World Cup-winning coach Bob Dwyer has given a stunning assessment of the state of the All Blacks, saying never before has he seen their skill standards drop so low.

Dwyer who guided the Wallabies to World Cup glory in 1991 says some basic techniques from the players are substandard. But instead of the blame going on the players for those deficiencies, he says the fault lies squarely with Graham Henry, Steve Hansen and Wayne Smith.

"It's totally down to the coaches," Dwyer told Sunday News. "If you don't understand the key principles of the techniques or then insist on their application all the time, then you can't expect the players to get it.

"People fall into bad habits. Mark Ella was a pretty complete player and was good at correcting his own faults, but there was one part of his game that I constantly had to remind him about and that was he was moving too early.

"If I was constantly on his back about it at training, then we had some chance of success in the game.

"What the All Blacks have to address is their execution," said Dwyer, who runs a website called www.bobdwyerrugby.com which contains coaching workshops and manuals to help with techniques, as well as a regular column from him.

"There are some really silly things, such as when you throw a pass your hands must finish facing the target, then the ball can't go anywhere but to the target." said Dwyer. "So many of the New Zealand players were flinging passes where the ball goes anywhere.

"One of my quotes that has lived on is that `practice doesn't make perfect, only perfect practice makes perfect'. If you practice perfectly you'll execute perfectly, if you don't practice perfectly then you won't get any better. If the coaches have a good handle on what good technique is, then all you have to do is do it and you have to insist on it and insist on it until it becomes part of your players' DNA."

As well as problems with the passing, Dwyer also took issue with the support the All Blacks were giving ball runners, a skill he believed New Zealand used to be the best in the world at.

"One of the things that really surprises me is that the country that had the best understanding and application of support play was New Zealand," he said.

"They had the best support players, particularly at the tackle contest. Traditionally they were the world leaders at it. Yet I thought their support play in their last test was poor. It became very lateral.

"When your support becomes lateral, invariably the pass goes to the players' hip or behind him."

However, while Dwyer finds fault with the coaches over the players' technique, he says they were right in the game plan they took into the tests against South Africa.

"I didn't think there was anything wrong with the tactics in principle.

"That was the approach the Lions used fairly much throughout the series, but it grew to become a more important part of their overall approach by the third test.

"The short passes from the Lions kept the ball moving quickly, there was good support and the recycling was happening quickly.

"To me, that's what New Zealand were trying to do against the Springboks also. But their execution was really bad."

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