England fall into paranoia as All Blacks offer comfort

Hope springs eternal in the human breast, especially when four influential All Blacks disappear into the bosom of the treatment room. The New Zealanders' captain, Tana Umaga, missed training yesterday after failing to recover sufficiently from the cramps that affected him towards the end of his side's humiliation of England in Dunedin at the weekend. Justin Marshall, the scrum-half, was also hors de combat, as were the flanker Richie McCaw and the wing Doug Howlett. If the tourists can get rid of the other 11 over the next few days, they might just square the series.

Hope springs eternal in the human breast, especially when four influential All Blacks disappear into the bosom of the treatment room. The New Zealanders' captain, Tana Umaga, missed training yesterday after failing to recover sufficiently from the cramps that affected him towards the end of his side's humiliation of England in Dunedin at the weekend. Justin Marshall, the scrum-half, was also hors de combat, as were the flanker Richie McCaw and the wing Doug Howlett. If the tourists can get rid of the other 11 over the next few days, they might just square the series.

Marshall was suffering from a knee injury, McCaw woke up with a severe headache - the direct consequence, it was feared, of too many heavy blows during the match at Carisbrook - while Howlett was packed off to hospital for a scan on his injured shoulder. The breathtaking Auckland finisher was hurt when Mike Tindall, the England centre, clattered him with a cover tackle of serious proportions during the first half of Saturday's game. It is not, therefore, strictly accurate to suggest that the world champions achieved nothing in the course of their most embarrassing 80 minutes in six years.

Those members of the Auckland public who attended yesterday's open session at the Waitemata club, the Alma Mater of the great All Black back-rower Michael Jones, were disappointed. But at least they were there, with official blessing. England, who view public training with the kind of suspicion Senator McCarthy reserved for pinko lefties, would not dream of running their moves in front of 3,000 autograph hunters. Aloof? Paranoid? A bit of both, probably. If their obsessive secrecy fails to save them from another hiding at Eden Park this weekend, they will look more than a little daft.

The England coaches spent yesterday in "video session", which should, if the events of last weekend were anything to go by, have been their equivalent of the Bloody Assizes. It cannot have been a cheerful gathering; no matter how many times Clive Woodward and his plotters watched footage of the shambles at Carisbrook, the balance between positives and negatives remained massively in favour of the latter.

Of course, the opposite was true for the All Blacks. Their appearance at Waitemata was good-humoured in the extreme - for the moment at least, the age-old image of the silver-ferned brigade as unsmiling giants has faded from view. Major contributors to the victory at Carisbrook even felt able to offer words of comfort to England while predicting that the tourists would play like world champions at Eden Park.

"I do not believe the scoreline in Dunedin reflected the intensity of the game," said the Samoan-born full-back Mils Muliaina, who had a big hand in two of the All Blacks' three tries in the opening Test. "We're pretty beaten up, to be honest. There are quite a few players carrying scars from the game; I reckon there were more stitches on the faces of the forwards than I've ever seen after a match. We knew England would try to niggle us, to rough us up, and if we'd lost our composure they would have been amongst us.

"There were long periods when we couldn't break them down - they're big guys, those English forwards, and they're pretty solid. There will be more to come from them on Saturday, for sure, and we'll have to work hard to close the deal and come away with a series victory. The good news for us is that our confidence is high. It gives this team a massive boost when people like Doug Howlett and Joe Rokocoko are in full flight. There is more to come from us, too. We just played it as we saw it in Dunedin. We certainly didn't show everything we have as a back division."

That last comment was the one thing Woodward did not want to hear. Whoever the coach names in his back division, they will not look too hot in any comparison with their opponents. It would be ridiculous to suggest, on the strength of one end-of-season battering, that England have fallen permanently from the grace they achieved in Australia before Christmas, but if Muliaina is right - if he and his fellow attacking runners shift up a level at Eden Park, the scene of so many majestic All Black performances down the decades - the world champions' chances of regaining their No 1 ranking any time soon will be more distant than the moon.