Hurting All Blacks have ‘honest’ review

A hurting All Blacks side believe it’s a case of doing the little things better rather than making drastic changes as they battle to keep hold of the Bledisloe Cup.

New Zealand’s 27-19 defeat to the Wallabies means they have to win in Auckland on Saturday night to retain a trophy they have held since 2003.

In Sydney, they were beaten at the breakdown, where Australia’s use of dual opensides David Pocock and Michael Hooper proved a success, missed costly tackles and had their scrum put under pressure.

Lock Brodie Retallick says the defeat “obviously hurt” and the All Blacks have had “a good, honest review”.

“It’s nothing major in terms of what we’re doing,” he said.

“We just need to do the little things a bit better. That’s what we didn’t get right.”

The breakdown was also an area where New Zealand struggled against the Springboks in their previous Test, before coming from behind to win 27-20 in Johannesburg.

Retallick said the All Blacks needed to get their roles right there and react more quickly to what the opposition was doing.

“It’s something we’ve talked about but it hasn’t happened,” he said.

“We need to make a mind shift and make sure it happens this week.”

Retallick put the missed tackles down to good pressure from the Wallabies.

“Technically, it’s probably not a massive issue, but we talked about how, if we give away the ball, how many more tackles we have to make,” he said.

“Obviously, you’re under pressure and that’s where most of the missed tackles come from.

“If we can stop it from the source, then hopefully we won’t need to make so many tackles.”

As for the scrum, Retallick said the All Blacks had yet to have a good look at that part of the Sydney Test.

“Obviously they put a fair bit of heat on us there,” Retallick said.

“We probably didn’t get as stable as we would have liked to, so we’re obviously going to have a forwards review, go over that and try and make some adjustments heading to the weekend.”

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