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Beating the Lions will be harder for the All Blacks than winning the World Cup

New Zealanders need to wake up to what All Blacks coach Steve Hansen has been saying all along - they are about to collide with a serious rugby team at Eden Park on Saturday.

The British and Irish Lions are better than anyone they faced at the 2015 Rugby World Cup, when the northern hemisphere sides were innovative only in the ways they managed to shoot themselves in the foot.

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The Lions struggled to find tries in the first half but the visitors broke away in the second half to grab a 10-32 win over the Maori All Blacks.

The traits of this Lions team are similar to the 2015 Springboks, against whom the All Blacks struggled in the semifinal: the difference is this Lions team is better in every department.

They have a bigger scrum, better depth, a superior lineout and a kicking No 9 who is at least the equal of Fourie du Preez in his twilight.

That view has been formed on the basis of cumulative evidence over the past fortnight.

As try as we might to view the tour matches as isolated events they are really part of a bigger jigsaw.

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Take the Lions' 34-6 win against the Chiefs on Tuesday for example.

While it is true that the Chiefs were deprived of their best players and it was a fixture the Lions were expected to win, does anyone now doubt that the Lions' base game - set-piece strength and defence - has grown with each fixture?

Opponents have been kept tryless for two of the past four tour games. The All Blacks will of course be infinitely better than the Crusaders and Chiefs but it is a stretch of the imagination to think that New Zealand's collective struggles against the Lions' defensive methods will suddenly disappear on Saturday.

I stood behind one set of goalposts at FMG Stadium Waikato on Tuesday night so can offer nothing of note on the 'Lions are offside' debate other than to state the obvious - modern rugby teams are all as cynical as each other.

However, I did see enough from that vantage point to make a few other observations about their defensive work.

The main one is that it is not necessarily the speed of the defence that is causing the problem, it's the excellent organisation.

When the Lions come up they do it in a line, they do it with perfect, consistent spacing between the defenders and they do it with the right numbers on either side of the ruck.

Very rarely did I get the impression that they were short of numbers on either side of the field. There is some excellent decision-making going on out there.

As for the set-piece, the ability of their jumpers to anticipate the calls is superb.

They were all over the Chiefs and it confirmed a suspicion that has been there since the Crusaders game when Peter O'Mahony leapt across the line to snaffle a Codie Taylor throw - they are largely reading the Kiwi cues.

No wonder the All Blacks are desperate for an underdone Kieran Read to play - they need him at lineout time.

Make no mistake about this: the Lions will put the All Blacks under pressure for periods - possibly large periods - on Saturday night.

But is this not what we wanted? A true test series? And it will tell us something else as well.

The doubters still bring up All Blacks assistant coach Ian Foster's title-free years at the Chiefs as a reason why he mightn't be the man to succeed Hansen.

But if he constructs an attack that unpicks this Lions side his credentials could not be greater.

This series will be harder than winning the last World Cup.

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