Rugby: Shellshocked All Blacks need to restore some mana with series win over Ireland

Big games don't get any bigger than Saturday night's showdown at Sky Stadium in Wellington.

It's there where the All Blacks are either going to rectify what happened to them last weekend in Dunedin or suffer a famous loss to an Irish side who have shown why opting for a tour rather than a short visit has been beneficial.

That's because, like the British and Irish Lions before them in 2017, the tour sets up a narrative. A goal for the players who have come all this way and the story of how they get there.

For too long, All Blacks fans have been satisfied with watching quickly uninterested teams get thumped and give us all the impression that it's only worth playing Northern Hemisphere teams at the back end of the year.

Not anymore. This All Blacks side is in danger of rewriting that entire perception, or to be more precise, having it violently rewritten for them.

There is far more at stake here than just a series loss, a trophy on the line or even a World Cup campaign. This is a battle for the very soul of what the All Blacks mean.

For years, decades, the unique selling point of the All Blacks is that they won pretty much all the time. Now, they don't. Four out of the last five tests have been dropped.

To find a historical record poorer you need to mention two years that send shivers down the spine of any fan who has any sort of passing interest in the national team's history: 1949 and 1998.

Those sad years saw six and five tests lost respectively. Another one for this All Black side will put them into that category, given that you actually have to go back a fair way to find a test win over decent opposition.

Much was trumpeted by the All Blacks about how many tries they scored last year, but racking up over 100 suddenly gets a little less impressive when you factor in tests against Fiji, Tonga, USA, a poor Argentina, an understrength Welsh side and Italy.

The grind that was the 19-17 win over the Springboks in Townsville last September was the most impressive win, on paper at least, that they had in 2021 - but even that is tempered by the fact that the Boks returned the favour a week later on the Gold Coast.

So how do you fix it? Bringing in Roger Tuivasa-Sheck certainly is interesting, but the rest of the changes feel more like a shuffle than an overhaul that was needed after the Dunedin debacle. Suddenly the positioning of Scott Barrett at blindside is being seen as an answer rather than a question. He did play well at Eden Park but this time it feels like the Irish will be far more wise to the physicality that he brings.

This isn't about the players, anyway. It's about the entire coaching staff and how they can turn a team around within a week to beat a highly motivated talented opposition that can smell a series win. But even then, even if the All Blacks go out and win by the same margin that they did at Eden Park, it won't matter to a lot of people.

Ian Foster, John Plumtree and the rest are on a hiding to nothing. You need to do something much bigger than just win to redeem yourselves in the eyes of the notoriously binary All Black fan base (just ask Stephen Donald), so the damage has very much already been done.

You can only fix inconsistency with consistency and one test win isn't going to do it.

One more test loss most certainly will though, in the completely opposite direction. If the All Blacks lose this series against Ireland at home, an utterly unthinkable prospect until now, action must be taken.

The All Blacks cannot go on like this, having their aura shattered over and over again. Nothing else matters other than beginning a win streak and maintaining it for a long, long time.

Otherwise we'll be having this discussion over and over again for the rest of the season.