Gregor Paul: Sir Steve Hansen on why he’s helping the Wallabies ahead of the Rugby World Cup

OPINION

Steve Hansen is spending six days with the Wallabies ahead of the World Cup – cue moral outrage and accusations of disloyalty and hypocrisy.

It is inevitable that there will be widespread uneasiness in the New Zealand rugby fraternity seeing Hansen, who was knighted for what he achieved in his 16 years with the All Blacks, offering the Wallabies the benefits of his vast coaching experience a couple of weeks out from the World Cup.

But clarity, context and perspective are all important in trying to make sense of whether he’s jumped the fence and gone rogue, or operating well within his rights, motivated by the more noble goal of friendship.

The issue that needs clarity is what precisely Hansen is doing for the Wallabies. He says he’s there to observe both players and coaching staff and feedback to Eddie Jones on what he’s seeing.

Listen to Sir Steve Hansen on the Mike Hosking Breakfast at 8.45am

It’s not a coaching or consultancy role, but an observational one. “I am not being paid,” he also makes clear.

He’ll be with the Wallabies until the end of the week and will be in attendance at Stade de France when they play France on Saturday night and says that any observations he has about the home team, he’ll make available to All Blacks coach Ian Foster.

And talking of Foster, Hansen says he informed the incumbent All Blacks coach about his plans to be with the Wallabies before he accepted the offer.

“I wanted to let Fozzie know that I wouldn’t be sharing or divulging anything about the All Blacks and for him to understand the nature of what I was doing.”

As for the nature of what Hansen is doing, he says he’s helping an old mate. He and Jones have known each other for more than 25 years and have built a deep mutual professional respect, but also a strong personal friendship.

When Jones became aware that Hansen would be in France on other business ahead of the World Cup, he asked him if he would be willing to spend a bit of time with the team to share his thoughts on what he observed.

As a devout old-school traditionalist, Hansen makes the valid point that he said yes because rugby has long been built of values that are bigger than sport and that lifelong bonds have been forged between players who spent years opposing each other in well-established rivalries.

But Hansen’s justifications and motivations will not stop many Kiwis from seeing his decision to work with the Wallabies – in any guise - as an out and out betrayal: a clear-cut case of taking All Blacks trade secrets to the enemy to help them.

And so this is why perspective is critical, because there is a bigger and more complicated issue about intellectual property ownership at play here – as in who owns it and who has the right to sell it.

Even more critically, there is a need to understand why the court of public opinion sees some interactions as betrayal and not others.

Hansen, who hasn’t coached the All Blacks for four years, has given his word he won’t be divulging any trade secrets to the Wallabies.

His insights will be his own and this has long been a source of contention between various All Blacks coaches and players and New Zealand Rugby.

There is no inherent IP within the All Blacks as such. It’s the people who coach and play for the team that bring the ideas and skill-sets, which is why the team evolves as the personnel changes.

Hansen’s philosophies and methods are his own and while they were no doubt enhanced by being with the All Blacks, they are surely, having coached for more than 30 years, deemed to be his to use as he sees fit?

Also, why be morally outraged by him being with the Wallabies, and not equally incensed that Daniel Carter, one of the greatest All Blacks in history, is peddling leadership advice in a book he has just published?

How can Hansen’s coaching IP be deemed to belong to the All Blacks but Carter’s leadership knowledge on how to win is his to sell without similar accusations of betrayal?

Equally, while the All Blacks were training in Teddington on Tuesday, there were a dozen sideline observers from the various sports teams with which sponsor Ineos has a relationship.

These athletes and coaches are given unfettered access to All Blacks IP, all because Ineos pays $10m a year to have its name on the back of the shorts.

As part of that sponsorship deal, Ian Foster has to attend a conference annually to share inner secrets about the All Blacks with the wider Ineos sporting family.

NZR is in the business of selling IP to the highest bidder, having set up All Blacks Performance Labs earlier this year – an initiative that sells leadership programmes to corporate executives which has the goal of making $33m over the next five years.

Then there was the decision to sell IP to Amazon for $3m to make the All or Nothing documentary – a project that lifted the lid high enough for some of the All Blacks mystique to be lost.

Hansen is not guilty of betrayal but perhaps underestimating how easily his role and motivations would be wrongly portrayed in a selective world where the uninformed and ill-informed get to determine who is a hero and who is a villain.