All Blacks head coach Scott Robertson enters the role with public hopes high. Photo / Photosport
THREE KEY FACTS
Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He has won multiple awards for journalism and has written several books about sport.
OPINION
When the cult of personality gripped the international rugby arena some time around late 2018, New Zealand’s public was an early adopter, but the game’s decision-makers weren’t so convinced it was the way to go.
Rugby, whether by design or accident, had built an all-powerful narrative around the value and influence of coaches, to the point where the stars of the 2019 World Cup were the veteran figureheads Steve Hansen, Rassie Erasmus, Warren Gatland and Eddie Jones.
They were dubbed super coaches, larger-than-life characters whose set-piece media events were a whole theatre in themselves.
Each week they would hold court, dropping carefully considered observations about their opponents, about their own players, about the state of the game, about anything at all really to engage, distract, and deflect. It was almost as if they were self-styled Donald Trumps on a mission to make rugby great again.
It was sugar for the media – a sweet treat to which they and their audiences became addicted.
Coaches became rugby kings – what they said filled an almost insane amount of cloud storage and a whole new industry developed in hyper-analysis of strategies. The legend grew that rugby, at the highest level, was a game played between players of almost identical ability separated only by the wisdom and tactical vision of their coaches.
But the public sentiment was not felt inside New Zealand Rugby (NZR) headquarters in late 2019 when they had to replace Hansen as head coach.
The choice was Hansen’s long-term deputy, Ian Foster, or Crusaders coach Scott Robertson.
Foster may have been an integral part of Hansen’s regime, but he was different in style – relying on a measured approach where his deep rugby and emotional intelligence shone through to the players but not always the public.
He didn’t fit the same force of personality profile as the super coaches of the era.
Robertson, renowned for breakdancing when the Crusaders won Super Rugby titles and for theming his campaigns, was a coach with enough charisma and points of difference to be considered bang on trend.
Yet while the public, and seemingly most of the media, wanted the perceived vibrancy and front-of-house intrigue Robertson would bring, NZR was not convinced he was ready.
It wasn’t sold on the concept that the head coach needed to be able to hold court as well as they could prepare a team to win, and Foster was considered to have the better portfolio of skills to deliver what the All Blacks needed.
What followed, however, was a four-year period in which it seemed as if NZR, no sooner than it had appointed Foster, regretted it.
It had put Foster in office just as it was beginning talks with United States fund manager Silver Lake to invest in a massive All Blacks rebrand where content would be used to win new fans all over the world.
The very premise of the investment thesis was that the team needed big personalities, heroes, role models and open-access characters who could sell the team, however conflicted, as coming with boy-next-door homespun charm, with a little of the chutzpah that is so rich in American sports.
There was also a sense that NZR finally realised it had to be tapped into the public mood – in tune with what the fans wanted – and that it had misread the room with its appointment of Foster.
For four years it twisted itself into knots trying to work out whether the All Blacks were a high-performance entity or a giant cash machine, and for four years, the rugby public and media gradually shifted into more extreme positions – abandoning all middle ground to cast Foster as a catastrophe, Robertson as a saviour and rugby in freefall.
In time, the period 2020-2023 will be seen for what it was – an omnishambles of epic proportions where NZR lost itself entirely – unable to clearly define what it wanted from the All Blacks to the point where it wasn’t even clear any more whether the administration saw victories as imperative or incidental to commercial ambition.
And through all the second-guessing of the public mood, the humming and hawing over whether to fire Foster midway through 2022 and the governance review shenanigans that continue to disunite the game, the All Blacks have reached the start line of the 2024 season amid a mass of jumbled truths, unrealistic expectations and distorted narratives that unfairly reflect the past, and place undue pressure on the future.
The Robertson era is kicking off with perspective wildly out of whack about what he can deliver, how his All Blacks will play and what would be fair and reasonable expectations for a win/loss ratio.
It may not suit certain agendas to clarify this, but the Foster era was not the unmitigated disaster it has been portrayed as.
Statistically, his era sits at the lower end of achievement, but then there was the impact of Covid-19 to consider, and the definitive change in performances and results in the last 18 months of his tenure tell a story of a team that was building in momentum.
The All Blacks, by the latter stages of the World Cup, were playing an effective and watchable brand of rugby that had enough flexibility to be implemented against all opponents.
They made it to a World Cup final and came within a whisker of winning it. There can be no suggestion – as there was perhaps 15 months ago when he was appointed as All Blacks coach-elect – that Robertson is coming into the role to conduct a salvage job.
Robertson is not inheriting a team in disarray or one so devoid of vision and structure that they need to be ripped up and reinvented.
He’s coming into the role with much the same brief as all his predecessors – to tinker and evolve, and to add his flavour to a team that sit at the Hillary Step rather than Base Camp.
And he’s coming into the role with the same expectations as everyone else – that he’ll leave the team in a better place than they were when he found them.
Where Robertson can succeed is by delivering a greater consistency of performance and results – a team that more regularly deliver in the big pressure moments.
More specifically, Robertson’s All Blacks need to be more disciplined than Foster’s.
If there was one universal blight through the past four years, it was the number of cards shown to the All Blacks and the number of penalties they conceded in big games. In Foster’s four years in charge, the All Blacks picked up seven red cards; in the preceding 118 years there had been just four.
But what’s in greater need of clarification is that Robertson can’t be expected to carry a media-driven narrative that he is some kind of coaching Svengali – capable of inspiring miracles with his every thought and that he will drive a cultural and performance revolution on the strength of his personality alone.
Since the All Blacks unveiled their 32-man squad, there has been a palpable sense of the media looking once again for their sugar hit around the cult of personality.
Most of the questions directed at Robertson about the team he picked to face England were about him and not the players.
What was he feeling? Would he have a little moment of reflection on Saturday before the game? Was the job delivering as he expected?
He answered them all, but as much as his employer may now be encouraging a full embrace of this new world where the All Blacks sell themselves individually more than they do collectively, it may pay for Robertson to shut down this line of inquiry in coming weeks before it’s accepted as the norm.
The new world might demand All Blacks coaches share something about themselves, but equally, it can’t be the only narrative. That would perpetuate the myth that the international game is determined only by the input of the steely-faced men sitting behind their laptops.
It’s only going to build the sense of mystique that Razor has an apothecary’s magic at his disposal – a secret cabinet full of spells and potions that enable him to reinvent what is possible.
The All Blacks will play 14 tests in 2024 – six against the big four of England, South Africa, Ireland and France, and nine away from home. Robertson can’t afford to let expectations run wild and encourage the media to bill him as a rugby messiah.
He has charisma, he sees the game through a different lens to most and he’s an undeniably deep thinker with a savant ability to present his ideas, but these qualities, of themselves, don’t guarantee success.
The realities of test rugby are going to grip at some stage in 2024 – there will be defeats, poor performances and bad decisions like there always are in any coaching regime, and so Robertson needs to build these into the forecasts so there is some leeway and forgiveness amongst both public and media.
No All Blacks coach can ever declare their numeric expectations about how many games they will win and lose. But somehow Robertson needs the media and public to not be surprised, and to not melt down or turn on him when they inevitably come.
The madness and volatility of the past four years has knocked perspective out of whack – and perspective is the one thing Robertson and his All Blacks need to be restored.
Veteran Sam Cane is given his farewell test appearance.