With the defeats racking up and the selection wheel being spun ever harder in search of the right
combinations, New Zealand’s great strength of producing multi-skilled athletes with impressively broad skill-sets is starting to look like it may also be the All Blacks’ greatest weakness.
In most other countries, the decision facing national coaches is simple: they must determine the best players in each position.
But in New Zealand, the picture is riddled with grey because the challenge for the All Blacks’ coaching staff is determining in which position to play the best players.
It’s an oddity that speaks to New Zealand’s underlying brilliance in producing all-court rugby players who reach the elite level of the game with such agility, athleticism, speed and soft hands, to ensure that many have experience of and potential to play in several different positions.
Versatility is forever sold as a strength, a quality that separates New Zealand from those nations who build positional specialists and restrict their selection options as a result.
But as much as New Zealand’s ability to produce hybrid athletes with potential to play multiple positions is hailed as a unique advantage, there’s increasing reason to wonder whether the whole concept of versatility is overvalued and potentially disabling the current coaching panel from settling on the best combinations.
If there has been a generic fault in All Blacks selection processes of the last 20 years, it has been a propensity to want to put the best players on the park even if it means using them out of their preferred positions.
It’s a bit like loading an icecream with too many toppings that are all individually scrumptious, but don’t always work as a combination.
And by extension, this has led to a hierarchical approach to bench selections – in that the next best players sit in the reserves, rather than applying a nuanced strategic lens to who might make the most impact.
Robertson, now staring at a 57% win ratio, was ushered into the role on a ticket of change and rejuvenation, but he persisted with the same desire as his predecessors to shift players to fit specific game circumstances rather than commit to picking people exclusively in their best position.
Ethan Blackadder has started tests at blindside and openside, Will Jordan has started at wing and fullback and Anton Lienert-Brown at second five-eighths and centre.
But there’s no more powerful example of how this thinking has played out than seeing Beauden Barrett, the two-times World Player of the Year based on his work as a No 10 in 2016 and 2017, now cast as a positional nomad, bounced between the bench, fullback and first five-eighths (although not by the current All Blacks regime).
In any other country, Barrett would have been used exclusively as a No 10 and if someone such as Richie Mo’unga surpassed him to become the preferred starter, he would have dropped to the bench rather than be shifted to fullback.
Barrett has been moved around to keep him in the starting team and to ensure his skill-set is used somewhere, but maybe the time has come to commit to him as a No 10 and make it a straight choice between him and Damian McKenzie.
This idea that McKenzie, relatively new to the play-making role, performs better with Barrett’s guiding hand at fullback, suggests that the former isn’t yet ready and perhaps the veteran is the better choice to field at No 10.
As another example of how incredibly versatile New Zealand’s players are, Ardie Savea is the current World Player of the Year – an award he won playing at No 8.
But is that his best position? He found himself there mostly because former head coach Ian Foster committed to Sam Cane as his captain in 2020, and so with two high-quality opensides competing for one role, Savea was shifted to No 8 so both could play.
It was a decision validated by Savea’s impact, but with Cane leaving New Zealand at the end of the year, and 22-year-old Wallace Sititi clearly a player with considerable long-term potential, why not reconfigure the back-row to put the best players in their best positions?
Sititi is a natural No 8, Savea a natural openside – is it so mad to commit to them both playing in their rightful positions for the All Blacks, with Cane, despite his high-impact performances in South Africa, making way for that to happen?
And then there is Rieko Ioane: would any other country have taken the best finishing wing in the world and tried to convert him into a centre?
Robertson is continuing to start Ioane at centre and shift him to the wing later in the game.
But after the test in Cape Town, the question has to be asked whether that shift should become permanent, because Ioane had more impact and influence in those final 20 minutes on the wing than he did playing in the centre for the previous 60.
He looks like he’s still one of the best wings, if not the best wing in the country, but arguably not the best centre.
And it’s, therefore, hard not to conclude he’s being picked at 13 because New Zealand has such an abundance of quality wings that the selectors are making room to get more on the field to fulfil the best players must start philosophy.
