In a way, it's quite nice to see that it's not only the Proteas that can choke when it matters most. That said, France do have a reputation of pulling one, and only one, out of the bag. They're becoming really good at upsetting the apple cart once in a while, but then not actually doing anything else beyond that.

On the one hand, I'd like to see France beat England as they're not likely to keep up the form in the final, however it would give me immense pleasure pasting the Poms twice in 2 months. (This does have the huge assumption that the Boks will cruise through to the final, as everyone expects).

A different spin to it…

Apart from feeling gutted and disgusted off the humiliating defeat of us NZers (not All Blacks as the French put it) , a few questions or thoughts just kept bombarding my head straight after this humiliating loss.

I am sure these kind of questions puzzled us all …but I will feel restless until I find answers to at least these…

Did the coach ensure that All Blacks were prepared to accept the fact that a few decisions would go against them? Was there any risk analysis performed by the coach? Did the coach take enough measures to counter the unexpected or the worst case scenarios?
- If so, the team miserably failed to adapt/change the tactics as they definitely didn’t step it up a notch?
- If not, isn’t it a good enough reason to blame the coach for the humiliating defeat.

Did the pressure of being the favourites did it?
- If so, is the “team” prepared to handle this as one unit? And most importantly, isn’t this what choking is all about????. Who’s to be blamed for this? And how do the real champions handle this?

Colin : I reckon that the Australasian power houses did the Boks a favour. The realised that they needed to kick it up a gear after half time and did ... fortunately! Next week's games are going to be very interesting.
Anonymous : Rather you than me. I think that a big part of the problem was the unneccessary adaptation of their game. The beauty of the All Blacks games up to then was the fact that the OTHER teams always had to adapt THEIR games when playing the All Blacks.