All Blacks coach Ian Foster. New Zealand All Blacks Squad naming for the upcoming July Test Series against Ireland. Mangere, Auckland, New Zealand on Monday 13 June 2022. © Copyright photo: Andrew Cornaga/ www.photosport.nz
The All Blacks head coaching role is among the most misunderstood in New Zealand. In part one of his ‘how to coach the All Blacks’ mini-series, Gregor Paul look at what the role really looks like in the modern age.
One story has dominated the sporting year, and all anyone who follows the All Blacks has asked in 2022, is whether the team has the right man at the helm.
But it’s a question that is decidedly harder to answer than it may seem, as the All Blacks head coaching role is among the most misunderstood in New Zealand.
The public and media lens through which they see the All Blacks head coaching role is narrow, focused exclusively on the training ground and what it takes to succeed is often underestimated.
Everyone who has coached the All Blacks, however, knows the complexities of this job run deep, that the demands are exhaustive and the brief of producing a winning rugby team can’t be fulfilled by sticking on a tracksuit, grabbing a whistle and making sure that 15 oversized men know which number jersey to stick on and in which direction to run.
“In the last eight years I have found I am doing less and less coaching. I am empowering other people. I am doing a lot of strategic work and people management,” the All Blacks most successful coach, Sir Steve Hansen said of the role shortly before he finished in 2019.
“Dealing with off-field issues a heck of a lot. You are the helicopter over the top and you have got to understand every little bit of the puzzle, but you don’t have time to coach every part of that.
“You have to have the confidence to trust and encourage those people who are coaching in those specialist areas and have the ability to interact and challenge and be challenged.”
Hansen, along with other former All Blacks coaches, are the people who best understand that “coach” is a terrible misnomer as it massively misrepresents what the role entails.
It’s a job which demands the incumbent to identify talent, to manage multiple relationships with different stakeholders; to be a diplomat, a psychologist, a chief executive, a shoulder to cry on; a disciplinarian and a strategic mastermind.
Most Super Rugby coaches would say this is largely what their jobs entail, too, but the difference in scale, scrutiny, profile, pressure and expectation between even the champion Crusaders and the All Blacks is vast and the respective head roles almost incomparable.
The All Blacks job carries an enormous weight of responsibility and intensity of pressure, because the All Blacks are the biggest and most successful brand in world rugby.
And they are a brand, generating 80 per cent of New Zealand Rugby’s $270m or so of annual income and anyone asked to coach the All Blacks must understand they are managing a business – one that has to fulfil significant commercial demands.
They also have to understand the vast scale of the organisation and be able to manage anything from 35-40 players, some of whom will barely be out their teens and devoid of any meaningful life experience, and 15 coaching and management staff and deal with the relentless pressure of having to win.
All this while being able to cope with the sort of media scrutiny and public profile reserved in most other countries for the head of state.
“The big thing is that you have got to be able to manage yourself under pressure,” says Hansen.
“I don’t think you would be normal if you didn’t feel a little intimidated, because you understand the enormity of the job you have been given. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t have some self-doubt either.
“You have to understand what it is and what it isn’t that you are negotiable on. Do you want to be a dictator, or do you want to empower others, or do you understand that sometimes that you have to be both.
“You have got to have good management skills. You have got to have good people skills and be prepared to have tough conversations. And you have got to have a sense of humour.”
When Hansen says that a head coach must be prepared to have tough conversations, the natural inclination is to assume he means with players: to be prepared to not pick individuals if they don’t perform.
But the nature of test rugby is such these days – the game so detailed and intricate, the component parts so specialised, that coaching and management teams have expanded to 15-plus people.
The dynamic of the coaching team is all important and this is where the All Blacks have changed most in the last decade – they have become dependent on more people to be successful and managing the managers – being prepared to have tough conversations with them - is a hugely important part of the head coaching role.
The head coach has to be across everything, but micro-managing doesn’t work, as Hansen discovered when he took over as head coach in 2012 and interfered a little too heavily with the sessions forwards coach Mike Cron was running.
“At the start he oversaw too much,” says Cron. “He wanted to make sure you were good enough to do the role and that was his right. But we had a conversation after only a matter of a few trainings.
“I said to him, ‘Who the f*** is coaching this lot because the players are getting mixed messages and we can’t have that’.”
But being overly trusting of fellow coaches and staff can be catastrophic, as Foster discovered when he didn’t make a strong decision late last year after feedback from the players was damning about two of the assistants.
He persuaded the NZR board to allow both John Plumtree and Brad Mooar to continue, promising that he would upskill them.
But it didn’t work, the All Blacks lost the series to Ireland and Foster was ultimately left with no choice but to wield the axe.
This is the reality of being the All Blacks head coach - that they have to recognise when things aren’t right, be strong enough to admit mistakes and fix them with cold, ruthless actions.
Foster was slow to make that hard call, and it nearly cost him his job. But making that decision obviously helped him realise he had the stomach for the darker tasks that come with the head coaching role, as a few days later he walked into a packed media conference and said: “Let me tell you who I am, I’m strong, I’m resilient and I think I’ve proven that.”
What most followers don’t appreciate about the All Blacks coaching role is how many parts there are to it, and that every part comes with a degree of conflict and confrontation.
And even less appreciated is that the two key pressure points for the head coach are applied by commercial stakeholders and Super Rugby coaches.
There’s more than $100m of sponsorship tied to the All Blacks and every brand that has its name attached to the team has bought the right to access the players to promote their association.
Servicing these agreements is a non-negotiable part of the high-performance gig, something former All Blacks coach John Mitchell discovered in 2003 when he adopted a belligerent stance towards commercial partners.
“There is concern around areas of the media, the interface with the Rugby Union and some sponsor activity as well,” said NZR chief executive Chris Moller in announcing why Mitchell’s job was being put up for tender.
There are highly detailed agreements between NZR and their sponsors about how much time they can take from the players and the nature of the work.
But despite these contractual securities, sponsors push the boundaries and there are so many of them, paying so much money that one of the key jobs of the head coach is to police the commercial activity to ensure obligations are fulfilled without interfering with the team’s preparation.
“The one thing that changed the most was that the commercial side of the game because of the need for money,” says Hansen of his time in the job.
Selection is another big part of the role as for six months of the year, the All Blacks head coach isn’t hands-on, but an observer and analyst of Super Rugby.
The national coach carries all the pressure of having to produce a winning All Blacks teams, but he is entirely dependent on Super Rugby coaches to ensure players turn up for the first test of any year in the right physical and mental shape.
Making this yet harder, is that the vision of the national coach is not always aligned with those coaching Super Rugby teams, and it is one of the great misconceptions that the All Blacks have the power to tell those below them in the hierarchy to pick specific players in specific positions, or to demand specific things be improved.
This year there was the case of Ethan de Groot, the young Highlander who has established himself in the All Blacks starting team, after not initially being picked in the first squad of the year.
The reason he didn’t get picked in July? “We think Ethan can get fitter,” said Foster. “We’ve got a high regard for him and now we’ll put a plan in place to give him an opportunity to come back.”
It takes diplomacy and patience to be able to work effectively with Super Rugby teams – to respect their individual needs yet get them to also align to some degree with the All Blacks plans.
If all this isn’t demanding enough, the All Blacks coach also has to be a skilled, clever and strategic communicator.
However hard it is to manage sponsors, Super Rugby coaches, players and staff, none of it is as difficult or as fraught as managing the media.
“You have to understand the role of the media otherwise they can really wind you up as they did earlier in my career,” says Hansen.
Hansen became one of the best manipulators of the media and the master at controlling the news cycle, and arguably the ability to set an agenda and sway public opinion is now the number one skill priority for the All Blacks head coach.
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