Semi-final / Australia 22 New Zealand 10: Defence is still king. Despite the glut of tries from the pool stages and the quarter-finals, when push came to shove in the first semi-final, defence still reigned.
That was, in many ways, the most salutary point of the night in the Telstra Stadium on Saturday.
Sure there were many other factors at work, not least that the Australians deserved it more because they wanted it more (yep, that old rugby adage again), that their public and even their litany of critics all rowed in behind them, and that nearly all the marginal decisions went their way.
And all of the above are interconnected. When the vast majority of a vibrant World Cup record crowd of 82,444 booed with derision after Jerry Collins supposedly high-tackled Nathan Sharpe (who actually ducked into the tackle a little) or after Mat Rogers ran into Reuben Thorne's late block and lay poleaxed, it made the offences seem worse than they were.
Amid the 8-4 penalty count against the All Blacks in the second half, Chris White very harshly pinged the immense Richie McCaw for playing the ball, even though he'd made the tackle on Wendell Sailor and risen to his feet before doing so.
Likewise the call, seemingly at the behest of Andre Watson, against Kees Meeuws for allegedly driving across replacement prop Al Baxter moments after he'd put Ben Darwin out of the game at the previous scrum.
However, the key marginal concerned the video match official Jonathan Kaplan. He deduced that Mils Muliaina knocked the ball on in touching down by the corner flag eight minutes into the game. The key question seemed to be whether it was the tackling Lote Tuqiri or Muliaina who touched the corner flag.
Muliaina grounded the ball before, in his second movement, he appeared to knock on.
It looked a legitimate try, and it would have struck quite a telling blow.
The Wallabies had made a ballsy statement of intent by running back the kick-off from inside their own 22 through seven phases in the opening declaration of a masterful tactical coup by Eddie Jones and his management team. By recycling the ball and copying Wales in attacking New Zealand out wide where the All Blacks defend "softly", they retained the ball, frustrated the All Blacks and pointedly refused to give their famed outside three any chance to counterattack all night.
It helped that it suited Stephen Larkham down to the ground (he still can't kick) and he probed brilliantly all night, especially when Carlos Spencer drifted wide and Richie McCaw couldn't always fill the gap, or at least not head on.
The All Blacks hadn't had any possession for the first five minutes, but had they taken the lead with their first salvo it would have set an entirely different mental agenda for the night. Instead, from the very next play, Stirling Mortlock scored what he conceded was the first intercept try of his life when anticipating Spencer's double skip pass to Leon MacDonald, who drifted off the pass without seeing Mortlock coming. Instead of 5-0 or 7-0 to the All Blacks, it was 7-0 to Australia. Different game.
The Wallabies' self-belief swelled and the All Blacks' brittleness gradually and palpably infused their play. There is also still no better team in the world at defending a lead than a Wallabies team. They'll use every trick in the book.
In his one legitimate gripe in a dignified press conference John Mitchell observed: "It was a very stop-start game. There seemed to be an enormous amount of stoppages. There seemed to be a lot of slowness in commencing 22 drop-outs and we were never really able to get any momentum going in the game."
The other key component running through the game was the lineout, where two of the Wallabies' five steals led directly to three-pointers.
It further denied New Zealand any forward momentum, but their failure to target the Wallabies' pack (as Ireland had done) in the set pieces and with their maul as they had done against the Springboks smacked a little of over-confidence.
Of course, simplistic analysis will shovel most of the blame for the All Blacks' defeat Carlos Spencer's way. He's an easy target. It was his pass that led to Mortlock's try, his over-pitched chip which led to Flatley's first of five penalties for a 10-0 lead. In the second-half catch-up, there was a miscommunication when one of his passes went to ground, but it was also his couple of sidesteps, pace, dummy pass and offload which created Reuben Thorne's try.
Big hits and physical commitment are rightly cited as bravery, but responding to his start in that way was a sign of courage as well. And as John Mitchell pointed out, "any pivot in the world will struggle without go-forward ball".
For sure, Spencer, along with Mitchell, must shoulder some of the blame along with the rest of the team leaders for the lack of a Plan B - and, amid shades of the rudderless implosion at the same stage against France four years ago, once their main leader, Justin Marshall, hobbled off you sensed the game was up.
If Thorne's public utterances are anything to go by, he is simply not an inspiring character.
"They won the inches, they dealt with the contact area better, we didn't execute well and that's the game," admitted Mitchell. But this was in part because the All Blacks became utterly predictable, constantly attacking one-off, and also very flat - another sign that they'd lost their confidence and composure and were forcing things.
The Wallabies, in the idyllic position of being no-hopers and yet at home, grew and grew in intensity. It was a far more complete team effort and the leaders had big games - Bill Young possibly the biggest of his life, George Gregan, Larkham, the beefed-up Mortlock (who was the game's outstanding runner). Even the converts from rugby league in the back three suddenly cut out the handling errors, with Lote Tuqiri making one of the most important plays of the day in chasing down Flatley's second-half restart. Flatley's ensuing penalty made it 16-7 and the All Blacks became frustrated and clueless as Flatley kept landing knockover penalties.
Watching the All Blacks tyros shake hands dejectedly with their conquerors and trudge away from the pitch, en route to an unwanted third-fourth-place playoff and the scorn of the globe's most rugby-mad nation, you couldn't but feel a little sorry for them.
As Jones and Gregan generously admitted afterwards, they had been the trendsetters for 2003, they had won the Tri-Nations and the Bledisloe Cup by playing a brand of rugby which no one else has touched.
Much good it did them now.
Scoring sequence
10 mins Mortlock try, Flatley con 7-0; 24 mins Flatley pen 13-0; 36 mins Thorne try, MacDonald con 13-7; half-time 13-7; 42 mins Flatley pen 16-7; 54 mins Flatley pen 19-7; 57 mins MacDonald pen 19-10; 62 mins Flatley pen 22-10.
Teams
AUSTRALIA: M Rogers; W Sailor, S Mortlock, E Flatley, L Tuqiri; S Larkham, G Gregan (capt); B Young, B Cannon, B Darwin, J Harrison, N Sharpe, G Smith, D Lyons, P Waugh. Replacements: D Giffin for Sharpe (24-31 mins and 39 mins), J Roff for Rogers (29-35 mins), J Paul for Cannon, A Baxter for B Darwin (both 49 mins), N Grey for Flatley (64-67 mins), M Cockbain for Smith, J Roff for Mortlock (both 72 mins).
NEW ZEALAND: M Muliaina; D Howlett, L MacDonald, A Mauger, J Rokocoko; C Spencer, J Marshall; D Hewett, K Mealamu, G Somerville, C Jack, A Williams, R Thorne (capt), J Collins, R McCaw. Replacements: K Meeuws for Hewett, B Kelleher for Marshall (both 48 mins), B Thorn for Williams (58 mins), Hewett for Meeuws (70 mins), M Holah for Collins (73 mins).
Referee: C White (England).
