It is 120 years since a New Zealand team first came to England, the inaugural All Blacks making their way to the British Isles via Montevideo and Tenerife. By the time the “Originals” arrived in London for a meeting with the national team, they had already played 24 matches, and the encounter moved from Blackheath to Crystal Palace to accommodate a spectatorship that some estimations placed at 100,000, many of them non-paying, with the future King George V among them.
Just another week? More than a century on, a visit from the All Blacks still stirs special feelings. England players have remarked, publicly and privately, of sensing an extra energy as they reassembled at Pennyhill Park on Sunday night after the win over Fiji – an excitement or “desperation”, as one individual put it. The Springboks may have knocked New Zealand off their perch with back-to-back world titles, but most of the England squad were raised in an age in which the All Blacks were close to unconquerable – that cloak of invincibility may have gone, but the old aura is difficult to escape.
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