Proud All Blacks fan and expert Vine maker Josh Davis recaps the morning’s Rugby World Cup action.

As I am sure you are aware, this morning there was a World Cup rugby match featuring our beloved All Blacks (c’mon boys) and Off Brand South Africa (Namibia). If you were one of the wise people who used this likely mismatch as a chance to regather yourself for the bigger games ahead, here’s a recap of the important events and talking points.

During the week, Sam Cane was named as the All Black captain for this match, as our lord and saviour Richie McCaw was rested due to the short four day turnaround after the Argentina. Sam Cane is 23 years of age. I think it is important for you to take a moment to contemplate how little you had achieved by 23 and then compare that to what this remarkable young man has achieved.

Yikes!

The tone for this game was set early on with a scrum reset inside the first minute. The game was absolutely riddled with stoppages, mainly on incessant and time-consuming TMO decisions – an ongoing trend during this World Cup, taking the air out of the stadium and frustrating viewers at home (not sure how it was received by bar patrons, can’t imagine there’s too much to be sad about getting pissed at the pub at 7am on a weekday).

The only man who wouldn’t let the stop-start nature of the game get him down was Justin Marshall.

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Turn up, Marshy.

Aside from all the stoppages, it was generally a fairly scrappy affair, with Namibia defending heroically for most of the match. Sonny Bill Williams was one of the standouts, with this absolute peach of an offload putting in Malakai Fekitoa.

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Sonny Bill’s strong prove-my-haters-wrong form over the first two games is a big talking point so far.

However, the biggest shout out of the game has to go to the dogged Namibians who, slightly unsure of how the World Cup actually works, briefly believed that this try had won them the World Cup.

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It also appeared that Steve Hansen believed this was the case, too.

Never fear, though. Eventually order was restored with a couple of tries in the last five minutes, including this belter set up by Beaudy Barrett and Man of the Match Nehe Milner-Skudder. The final score blew out to 58-14 to the mighty New Zealand All Blacks.

https://vine.co/v/exZp2KraJJw

Sam Cane also did a very admirable job of stepping into the post-match interview, captain’s cliche breach.

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But shout out to plucky battlers Namibia for hanging with the best team in the world, defying many predictions that the All Blacks were going to drop a hundred points on them. The gap is closing.

From the Kiwi perspective, not the vintage World Cup minnow thrashing we’ve come to expect from the ABs, but Steve Hansen will be relieved to have come through relatively unscathed in terms of injuries.