Peter Jackson verdict: Wales bewitched by Beauden Barrett

There is such a terrible beauty about Beauden Barrett that as soon as he appeared Wales had good reason to fear the worst, that the game was up.
His penchant for spiriting the All Blacks out of a tight corner and preserving seven decades of endless domination suggested it would be but a matter of time. And so it came to pass.
Every time history beckons Wales like a mocking mirage, Beauden the Beaut waves his wand and restores the familiar haunted look to the faces of his favourite opposition. A few puffs of his magic yesterday put the Dragon out for a depressingly early knock-out.
The knock-on effect threatens to disturb the tectonic plates beneath the British and Irish game, raising the possibility of a seismic shift over the leadership of the Lions in New Zealand next year. At this rate it will be a matter of when the selectors ask the RFU whether England's favourite Aussie is still unavailable.
Warren Gatland, the supposed shoo-in for the job, keeps losing – four in a row, the worst to the Waikato Chiefs' Reserves. Eddie Jones keeps winning – eight in a row since inheriting a squad demoralised by what Wales did to them at Twickenham during the World Cup.
By the time England under Jones had made history, Wales under Gatland had failed yet again to make theirs, albeit against more testing opponents.
At the home of the Hurricanes, in the maelstrom of a Windier City than Chicago, Barrett whipped up the perfect storm just as Wales were daring to dream at ten-all.
Instead they were blown away in the seven minutes it took the substitute fly-half to preside over three tries.
At Eden Park the previous week, Wales led for more than an hour and would probably have been ten clear but for Barrett's miraculous tackle on a stampeding George North.
In the ‘Cake Tin' yesterday, Barrett didn't just have his gateau but cleared the shelves. He made the first try, scored the second and engineered the bewitching skills which led to the third, then the fourth. Talk about taking the biscuit.
Wales, hit by 26 unanswered points in 14 minutes, had been counted out on their feet. Barrett left them a few crumbs and the magnificent Liam Williams made the most of his, no thanks to being taken out in mid-air by Waisake Naholo.
They banned Scotland stand-off Finn Russell for a similar offence against Wales last year.  Jaco Peyper's weakness in refusing to bin Naholo on the spurious grounds that Williams had avoided serious injury ensured the All Blacks were fully loaded when Barrett unleashed them.
Wales would have suspected what was coming once Barrett made his entry far sooner than scheduled because of the emergency over Aaron Cruden's neck inury. Once Wales had followed up their exhilarating first try in Auckland by again stretching the All Blacks from one side of the pitch to the other for a replica, Barrett was in familiar territory. In Cardiff two years ago when Wales found the nerve to lead by a point going into the final ten minutes, Barrett scored two tries of his own and put another on the proverbial plate for Kieran Read with an exquisite cross-kick.
Ninteen points in seven minutes at Cardiff, 19 more in Wellington – consistency on a high scale. In doing so, he and his high-octane team-mates did the game an almighty favour, taking it out of the thudding physicality and onto a planet way beyond Welsh wit and imagination.
They had given as good as they got for more than half the match while knowing they were always one mistake away from being undone.  Alun-Wyn Jones made it, allowing Read to steal a Welsh throw and provide all the ammunition Barrett needed.
He handed off one Welsh centre, Jamie Roberts, and bewitched the other, Jonathan Davies, into letting him go.   Ben Smith duly did the rest whereupon Barrett reappeared barely three minutes later for a try of his own, again leaving Roberts in his wake.
A match that had been so irretrievably lost that the late Welsh defiance served only to reduce the deficit found Gatland in the familiar default position of clutching at straws.  He talked of Wales gaining “58 per cent territory and possession and that's a massive number against the All Blacks”.
Maybe so but the number that matters, the try count, is even more massive – 21-7 over the last four games with the prospect of another five or so in Dunedin this coming Saturday.
No mention of that, of course, just as there could be no mention of Tuesday's hammering at Hamilton.  When a New Zealand television reporter asked Sam Warburton about it two days later, the Wales captain was about to front up, as he always does, when the Wales media officer, Luke Broadley, muzzled him.
He, of course, would have been acting under instructions from the Welsh management who always say they are their own biggest critics. Why, then, object to a perfectly reasonable question two days later?
Gatland's reaction to the shambles was to lay the blame on some of the team. “Players have been asking me why they haven't been selected,'' he said before stating that the answers were to be found in their performance, or lack of it.
He didn't name names. If he was referring to Matthew Morgan, Eli Walker, Tom James, Tyler Morgan and James King, then it ought to be pointed out those humbled by the Chiefs included a large number with vast Test match experience.
Twelve of those involved, including Luke Charteris, Taulupe Faletau, Scott Williams, Rhys Priestland, Scott Baldwin, Roberts and Warburton, have almost 500 caps between them.
Test rugby, as Kieran Read keeps pointing out, is a 23-man game and a shrinking Wales keep falling a long way short.