22 July 2022 | All Blacks head coach Ian Foster has named his team for the upcoming SA tour, keeping Cane on as captain, but he remained tight-lipped over changes to coaching staff after their recent test series loss to Ireland. Video / NZ Herald
OPINION:
If we assume that a couple of coaching assistants will be sacrificed, will that be enough for Ian Foster's All Blacks to pull off a terrific comeback, beating South Africa in two tests in the republic?
It's hard to embrace that possibility, simply because of the manner in whichthey lost to a strong Ireland team and because Foster appears welded to the status quo – a man, it seems, who doesn't like change.
Sure, there are players yet to return who will add heft in the World Cup year ahead – Joe Moody, Josh Lord, Ethan Blackadder, Shannon Frizell, Anton Lienert-Brown, Damian McKenzie and Caleb Clarke. But Foster's reluctance to give the new boys consistent game time (on the northern tour last year and, particularly, against Ireland) has made it clear he is not prepared to experiment between now and the World Cup in France.
This conservatism means we have seen little of players like Samisoni Taukei'aho, Ethan de Groot, Tupou Vaa'i, Hoskins Sotutu, Aidan Ross, Finlay Christie and Roger Tuivasa-Sheck; Stephen Perofeta's reward for a stellar Super Rugby season was to be chosen for the All Blacks but not played. Would they have made a difference? How can we tell if they barely take the field?
Players like Finlay Christie have been scarcely sighted under Ian Foster's All Blacks. Photo / Photosport
Young and untried players can often light a fuse in rugby teams, not just with their energy and incentive. Their very arrival can be a catalyst for competitiveness among incumbents – another charge some lay against Foster's All Blacks: a cosy club where, once in, a member can be hard to dislodge.
The exception was the rather cruel departure of Pita Gus Sowakula, discarded after the grand total of 27 minutes on-field in two tests. In truth, as this column said at the time, he was a dicey selection; Sowakula had a fine start to Super Rugby – but dipped in form even before All Black selection and, two handling errors later, he was gone. Cruelly, his selection means he cannot play for Fiji now.
Unlike other coaches (Eddie Jones and England come to mind), the All Blacks have generally experimented little with the young and the restless. That didn't sit well with rugby fans and critics who point to Foster's inability to right the ship after it was badly holed on last year's northern tour.
The signs of All Blacks' vulnerability were unmissable and widely discussed – and were again on show against Ireland where the scrum, lineout, loose forwards (Ardie Savea excepted), halves, midfield and fullback were overshadowed by their Irish counterparts.
So Foster's largely-unchanged squad looks a bit like a driver suffering a flat tyre. He changes the tyre, putting on the spare. Just down the road, he suffers another flat tyre. So he changes the wheel, putting on the first tyre... which is still flat.
There is one inescapable conclusion to be drawn from all this – if it is not a personnel problem (and the unchanged nature of the squad suggests so), it must be a coaching issue.
So what, you wonder, is New Zealand Rugby's bottom line now? Will Foster have to win the two tests against the Boks to survive, or only one?
After the third test against Ireland, NZR put out a press release saying the series defeat was "not acceptable". Let's see, we have the same head coach, nearly all the same players and a hint that some change might occur at some unspecified time in the future, presumably of some of Foster's lieutenants. Joe Schmidt isn't travelling to South Africa and remains just a selector. You'd have to say, based on all that, it looks like the defeat was almost entirely acceptable to NZR.
However, the logistics of sending Foster off into the twilight and replacing him with a new coaching team are problematic; who would volunteer to take over a misfiring All Blacks team so close to a World Cup – lumbered with a mess not of their making? NZR has somehow engineered a situation where the coach they elected to power has lost four out of the last five, in the process creating an environment where it is harder to replace him than keep him.
Giving him a co-coach or mentor is similarly difficult. It would only introduce the potential for divisive politics (John Hart and Alex Wyllie, anybody?) and, let's face it, if they win, everyone will say it wasn't down to Foster but to the co-coach.
No, it's stand or fall alone now – and you have to give Foster his due; it took courage for a man who is not a natural performer to walk into a press conference full of media, most of whom are thinking he should be out of a job. In an emotional stand, he used words like "strong", "resilient", "accountable" and "strategic".
