STEVE HANSEN HAS explained what the All Blacks need to do to beat Ireland in a potential World Cup quarter-final.
An Ireland-New Zealand showdown is looking likely after Andy Farrell’s side beat world champions South Africa 13-8 on Saturday. The All Blacks, meanwhile, fell to an opening day defeat to France, with both sides completing all of their other assignments thus far.
The All Blacks’ 2015 World Cup winning head coach was speaking on The Platform NZ’s It’s Only Sport.
“If we want to beat Ireland, we have to be able to take them on up front, contest at lineout time, make our scrum really potent and challenge them there,” Hansen said.
“I think we need to go through the breakdown, they’re not putting anybody in the breakdown themselves, so go through it rather than trying to play wide. And then once we start going through it and we narrow them up a bit, then we can go wide.
“We have to get to [Johnny] Sexton. He’s a phenomenal player, probably the best I’ve ever seen at making the right decisions on the line who to give the ball to. I don’t think I’ve seen a player anywhere in the world or any time in the world as good as he is at offloading the ball to the right person at the right time, under pressure too I might add. We’ve got to get to him. That means anyone around him, we have to tackle. The South Africans showed us what to do there, they just tackled everybody around the ball because he could give it to any one of them. And that put them under a wee bit of pressure.
“They’re tough so we have to make sure that we’re prepared to stay in the fight, stay in the fight, stay in the fight; take the points when they’re on offer and keep ticking the scoreboard over; and try and put them under pressure from a scoreboard point of view. If we can put scoreboard pressure on them, it’s like, ‘Ah here we go again, we’re not going to get past the quarter-final.’ So that will put a bit of pressure [on] and maybe distract them away from where they need to be mentally.
“They’re a good side. Both them and South Africa are very good sides, but so are we. I think the four top teams are all capable of winning it. France have had a bit of a knockback with [Antoine] Dupont being injured, but if you have a good day, have a bit of luck, and no yellow or red card, you’re in the fight. It’s just going to be a shame to see two good sides get put out in the quarter-final.”
Hansen disagreed with host Martin Devlin’s opinion that New Zealand’s forwards can’t physically compete in a contest such as Ireland versus South Africa for 80 minutes.
“We can compete. What we’ve got to look at and say in the last few Tests [is] we haven’t and then ask ourselves why. Well, seven players hadn’t played for four weeks before we played South Africa so they’re always going to run out of petrol. Especially when they went seven and seven themselves, they had a big shift in their forward pack.
“Then again against France, they would have played two games in six weeks. It’s not enough rugby, but they took that choice because they want to build into this tournament and they’re gonna get plenty of rugby. How are South Africa and and the likes of those teams that have had lots of games in tough pools going to be travelling at the back end of the tournament? Are they going to start feeling it?”
Hansen certainly believes the All Blacks can win the World Cup.
“Yeah, why not? We’ve played South Africa, we’ve beaten them. We were the last team in the world, I think, to beat Ireland and I think we’re playing a lot better now than we were when we did that. We can beat them.”
You can watch the full interview here:
