In the amateur era they cast fear wherever they went as rugby’s unsmiling giants but in their desire to set even higher standards in the professional age the All Blacks have learned to embrace their status and reach out to the wider world.

Where their predecessors, giving of their own time as they were, had license to behave as they wished this is now an entertainment business and, rather than merely drawing internal satisfaction from achievements such as Saturday’s there is an understanding of a need to connect with the watching public and Richie McCaw, described by Steve Hansen, their head coach, as the greatest All Black of all, clearly understands that.

“You’ve got to enjoy these moments,” he said, when asked whether there was any sense of the anti-climax top sportsmen sometimes feel once they have achieved their goals.

“It’s been hard at times to enjoy what you do and sometimes we think the end goal is going to be the happy part but it’s doing the work that you have to enjoy. Then you can sit back and enjoy the end part.

“I’ve tried to enjoy the six or seven weeks we’ve been here and I’m feeling pretty warm inside and proud of the men I’ve been into battle and done a lot of stuff with over a number of years.”

Others may talk of the cultures they are trying to create but clearly these All Blacks have lived it during a remarkable four years since they won the Webb Ellis Cup in 2011 during which they have won 50 Test matches and lost only three.

None of it has happened by accident and the environment has been created by Hansen has seen lessons learned both from within and outside the camp applied during the four years since he took over from Graham Henry whom he had previously followed into the head coach’s role in Wales.

He knew what would confront them in terms of the intensity of the scrutiny to which they would be subjected on arriving in the UK and decided that a siege mentality would be foolish.

“In an event like this you’re going to have a lot of media commitments before you start so you set your mindset to ‘let’s have a bit of fun when we’re there’ and enjoy them and the key thing is you want to get messages across to the people who support you which is your fans,” he explained.

“So you try to do it as nicely as you can and as I said right at the beginning, enjoy the banter. No point in being here hating it.”

That was all the more impressive because they could easily have felt they had been set up by the organisers.

While England received a fixture list of which Alf Ramsey would have approved, no possibility of having to play any matches away from Twickenham other than a solitary game against Uruguay, the All Blacks were to be marched all around the country.

Starting in London, not at Twickenham, but Wembley then the Olympic Stadium, they were then sent to the tournament’s extreme western venue in Cardiff, brought back to London’s east end, then it was off to the northern-most outpost of Newcastle and back to Wales for the quarter-finals.

They might have suspected that the idea was for them to be as disoriented as possible by the time they met the hosts on their own patch but, even had England survived that far, their attitude would have served them well.

"We knew before we got here what was going on so we sat down together as a team and said, 'let's enjoy this',” Hansen explained.

“Whilst we were coming here to win the thing let’s make sure that win, lose or draw is irrelevant, what we wanted to do was to leave this country with people realising that we have got some good values we are not bad people to be around and enjoy that experience.

“For too many athletes special occasions slip by and they don’t get to enjoy it. We relished the fact that we were moved around a lot.

“We saw it as a big advantage for us because if we were lucky enough to get here (the final) and we’d done ourselves proud and been the people that we are then we would have some extra friends maybe and I think that might have been the case. There were a lot of people who realised we’re not the big bad ogres we are sometimes printed to be in the media. We’re just ordinary people who can play rugby reasonably well.

“Life’s too short not to have fun either. It’s been great. People who have looked after us throughout England and Wales have been magnificent.”

It is not just in the way that they play that these All Blacks have set an example.

Hansen was right. As the rugby equivalent of Brazil they have always been admired with their on-field play, but they have now also won countless friends with their outlook which can only be to their advantage as they continue their quest to take their sport to new heights.