The focus on who wasn’t playing on Saturday was redundant in an era in which player depth is critical. The brave new world of All Blacks rugby we’ve been promised began with a win that was uncomfortably close, if not quite “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life,” as the Duke of Wellington said of the Battle of Waterloo, another tight tussle in which the French came up short. Beforehand the French team was routinely described and sometimes dismissed as “under-strength”, the implication being that anything less than a convincing win would be a deflating start for new coach Dave Rennie.