THE All Blacks have been making everybody feel good this November.

Themselves, obviously enough, their supporters, the rugby neutrals among us and even, most remarkably of all, the teams they've pummelled into submission over the past month.

When Wales captain Stephen Jones was questioned about his side's 45-10 hammering at the hands of the tourists last Saturday, the out-half refused to go down the road of succinct analysis and instead simply shrugged his shoulders and mumbled that Wales were playing the best team in the world.

A beleaguered French management went down a similar route after their double defeat to New Zealand, albeit with a more dramatic, Gallic shrug of the upper torso, and BBC's John Inverdale even had the temerity to suggest on air after the match in Cardiff that perhaps Andy Robinson's England weren't actually that bad after all, seeing that they'd only lost by a mere 21 points to the tourists on the first match of their tour. A Jonathan Davies laughing fit, along with a withering look from Jeremy Guscott, eventually brought the presenter back down to earth, but for a brief moment the England coach was almost served up an excuse to save his job because of the excellence of the All Blacks. What a paradox that would have been.

So while they've made others feel good, there's no doubt that the All Blacks have succeeded in brightening their own mood over the past 12 months. Graham Henry, normally one of the grimmest men you could ever come across, has had a near-permanent smirk etched from cheek to cheek in recent weeks and his press conference persona have also been somewhere in the domain of confidence cross-fertilised with smugness. "No, no, no, " was Henry's answer when asked after Saturday's game whether the IRB should just hand the Webb Ellis trophy to New Zealand right now, but if his words appear conciliatory on paper, his facial expression certainly wasn't. Henry was almost teasing his rivals, his demeanour suggesting that it doesn't really matter whether New Zealand get their hands on the trophy now, or in 12 months' time, because they are going to be the next winners of it.

While that kind of superior attitude grates with those who simply enjoy watching the All Blacks play, the thing is that Henry actually has the ammunition to back up his haughty manner. Since the Lions tour of 2005, the All Blacks have streaked ahead of everybody else on planet rugby for the simple reason that they appear to know exactly what they're doing.

France, England, Australia, Wales, Scotland and South Africa have, to varying degrees, gone through serious upheaval over the past 18 months and even Eddie O'Sullivan appears only to have cottoned on to exactly what he wants to do with his Irish side quite recently. All the while, Graham Henry, Steve Hansen and Wayne Smith have been pushing on with their blueprint for the 2007 World Cup, one that had been pinned to the drawing board since that particular coaching team took the reigns in 2003. In that period, the All Blacks have won 32 out of 36 internationals, losing to Australia once and South Africa on three separate occasions, but the way they've gone about achieving this has been pretty simple.

They started by maximising their playing resources. With such a huge base of eligible professionals, Henry's vision of creating two separate teams capable of taking on the world was entirely logical, and its success can't have been a surprise to anybody who knows the New Zealand game. Why have 15, maybe 20 players, ready to play at international level when you can have 30, maybe even more? New Zealand's challenge at the last World Cup fell down through injuries to key players and Henry is determined that won't be a problem in France next September and October.

So with a veritable army of talent to chose from (the fact that they're all impressive physical specimens is a given in this day and age), Henry and his coaching team have concentrated on three key areas on the paddock.

The first one is that old chestnut, the scrum. On his appointment as All Black coach, Henry made his intentions clear from the very first press conference. "We have to get back to the scrum being a contest rather than a mechanism to restart the game, " he said back in late 2003.

"There's a huge forward contest in European club rugby, and we don't get the same in Super 12. I think that is wrong, and we need to change that." He immediately appointed Mike Cron to the position of scrum coach and the difference in the All Blacks' front-row play has been visible ever since. Cron, a former prop who was forced to retire in his late 20s through injury, has a logical philosophy. He puts the emphasis on technique, not just power. "We have gone away from hitting scrum machines as a scrum training session, " he says. "I do a lot of work one-on-one with bodyawareness drills that help them scrum. International teams are all roughly the same weight, so we have to learn to push better, to coordinate better. About 62 per cent of the power comes from the back five, yet we all think it is the front row. But we must have them all correctly aligning their spines to transfer the power through."

The scrum sorted, Henry's second and most important tinkering has come at the breakdown. The All Blacks now rule the roost in world rugby when it comes to the battle on the ground and it's a real education to slow everything down and watch them in action. In attacking situations, they don't do an awful lot different to any other team out there but it's their actions at defensive breakdown scenarios that really sets them apart from the rest in world rugby. They're something close to a machine.

It all clicks into gear once an opponent is tackled, with all 15 players on the park, and not just those positions traditionally expected to compete at the breakdown, prepared to get down and dirty. The tackler is joined on the ground by his nearest teammate, who flies into the ruck at high speed, and at an extremely low angle, causing all sorts of completely legal disruption in the process. But then the dark arts come into play. The tackler is supposed to roll away from the tackled player once they hit the ground but once his flying companion joins him, the All Black tackler stops his pretence and does everything possible to stop the opposition from getting the ball back quickly. That, at the very least, succeeds in generating slow ruck ball for the opposition and the next All Black on the scene . . . remember this is all happening in the space of a few seconds . . . holds his ground until he figures out if a steal is actually on. If he thinks there's a chance of a turnover, he too will fly in to add his presence, but if he doesn't, he'll simply stand his ground and realign himself defensively. Therefore when the ball eventually comes back, the All Blacks have only committed two men to the ruck and have 13 men ready to defend. The opposition, meanwhile, invariably have a figure less than that ready to attack.

"A lot of people say they cheat, but it's not cheating, " says Sonny Parker, the Welsh centre. "They are just streetwise. They move bodies really well and they are very physically strong. It's excellent what they do and it sucks playing against it."

There's a nice example of just this from the game against Wales. In the 21st minute, Tom Shanklin was tackled by a combination of Dan Carter, Conrad Smith and Luke McAlister on halfway. When everybody hit the ground, Carter and McAlister extracted themselves from the mess and Smith hung on in there, getting back on his feet to fight for the ball.

It took four Welshmen a good five seconds to free things up but when they did, Wales had 10 men ready to play ball, to New Zealand's 14. Needless to say, Stephen Jones looked up and promptly kicked the ball to touch such were the lack of options available outside him and possession was back in New Zealand hands via the line-out. And that's just one example, it happened all game long.

"From one to 15 New Zealand's whole mindset is making it hard work for you to win that ball, " commented a downbeat Martin Williams after the game. "It's not just the back-rows' job, it's everyone's. That's probably a mindset we are not quite in touch with here yet. The back-row and the centres are left to do a lot of the work at the contact area in the northern hemisphere. That has to start changing."

Their breakdown work leads directly to the third key change of the Henry era.

They're unlikely to admit it out loud but the All Blacks are defying all previous rugby convention by viewing the defensive breakdown as their most potent source of attacking ball, and the final secret to their success stems from this.

In rugby league, there's an old dictum stating that you should always counter-attack when the opposition make a mistake and the All Blacks follow that rule to the extreme. "As soon as you make a mistake, they turn over ball really quickly and come straight back at you, " says Parker. "Before you have a chance to get your bearings, you're running backwards at speed and if they pick the right passes, it's difficult to stop."

Is there any way of stopping them before World Cup 2007? Sure, there's always the chance of a fluke defeat at some point in the tournament but even the likelihood of that happening are diminishing by the week. The All Blacks have their own clear vision and even if the rest of world rugby's senior constituents figure one out for themselves in the coming months, they'll have very little opportunity to perfect it.

The thing is, New Zealand already have.

PLAYING CATCH-UP . . . WHAT THE REST NEED TO DO BEFORE SEPTEMBER 2007

IRELAND John Hayes (right), Paul O'Connell, Brian O'Driscoll and Ronan O'Gara need to be looked after like porcelain dolls, and it might even be an idea to give all four of them a holiday instead of a summer tour plane ticket to Argentina. The coach also needs to trust his players and not revert to type when the pressure comes on next year.

AUSTRALIA The first thing the Wallabies need to do is become interested, and while they should manage that for a World Cup, they'd also want to decide pretty sharpish where they're going to play Mat Rogers and Matt Giteau in 10 months' time.

FRANCE First things first. Damien Traille is not an out-half and they need to get either Frederic Michalak, if fit, or Benjamin Boyet into the shirt for the start of the Six Nations. A rocket up their collective backsides might also help.

SOUTH AFRICA Ideally, Jake White would like to throw the transformation policy out the window but as that's unlikely to happen, he needs to do something radical to get the most from his backline. Bryan Habana (right) is their only threat at the moment.

WALES Wales's biggest problem is deciding on their first-choice backline.

Do they go for a basher at 12, or a footballer like Gavin Henson or James Hook? It would seem that Henson or Hook in that role would suit them best and if they can click their offloading game into gear in the next few months, they'll cause trouble.

SCOTLAND Frank Hadden appears to be making Scotland into a replica of the Edinburgh team he previously coached so well, but the same problems remain. Scotland go from touchline to touchline quite impressively but they need to unearth a couple more ball-carriers to straighten things up a bit more regularly.

ENGLAND In this order; find an unpretentious coach, lose the collective chip on the shoulder, never play the overrated and tactically clueless Martin Corry again, pick the best 22 players on a consistent basis and keep the gameplan easy. Simple.