Scott Robertson has four vital cards up his sleeve as he workson selecting the All Blacks squad of 32 for the first three tests of the 2024 season.
1. He knows the players
Robertson’s job for the past seven seasons, as the coach of the Crusaders, has involved studying in forensic detail every player in New Zealand Super Rugby. With seven Super titles, his credentials as an analyst could hardly be more impressive.
What can be blurred in the media attention his break dancing after titles attracts, is that while the energy and enthusiasm he brings to coaching is genuine, he’s also obsessional about detail. When he began full-time coaching he actually had to work at giving himself space.
“I have to be quite disciplined,” he once told me. “I start getting these random thoughts, and then I start jotting things down and the cycle starts.”
He’s been a details man since he arrived in Christchurch in 1996 as a player, already carrying his own playbook, which he filled with the wisdom he gleaned from one-on-one conversations with three great coaches, Wayne Smith, Robbie Deans, and Steve Hansen.
If there’s a bolter in the All Blacks for the July tests, bet the farm that Robertson won’t have jotted his name down on a whim. There’ll have been a lengthy, logical process behind the selection.
During the odd Twilight Zone period when New Zealand Rugby had Ian Foster in charge of the All Blacks, but Robertson anointed as the next coach, Ryan, as decent and honest a man as ever propped a Sydenham club scrum in Christchurch, was revitalising the All Black pack.
Ryan, who’s been coaching with Robertson since 2013, can dig beyond the video screen, having been close up and personal on the training track with the All Blacks forwards since 2022 when Ian Foster called him in to replace John Plumtree.
It’s a measure of the Ryan-Robertson relationship that it didn’t fracture when Ryan joined Foster’s team. That’s quite remarkable, given that when Robertson lost the All Blacks job to Foster in 2019, Ryan was a key man on Robertson’s potential staff list.
All Blacks forwards coach Jason Ryan. Photo / Photosport
After Ryan was asked to work with Foster, Ryan and Robertson met in Christchurch and, in Ryan’s words, “had a coffee, had a cuddle, and when we left I was in no doubt in my mind he was excited for me.”
That innate decency and strength of friendship on both sides has thankfully meant one of the most successful coaching relationships in the history of our game is together again, and ready to shine.
3. Wayne Smith is at hand
A lack of ego cost Wayne Smith his head coaching job with the All Blacks 23 years ago, when he insisted, with no contractual necessity to do so, that his job be made contestable near the end of his second year in charge.
That shining honesty, and lack of a thirst for the spotlight, is what makes him such a perfect choice as a performance coach for the ‘24 All Blacks.
You can add in a work ethic that I’ve never seen bettered during a half-century of interviewing and observing national coaches from Sir Fred Allen to Ian Foster.
Smith has enormous empathy, which also makes him exactly the right man if Robertson needs a special project undertaken.
A prime example of Smith’s management skills? Talking with Dan Carter last year for Smith’s biography, Carter recalled how, in the middle of the 2015 Super Rugby season, “I was injury-ridden, on the brink of retirement, harbouring huge amounts of self-doubt, whether I was good enough, whether I should keep going.
“So Smithy flew down to Christchurch with a video he’d made for me. He’d put this video together when I was playing with freedom. Basically the highlights of my career.
“He asked, ‘Who is this?’ ‘It’s me.’ ‘What are you doing?’ ‘I’m enjoying myself, playing with such freedom.’ Then he said, ‘Have you been doing that for the last couple of years?’
There was only one answer, ‘No.’ He really gave me my career back, by reminding me of the player I could be when I was doing those things.”
4. Razor can be a very straight shooter
As a Crusaders squad member told me a couple of years ago after a call into the All Blacks camp, “The All Blacks are special, but with Razor there’s a buzz at the Crusaders every day.”
Grumpy old timers might have blanched at Robertson’s feeling that the 2017 Crusaders “really connected in” when, at a pre-season stay at a lodge near Mt Hutt, the team bonded over a players’ band, featuring Richie Mo’unga and Pete Samu.
But it’s not all music and unicorns. As someone inside the All Blacks noted this week, “If people aren’t meeting standards, Razor doesn’t hesitate to address it, in very direct ways. In his own way, he runs a very tight ship.”
