Under pressure to perform

There’s one piece of merchandise you won’t find at the main Rugby World Cup outlet on Auckland’s Quay Street, or at the other outlets at the 12 tournament venues dotted around the rest of New Zealand.

The All Black choker, a black dog collar that can be worn around the neck or wrapped twice around the wrist is an item of memorabilia the International Rugby Board wouldn’t endorse, even if, at €7 a pop, it might have generated the tournament organisers a tidy profit.

Alas, the choker is for sale online only but, given its wind-up potential, it’s sure to be the fashion accessory of choice among Australian supporters, and others, next month. And wind up the Kiwis it will.

While most rugby folk in the country readily admit that their national side have failed to reach their potential at five successive World Cups since David Kirk lifted the William Webb Ellis trophy at Eden Park in 1987, they bristle at the idea that the men in black have choked under the pressure of winning the trophy for a second time.

As well they might. In the wide lexicon of sporting terms, few words hold such a pejorative meaning as “choke”, as the likes of Greg Norman, Jean Van de Velde and Jana Novotná can no doubt attest to. It has become not just a comment on a particular set of events, but a description that attacks the very core of a sportsman or woman’s character – a term that is easy to become stuck with, but difficult to lose.

But what exactly is choking? According to academics in the field of sports psychology, choking is the occurrence of sub-optimal performance under pressure. More specifically, it is when a player allows situational, environmental or psychological factors to inhibit performance.

Matthew Syed, a British table-tennis champion turned journalist and author of the highly acclaimed book Bounce on sports performance, recently provided a useful example of what happens to a player when he chokes.

Syed used the comparison of the novice and the experienced driver. The novice is constantly thinking about what he does, when to press down on the clutch, when to change gears and so on. The experienced driver, on the other hand, generally gets from A to B without even thinking about what he’s doing.

“In effect,” wrote Syed, “experts and novices use two completely different brain systems. Long practice enables experienced performers to encode a skill in implicit memory, and they perform almost without thinking about it. Novices, on the other hand, wield the explicit system, consciously monitoring what they are doing as they build the framework supporting the task.”

Choking, therefore, comes about when the expert, because of the various pressures being exerted upon them, begins to use the wrong system. “The highly sophisticated skills encoded in the subconscious part of his brain would count for nothing,” Syed wrote. “He would find himself striving for victory using neural pathways he last used as a novice. This is the neurophysiology of choking. It is triggered when we get so anxious that we seize conscious control over a task that should be executed automatically.”

If anxiety is the trigger, your average All Black has plenty to fret over. “When I was playing for the All Blacks,” recalls Sean Fitzpatrick, the former New Zealand hooker and captain, “my biggest fear was that I was going to fail, that I was going to let down the nation.”

As the years have passed, it is to be expected that this fear has only magnified for the average player. Not only are their actions on and off the pitch subject to even more scrutiny than they were in Fitzpatrick’s day, come World Cup time the pressure will leap a notch or two, given those five failed attempts since 1987.

“Harnessing that fear of failure is absolutely key,” says Fitzpatrick, and over the past decade mental skills coach Gilbert Enoka has been attempting to help successive All Black sides to do precisely that. One of the key problems he has attempted to address is what he terms a “culture of silence” – a not uncommon problem among groups of men in any kind of environment, not just sport.

“It’s about encouraging people to talk openly about the daily struggles, about what it means to be an All Black,” said Enoka, before the 2007 World Cup. “If we can get people to overcome that culture of silence, we’re going to create an environment where people feel supported and are more free to be themselves. A lot of the stoic, tough men of the past would say, ‘Hey, you shouldn’t show your weaknesses.’ I feel the All Blacks have been trapped in tradition. We’ve been doing a lot of things because the old people like Colin Meads did them.”

While the anxiety triggers for choking are present, blaming mental deficiencies alone for the All Blacks’ failure to turn favouritism into triumph over the past 24 years may be too easy and inaccurate. If you dig a little deeper into the definitions of choking offered by academics, they note a very real difference between technique breaking down under certain pressures, which is regarded as choking, and technique remaining more or less the same, but the person or team being beaten by an opponent who performs better on the day.

The latter has happened to the All Blacks more than once. In the 2007 quarter-final exit, for example, France may not have been inspired in their traditional strutting manner, but there was heroism in their stubbornness that night that the All Blacks could never have legislated for. The most astounding statistic of the night was the 38 tackles made by Thierry Dusautoir over the course of the game, two more than the entire All Blacks side between them. The flanker’s effort was emblematic of an exceptional display from Les Bleus, a performance that came from nowhere.

Just like in 1999. The All Blacks were hot favourites going into the tournament, with Jonah Lomu still at the height of his powers, and they set up a fairly comfortable looking semi-final against France at Twickenham. Just three months previously, the All Blacks had destroyed France 54-7 in Wellington – and they had also beaten the French first team a week previously on that very same tour.

Pre-match predictions appeared to be coming true as the Kiwis took a 24-10 lead by half-time, but with France scoring 24 unanswered points in a 13-minute spell of mind-boggling, off-the-cuff brilliance between the 46th and 59th minute, they recorded one of the most sensational victories in rugby history.

A similar point can be made in relation to David Campese’s two moments of magic that contributed to Australia’s 16-6 victory over their nearest neighbours in the 1991 World Cup semifinal at Lansdowne Road.

And perhaps, too, the tidal wave of unity in post-Apartheid South Africa, stirred up by Nelson Mandela, which swept the Springboks to victory over the All Blacks in 1995. Not to mention the matter of the food-poisoning incident.

“We choked on our food – we didn’t choke,” said Sir Brian Lochore, manager of that unfortunate 1995 side. “Good luck to South Africa because they won, but if we would have played them 10 times, we would have won nine of them.”

Lochore’s words echo a recurring theme. Besides the 2003 semi-final defeat to Australia, where the All Blacks might well have choked given the clear dip in their performance levels, there is a sense in the case of their four other World Cup exits that New Zealand would probably have won each game on any other day.

The independent review of the 2007 exit, for example, blamed not only a lack of effective decisions on the pitch for the All Blacks’ defeat to France, it also pinned the blame – not unfairly – on some erratic refereeing decisions from Wayne Barnes, as well as an unlucky sequence of injuries.

That particular review also produced an interesting observation that casts further doubt on the choking theory. It noted that tournament rugby needs a different approach to a Tri-Nations or summer tour. In that area, the mindset of the All Blacks’ management came in for particular criticism. Graham Henry and co made a decision in the days before the France game not to “push the emotional button” because they found it generally led to a come-down period the following week. Which is all well and good except, as the review noted, in knock-out rugby if you don’t win, there is no game the following week.

The All Blacks didn’t take the nature of cup rugby into consideration. Nor does the New Zealand rugby public when it comes to expectation levels with regards to the All Blacks. Look at it this way: in the calendar year before both the 2007 and 2003 World Cups, the All Blacks lost just one game each time. Both are extraordinary records, which justified the Kiwis’ favouritism heading into both World Cups, but those statistics ignored the obvious – lose one game out of 13 (as in 2006), or 12 (as in 2002), and it represents a small blip in form; lose one game at a World Cup and you’re out.

“The World Cup should be tough to win,” said All Blacks captain Richie McCaw recently. “But that’s why people appreciate it. I don’t think there’s a mental block with the All Blacks. You know what you need to do, it’s just a matter of doing it.”

Which is the only way those All Black chokers will lose their wind-up value.

Kiwi form before each World Cup failure

1991: The All Blacks, coached by Alex Wyllie and John Hart, arrived in Europe as 6/4 joint favourites with Australia for the tournament. In the 18 fixtures they had played in the two years building up to the tournament, they had lost twice, both times to Australia.

1995: Before the competition, Laurie Mains' side lost three games, one to Australia in Sydney and two to France. Jonah Lomu was unleashed by the All Blacks at the tournament, which saw them graduate to competition favourites in the first week.

1999: The All Blacks came into the tournament as Tri-Nations winners, and had won 18 tests out of 25, with one draw, in the two years before the tournament. They had also possessed some extraordinary talent in their ranks: Jeff Wilson, Christian Cullen, Tana Umaga and Josh Kronfeld, to name but a few.

2003: They started as favourites, having won that summer's Tri-Nations. In the previous two years, they lost just four games from a total of 28 and seemed streets ahead of anything the others had to offer.

2007: The All Blacks were hotter favourites than ever. Their demolition of the Lions in 2005, orchestrated by Dan Carter, showed their all-round talent, while in the Tri-Nations, they won three tournaments in a row coming up to the World Cup. In the two years before the tournament, they lost three of 32 games.

And why they failed . . .

1991: A lack of harmony between coaches has been been blamed, but there's little doubt they were outclassed in their elimination by a David Campese-inspired Australia.

1995: Forty-eight hours before the team's second and most recent World Cup final, half the squad got food poisoning. It's never been proved, nor is it likely to be, that their food was tampered with, but what is certain is that the team were not themselves during the final. They lost 15-12 in extra time to a pumped-up South Africa, inspired by Mandela's support, and seemingly destined to win.

1999: France's second-half display in the semi-final was extraordinary, particularly the inspired, off-the-cuff brilliance that led to Christophe Dominici and Philippe Bernat Salles' memorable tries. It's difficult to see how anybody could have stopped France in that kind of mood.

2003: There was a worry coming into the tournament that Carlos Spencer didn't have the kicking game to get the All Blacks out of trouble, and that proved the case in the semi-final against Australia. The hosts pinned their neighbours into their own half and defended for their lives, leaving a New Zealand side who had scored 45 tries in their five games before the semi-final, unable to gain the territory needed to work their magic.

2007: This World Cup exit had a number of contributing factors: injury to key players, some questionable refereeing from Wayne Barnes, poor decision-making in the game's final 10 minutes, and a remarkable performance from France on the day.