It began, again, somewhere around the 70th minute.

Jean-Baptiste Elissalde had just converted a Yannick Jauzion try, scored off a missed forward pass, giving the French a 20-18 lead in their 2007 Rugby World Cup quarterfinal against the All Blacks in front of a packed Millenium Stadium in Cardiff.

The All Blacks were the best team in the world. All they needed was a penalty, a drop goal, a try. Momentum, that age-old All Blacks’ drive.

All they had to do was what they’d always done as a team, string together some good rugby, and the points would come.

But they didn’t. Like 1999 at Twickenham, and 2003 in Sydney, the men in black froze. Simple passes went astray. Backline moves turned to custard. Decision making and leadership dissolved.

The fear of losing overwhelmed the desire to win.

The All Blacks lost. They choked. And it hurt.

Remember Richie McCaw with his hands on his head. Remember Dan Carter and Anton Oliver, their thousand-yard stares from the bench.

It hurt us all – those 22 blokes, the coaches, the thousands of Kiwis in the stands, and all of us at home, sitting there on a Sunday morning, feeling like the world had ended.

It had happened again. Remember Twickenham, that 17-minute French onslaught, our inability to stop the unstoppable Les Bleus.

Remember Sydney, George Gregan mouthing ‘four more years’ to Byron Kelleher. Not again, we howled. Not again.

Tonight the All Blacks head into a Rugby World Cup semifinal against Australia, the sixth time they’ve made it this far. But they’ve only ever been to the Big Dance twice, when Brian Lochore’s boys won it in ’87 and that cursed ’95 match in Johannesburg.

Why do the All Blacks struggle at the World Cup? Why do they freeze up, or panic, under the pressure? Why do they choke?

Choke. Even to write it, the word appears ugly and blunt. One that New Zealanders avoid discussing openly at all costs, especially every fourth year on the rugby calendar.

According to Dr Gary Hermansson, it’s all down to who we are as New Zealanders, and how we let the fortunes of the All Blacks define us as a nation.

Dr Hermansson knows his onions. One of New Zealand’s leading sports psychologists, he was chief psychologist for the New Zealand Commonwealth Games teams in 1998 and 2002, and the 2000 Sydney Olympics team.

He’s been there at the coal face too, playing more than 100 games for first-class rugby games for Wellington, Manawatu and New Zealand Universities; a member of the Wellington sides who famously beat the 1965 Springboks and 1966 British Lions.

He knows 2007 wasn’t just a fluky loss. Nor was 1999, or 2003. Something was going through All Blacks minds hamstringing their performance.

”If you look at Cardiff, the performance there was so markedly beneath what we were capable of that it was clearly a mental process that went on,” Hermansson says.

”France got more and more into the game, we got more and more concerned we might not get it right and guys started not turning up mentally.”

But what exactly happens when sportsmen choke?

In his famed ‘The Art of Failure’ essay for the New Yorker magazine, American writer Malcolm Gladwell proposed that pressure situations, such as knockout matches, can cause teams, or athletes, to either panic or choke.

Choking, he wrote, occurred when athletes got ahead of themselves, forgetting their natural games and losing themselves in the final consequences of the match or their actions.

Dr Hermansson agrees with this. For him, one of three things will happen in this situation.

”If two dogs meet and there’s a bit of a threat involved, eventually they might fight because it’s one of them is thinking ‘I’ve got to fight’,” he says.

One dog could run for his life, or, thirdly, one dog might cower down, lie down, and act submissive and say I’m not a threat to you.”

”That’s the instinct that it all comes down to in high anxiety. You lose that ability to be intuitive. It’s almost like mind and body are separated.”

”Half your mind is ahead of itself and you’re trying to manage something that is uncontrollable. You can’t control whether you win a game or lose a game, all you can control is how well you play a game.”

”If half your mind is pre-occupied with ‘will we win?’, ‘can we win?’, ‘gee we might lose’, then that intuitive between mind and body, that natural intuitive feel for the game gets interfered with.”

That’s when passes stop sticking or going forward, tackles get broken by the opposition, kicks go straight out instead of inches inside the touch line.

Tonight’s challenge will be rising above those mental demons that have haunted us in the past.

And no matter if you’re Richie McCaw, Aaron Cruden, Graham Henry or some hunter listening to an AM radio in the Kaimanawas, if things are close heading into the last 20 minutes, the test, that test within a test we’ve always faced, will rear its head again.

This is where the All Blacks will be vulnerable. This is where the fear of losing clashes with that desire to win. If they can overcome that, tonight, the old ‘choking’ hoodoo, that thing that has hung around our necks for so long, may be cast away.

”If it’s close it’s going to be extremely tough for the All Blacks because they will be pre-occupied with ‘we may not win this’,” Hermansson says.

”The more intense that gets, the more likely they’re going to get over-anxious and their heads will be pre-occupied with the scoreboard. Their performance level could drop away because their thinking will be away from ‘the moment’ and their skill level will be influenced by physical and mental tightness.”

”That’s what happened against France and those other games as well. When you see it in their eyes, getting a bit narrowed down and the life goes out of the eyes, that’s where issues are going to be, the final twenty minutes.”

If the All Blacks can make their first World Cup final since 1995 tonight, and win it next weekend, the celebrations are going to last a long time.

Hermansson believes the All Blacks can, and will, do it. He thinks the Eden Park factor, the sheer visible support of Kiwis and the fact they’ve dropped a couple of games heading into the World Cup are all hugely beneficial factors.

Victory celebrations, if they do occur, will be ”out of all proportion to what [the win] really is.”

”On one hand you’re going to say, great isn’t it wonderful, on the other, you’ve got to say, that’s a little sad. Without trying to sound like sour grapes, let’s keep it in perspective,” he says.

That’s a hell of a good point.

Because for as much as the All Blacks means to us, as much as Richie McCaw holding up the Rugby World Cup up at Eden Park would feel bloody good, there’ll still be oil on the beach at Mt Maunganui and buildings in rubble in Christchurch’s Cathedral Square.

Life’s all about context, you see.

But to anyone who saw that game at Cardiff, victory tonight and next week, would make that vision of Carter’s thousands yard stare, a very distant memory.

– Fairfax Media