasture, often through workhorse Wallace Sititi who made three line breaks, they weren’t able to make England pay often squandering the opportunity with turnovers or kicks that weren’t regathered.
There was audacious rugby at times, with Will Jordan attempting an offload coming out of his 22 that fell short of Ardie Savea running on his inside hip. The turnover gave England prime attacking ball which was celebrated widely by their forwards.
Head coach Scott Robertson was consistent in his message, backing his players decision-making and instinctual reads but also said it’s bigger than that, forming the identity of New Zealand rugby.
“If you see it, do it, back yourself,” Robertson told media.
“I think, it’s part of our skill set and part of our DNA, you know, we want to play footy, if it’s on we will take the opportunity in front of us.
“We’ve got some great tries and but more importantly, showed a lot of grit to stay in that from behind.”
Part of overplaying led to the deficit New Zealand fell into, with attacking from within their own half leading to cheap turnovers and scoring opportunities for England, while their one try came from a Marcus Smith intercept that flipped the game on it’s head.
Robertson admitted that some of their play wasn’t good enough at this level, but he didn’t want his team to stop taking opportunities when they see something on.
“Understand why we’ve sort of made that error. But like I said, because you can see it, let’s do that,” Robertson.
“You know times this year, we haven’t trusted ourselves. We did a couple of new kicks to shape the backfield. Some came off, some didn’t, it let us get some kick meters later on.
“But, you know, keeping the ball alive is pretty important in our game. And some came off, some didn’t, but we will always keep fine tuning it.
“Some of the stuff’s not good enough for Test level, we’ll be honest in our review, even though we’ve got the result, we’ll still go deep.”
Captain Scott Barrett was happy with the endeavour shown by the team to keep attacking despite falling behind by eight points at one stage.
“I think we potentially just played a little bit more than rugby than them,” he said.
“There was a few arm wrestles, but yeah, I was pleased with how we just our endeavour to play, and that created an opportunity with Mark to put us in front.”
As they prepare to face Ireland in Dublin this Friday night, Robertson concedes that they will have to be better.
“We need to tidy up that discipline, some execution errors, but keep creating, keep being brave. It’s small margins but we will definitely have to be better.”
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