All Blacks don't have best XV, will use horses for courses approach, says Steve Hansen

Steve Hansen says the All Blacks don’t have a best starting XV and will adopt a horses-for-courses approach during the Rugby World Cup.

As in 2015, the defending champions are placing as much of a priority on who finished games as the starters.

“I don’t think we’ve got a number one starting XV, I think we’ve got a group of 23 players that we’ll use depending on who we’re playing and what the opposition are and that will chop and change,”

“That was our point in selecting our 31, we wanted to be able to have the ability to do different things with different people.”

“We never look at is it important to start? Obviously it’s important to finish too, you’ve got to have people to do that.”

Despite a brilliant showing in the Bledisloe Cup win at Eden Park, Hansen said Patrick Tuipulotu was not close to usurping Scott Barrett as starting lock.

“We discussed the fact that we could play both of them with Scotty going to six but we like what we’re seeing in the loose forward trio at the moment so we wanted to have another look at that against this big pack.”

Shannon Frizell was named as loose forward cover on the bench because Matt Todd was nursing a sore shoulder with Hansen saying the overall health of the squad at the quarter-final stage a priority.

“Our whole attitude is it’s a marathon, it’s not a sprint, we want to have everyone available at the back-end of the tournament, around the quarter-final stage, there’s nothing guaranteed after that,” he said.

“We want everyone available for the quarter-finals and we’re not prepared to risk anyone at this stage.”