Scott Robertson. Photo / Getty
OPINION:
Rugby bosses around the world, including New Zealand, are a little fixated with this idea that an international head coach must have previous experience in the test arena.
The few times that someone has been chucked cold into an international head coaching role, things have ended badly.
Martin Johnson and Stuart Lancaster, fresh and inexperienced, presided over disastrous England World Cup campaigns and seemingly are held in administrative circles as the irrefutable evidence that it’s best to entrust big jobs to even those who have failed in test football rather than those who have never had the chance.
This is modern rugby, ruled by groupthink and illustrated by Wales, who were in chaos at the end of last year and didn’t bother checking in their own backyard for a solution to their woes.
They went straight for Warren Gatland, meeting his $1million-a-year pay demands, because he’d been there and done that.
Australia showed they too believe in the value of experience when they swooped for Eddie Jones.
He’d been with Australia before, had a bit part with South Africa, coached Japan and England and when the latter fired him in November last year, there was a case to be made that his time was up – that he was perhaps recycling the same ideas wherever he went.
Obviously Rugby Australia saw it differently, offering Jones a five-year deal that will have left their domestic Super Rugby coaches wondering how the guy who gets fired by England sits higher than they do in the Wallabies pecking order.
England, having dispensed with Jones’ services, had a preferred candidate in Steve Borthwick – the former England captain who had served as an assistant coach with the team between 2016 and 2019.
Borthwick is a novice international head coach, but he’s not without test experience and the hirings and firings around the world these last few months carry significant clues as to what may happen with the All Blacks.
Wales, Australia and England all had the opportunity to invest in an untried coach and prove that newbies are not the risk everyone says they are.
Why not turn to someone exciting and untried such as Scott Robertson who has proven himself beyond doubt at Super Rugby level?
They were handing out five-year contracts which effectively came with a World Cup 2023 Mulligan, and probably a two-year honeymoon period where every defeat could be blamed on the mess left by the previous guy.
But despite the market being overwhelmingly favourable to a no-experience appointment, as far as the Herald understands, the closest Robertson got to any of the three jobs was having a coffee with England’s chief executive Bill Sweeney.
It wouldn’t seem like their date carried much of a wow factor as it’s believed there was no follow-up, no next-stage discussions and certainly no hint of a job offer.
And whether Fiji is a genuine option is hard to determine as the Herald understands that former head coach Vern Cotter suddenly quit a couple of weeks ago after he met Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka and was told that the Fijian national team needed to have a Fijian head coach.
There is no global appetite to invest in an untried international coach, and this is where things get a little angst-ridden for Robertson, as New Zealand Rugby has taken its cue from the rest of the world these last few years.
The days of New Zealand fearlessly ploughing its own path, caring not what others did or thought, are long behind us and now the prevailing thinking seems to be that conformity is a sign of success.
Nothing scares NZR quite like being different, and they effectively sold five per cent of their business to a US investor on the basis that’s what they were all doing up North.
Equally, a desire to align with the high-performance thinking and practices of the Six Nations is one of the main reasons why NZR has decided to begin the search for the next All Blacks coach before the World Cup.
Here’s an organisation driven by the need to keep up with the Jones’s, convinced that emulation is validation, and if none of Wales, Australia nor England were willing to take a risk on Robertson, it’s hard to see why NZR would.
Certainly, Robertson won’t be helping his chances if he presents his case with the same wider coaching group he has on the previous two occasions he’s competed for the All Blacks job.
When he missed out in 2019, he was told there were concerns his assistants lacked experience. When he was sounded out about the job in August last year, NZR again felt his wider team needed an old head and pushed to see if Robertson could find a place for former Ireland coach Joe Schmidt.
That didn’t work out and if Robertson comes back a third time with the same team, it will either be seen as a sign of his conviction that he has the right people around him, but more likely, it will be interpreted as an almost belligerent refusal to bend to his employer’s will and an inability to react to feedback.
Coaching is essentially about knowing what is non-negotiable and what can be compromised.
When the puff of white smoke does arise from NZR headquarters, it will more likely be to signal that Jamie Joseph will be taking over the All Blacks in 2024.
He’s had eight seasons in Japan, enabling him and his trusty sidekick Tony Brown, to tick that all-important box of international experience.
These two are a vote for lower-risk decision-making and conformity. Stick them in the job and it will allow NZR, an organisation increasingly pre-occupied with brand narratives and public perception, to talk of how they followed best practice by placing such a heavy weighting on previous experience.
The silver-lining for Robertson, if it could be termed such, is that a job will open in Japan and most likely it will be his as his lack of test experience won’t frighten a nation that has become the third largest economy in the world on the back of a relentless desire to innovate and embrace new ideas.
The next step in their evolution is increasing the precision in the final third.