The evidence is in: We can stop worrying about Ian Foster
Here's what we know for sure: the All Blacks under coach Ian Foster have not won as often as we'd have liked and we're upset about that, and because we need to talk, predominantly about rugby, and because it's hard to say what factors have led to these unexpectedly poor results, and because the coach is "in charge" and "ultimately responsible", we blame him. But does he deserve it? And if so, how much of it?
In 1994, after three dire years of All Blacks underperformance, many of us were desperate for then-All Blacks coach Laurie Mains to be sacked, and we had much results-based evidence to support our claim, including a win-loss record significantly worse than the one currently belonging to Ian Foster, culminating in consecutive losses at home to a lousy France. A year after that, Mains' All Blacks, so bad for so long, were the best team in history to be cheated of World Cup victory by rogue wait staff.
After Mains came John Hart. In 1982, Hart had taken over a mediocre Auckland side and changed the face of rugby in this country, winning the national championship in his first year and building a team that was soon scoring so many tries the Eden Park crowd would change ends at halftime so as not to miss any. Hart was lauded as a tactical genius and selectorial savant for picking, among others, the young John Kirwan and Michael Jones and the ageing Joe Stanley, all of whom would become All Black legends. Auckland won the national championship in three of Hart's five seasons in charge and in 1985 they beat Canterbury, in front of a feral Christchurch crowd at an over-full Lancaster Park, to win the Ranfurly Shield, in a match that became known as the game of the century. Twelve years later, in Hart's first two seasons in charge of the All Blacks, they lost only one game out of 22, going the entire 1997 season unbeaten. The following year, they lost five games in a row and a year after that they were beaten by France in the semifinal of the World Cup, after which Hart's horse was spat on in Christchurch.
After Hart came Wayne Smith. Today, Smith is known as The Professor and is widely considered the greatest brain in New Zealand rugby, largely because of his time as All Blacks assistant coach during the team's golden era of the 2010s, of which he's seen as a mastermind. But during his time as head coach in 2000-2001, The Professor lost 5 of his final 12 games in charge, resigning before we could unleash upon him the full strength of our vitriolic self-righteousness and bestow on him the nickname The Dummy.
After Smith, John Mitchell had a decent couple of seasons leading up to the 2003 World Cup but lost the semifinal and was replaced by Graham Henry, who built one of the most successful All Blacks sides in history but reportedly once said, "Judge me on the World Cup" and - after his team lost in the quarter final to France - many people did. Reporters and pundits everywhere railed against him with great and furious fervour. The Sunday News' vehemence was representative: "Not making a change to the All Blacks coaching post is now no longer an option. That is the only conclusion the NZRU's board can reach after today's stunning revelations that sees 50 former All Blacks demanding Graham Henry is stood down as coach in favour of the champion Crusaders coach Robbie Deans."
Seemingly everyone except the NZRU wanted Deans - whose Crusaders team had made seven Super Rugby finals in nine years and won five titles - to replace Henry, but when Deans didn't get the job and left to coach Australia, he lost a lot of games, even by Australian standards. Henry went on to win the 2011 World Cup and was lauded, feted and, eventually knighted. Deans was sacked by Australia in 2013, with a winning percentage of 59 per cent, which was slightly higher than the guy two coaches prior, but otherwise worse than every one of his predecessors dating back to 1978. The guy two coaches prior was Eddie Jones, who went on to coach England to a 2019 World Cup semifinal win over the All Blacks, who were coached by Steve Hansen, the most successful All Blacks coach of all time. After the game, the Sydney Morning Herald represented the mood of the rugby world when it described Jones as "an absolute genius".
The 2007 World Cup, on which Graham Henry supposedly wanted to be judged, was won by South Africa - a team that had lost seven of their 12 tests the previous year, and another three in a row just a month before the World Cup. Of all the things South Africa changed over those two seasons, none were the coach.
When we become fans of a sporting team, we relinquish to them some control over our wellbeing. When they let us down, one way we make ourselves feel better is by seeking to reclaim some of that control by telling anyone who will listen what the problem is and how it can be fixed.
Our belief in our ability to judge the quality and suitability of All Blacks' coaches is unshakable, but researchers have spent many years and much grant money building and measuring sophisticated statistical models to judge the impact of coaches in a variety of sports and they have largely failed to find support for the idea that elite level coaches make much difference at all.
In their 2001 book, The Economics of Football, economists Stephen Dobson and John Goddard used data from five English Premier League seasons to rank the league's most effective coaches based on the quality of their players. Sir Alex Ferguson, then the most dominant and celebrated coach in English soccer, whose Manchester United team won the Premier League league title in four of the six seasons studied, didn't even make the top 25.
In the 2000s and early 2010s soccer manager Jose Mourinho was arguably even more celebrated than Ferguson, hailed as a genius and master tactician, particularly during his time at cash-rich London club Chelsea. In 2013, ESPN ranked him number nine in its list of the 20 greatest football managers of all time Two years later, he suffered a run of 9 losses in 16 league matches and Chelsea sacked him. Three years after that, he was sacked by Manchester United. Two and a half years after that, he was sacked by Tottenham Hotspur. Did Mourinho suddenly get worse, or did other coaches get better, or both, or neither?
A 2019 Economist study, headlined "Managers in football matter much less than most fans think", found that even the most effective coach in the world improved his club's results by only about four competition points per season - roughly equivalent to the impact of the world's 50th best player. The best players in the world were worth at least double the competition points of the best coach.
"The likely cause of the 'decline' of once-feted bosses like Mr Mourinho," the article read, "is not that they lost their touch, but that their early wins owed more to players and luck than to their own wizardry."
A 2013 study of American football published in Social Science Quarterly found that for especially poorly performing teams,replacing the coach had little effect on team performance and that for middling teams, it actually made them worse.
A 2014 study of English soccer published in Managing Leisure found changing coach did lead to an increase in points per match but not necessarily an improvement in league position.
A 2021 study of European soccer published in Biology of Sport also found coaching change led to improved performance, but that effect declined after 10 games and disappeared altogether after 15.
A 2022 study of international soccer, published in Scientific Reports found the improvement disappears even faster - after approximately five games - and concluded: "The highest number of collected points per game are obtained by coaches who lead their teams for several seasons."
Perhaps most relevant to our discussion is a 2003 study, published in Applied Economics, which found that, because it's not clear that on-field results improve after regime change, coaches are probably sacked for other reasons, notably pressure from media and fans.
The result of a game of rugby is dependent on the dynamic interplay of 30 players, 16 substitutes, a ball, a field, the weather, a crowd and several referees, all of which creates an enormous number of possible outcomes at any given moment, only a small percentage of which are under the control of any given individual, let alone an individual sitting in the grandstand.
One reason we might assign a disproportionate amount of responsibility for the result of a game to a coach is because the human brain is nowhere near powerful enough to process the unfathomable quantity of data needed to establish who or what was really responsible.
There are now many positions in which the All Blacks' players aren't the best in the world. Or, as John Hart recently put it to Mike Hosking, "World rugby is so strong right now and we have to recognise we're just part of that and not dominating it as we might have in the past."
Of course coaches make a difference. Take New Zealand netball coach Noeline Taurua, who took charge of the team in 2018 after it had lost to Malawi, and guided it, less than a year later, to World Championship victory over Australia. Having said that, Taurua was also coaching the team at this month's Commonwealth Games, when it failed to make the final after getting thrashed by Jamaica. Having said that, her side was missing a number of key players at the Commonwealth Games. Having said that, part of a coach's job is to build depth. Having said that...
The point is, there are too many factors influencing a coach's record for us to reduce it to a calculation dividing a team's number of wins by its number of games played and multiplying by 100.
I could only find one piece of published research on the impact of international rugby coaches on team performance. It was written by Massey University senior lecturer Sam Richardson and published in the Journal of Global Sport Management in 2018. Its key finding was that: "New Zealand-born coaches have been associated with improvements in the international performance of overseas national teams."
I emailed Richardson to ask if he would be happy to talk to me for this story. His reply read, in part, "I don't believe I'm qualified to give you a comment on this," making him probably the first New Zealander to hold that position, and a role model for us all.
Greg Bruce's new book, Rugby Head (Penguin Random House, RRP $35), will be available on September 5.
