All Blacks leaking aura from all sides 

Source: PhotosportJubilation and celebration: Jimmy Cowan and Daniel Carter

There's a Facebook group for just about everything these days, it seems.

A spot of frivolous Facebook searching is enlightening. There's a group for people who want to bring back Lime and Cracked Pepper Kettle chips. A group for people who will go slightly out of their way to step on a crunchy-looking leaf. A group for people who believe that Creed lead singer Scott Stapp is the Antichrist.

Most disturbing of all is a "Closet Obsessionists" group dedicated to yours truly, totalling 16 members, mostly male.

Surely it can't be long, then, before there's a group for rugby players and pundits who have accused the All Blacks of losing their aura and almost immediately been made to look like complete idiots.

It's not like there would be a shortage of members. Any rugby journalist worth his salt has played the aura-loss card at some stage or another. It must be like a rite of passage overseas.

The All Blacks just can't do anything these days without haemorrhaging aura from every seam. With each defeat they suffer, it bursts forth like the opening of some previously-unseen floodgates. Aura floodgates.

Aura is something they used to possess in a vast, possibly innumerable quantity, it seems. Nowadays, ask any foreign fan and they'll tell you that the aura is either completely gone, or in very low supply indeed.

But just why such a hardened bunch as the international rugby fraternity would obsess so much over such a new age concept as aura is curious in itself.

It's hard to imagine this current crop of All Blacks - or any for that matter - sitting around a camp fire with a guitar and their incense, fixing each other with concerned, faraway gazes.

"Whoa, Richie, you've, like, totally lost your aura, man."

"No way Brad, yours is like, barely even there, dude. Gnarly."

Fortunately, there appears to be little direct correlation between possession of aura and sporting success.

Skill levels are still more important than aura levels on a rugby field; it's still better to have a solid scrum than a pack of rag dolls with a faint glowing outline around them.

Aura doesn't create tries through constructive phase play or flowing backline moves nearly as often as having fast, powerful and highly-skilled players does.

Still, that didn't stop Wales coach Warren Gatland from throwing his weight behind the "lost-their-aura" camp this week. Perhaps if he'd considered the embarrassing backlash that previous aura-observers have suffered after pulling the aura card, he may have phrased his words differently.

Something like, "they're not quite as good as they used to be, but without the independent advice of a Tibetan spiritual elder, I cannot sufficiently gauge their aura levels at this point in time".

Premature aura-loss accusations: an historical timeline

Simon Barnes, 27 November 2004:

"For once, the great, implacable, unstoppable All Blacks machine has made an error," Barnes wrote in the lead-up to their season-ending Test at the Stade de France. "Today, New Zealand must take on a half-decent rugby team - the world has caught up with the All Blacks myth."

In an article that reeked of the unmistakable bitterness of an Englishman who's watched his team have its nose ground into the dirt by the Black machine time and time again, Barnes went on to accuse the All Blacks of deliberately orchestrating "soft tours", trading on "nothing but worn out myths", and being afraid of playing England at Twickenham - allegedly "the hardest task in world rugby".

Not only did they go on to deliver one of the most severe pants-down thrashings of the Henry era - a 45-6 drubbing of France in Paris - but they made a mockery of Barnes' sneering arrogance by comfortably dispatching of his beloved England at Twickenham in 2005, 2006 and 2008.

We don't hear much from Barnes these days - perhaps he has since drowned in a sea of his own froth.

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Brian O'Driscoll, 10 August 2007

You'd hardly think the captain of Ireland would be in any position to comment on auras of invincibility. After all, just two years earlier in New Zealand, he "could have died" after being lightly dropped on his shoulder.

O'Driscoll professed to having "seen signs" that the aura of invincibility was gone, and harbouring confidence that his team could exploit these weaknesses when the two sides met in the World Cup quarter-finals.

As it happened, they never did meet in Cardiff, because Ireland were already on the plane home, beaten by both Argentina and France in the pool stages.

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Paul Kent, 25 July 2008

"Almost on cue, the arrogant All Blacks arrived in town, clinging to their faded reputation by refusing to speak after touching down."

So said Kent, writing for that bastion of reasonable, intelligent and impartial rugby commentary that is Sydney's Daily Telegraph, in the build-up to last year's Bledisloe clash in Sydney.

He went on.

"Continual World Cup failures, a loss to South Africa in the second game of the Tri Nations series and the Wallabies' hiring of Kiwi-born coach Robbie Deans appear to have left the All Blacks tongue-tied."

He then cited the All Blacks' "diminishing presence in world rugby" and the fact that new coach Robbie Deans has "reinvigorated the Wallabies with subtle shifts in the playing structure" as reasons to believe a period of Aussie dominance over their trans-Tasman masters was imminent.

As it happened, Australia's win that weekend proved the falsest of dawns. Since that night, they have lost their past seven Tests against the All Blacks; six of which they led at half time.

They may be "clinging to their faded reputation", but at least they had one to start with, which is clearly more than can be said for Paul "Nostradamus" Kent.

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Paul Ackford 12 September 2009

An article with a headline as side-splitting as "Southern Hemisphere dominance is fading ahead of Rugby World Cup", can never be taken seriously, even if Ackford was highly respected as one of the great enforcers of world rugby in the '90s.

"Of the six Worlds Cup to date," Ackford wrote, "Only one has been won by a northern hemisphere team. When rugby's global circus relocates to New Zealand for 2011 that number will double to two".

France and England are the most likely candidates, according to Ackford, but don't count out the Irish, who "appear to have shrugged off long-term character defects", or even the brave Scots, who "might sustain their effort better".

In fact, about the only team not tipped to figure at the pointy end of the competition are the All Blacks, whose slow decline has left them "bereft of ideas", and presumably pre-occupied with scrounging around their hotel rooms, lifting beds and pulling sets of drawers away from the walls in search of their missing aura.

With the end of year tour still to come and the World Cup still two years off, time may yet prove Ackford right. But probably not.

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Warren Gatland, 2 November 2009

While it's almost a daily practice for foreign journos to accuse the All Blacks of aura-loss, coming from one of our own in Warren Gatland, it hits home twice as hard.

"Like everything, over a period of time, that aura does slowly break down if you are not always successful," Gatland, channelling The Byrds, told reporters this week.

They may be injury-ravaged and without a win against the Men in Black since 1953, but Gatland is pinning newfound hope on the fact that his players are now fully aware that the All Blacks have lost their aura.

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