Scott Robertson has yet to name his All Blacks coaching team for 2024. Photo / Photosport
Scott Robertson has yet to name his All Blacks coaching team for 2024. Photo / Photosport
OPINION:
One of the dangers of appointing the next All Blacks coach while the current one still has six months of his contract to run and a World Cup to get through is the conflicting messages it sends fans about how to feel about the incumbent and incomingregimes.
Last week was a doozy in that regard, as head coach-in-waiting Scott Robertson confirmed that he is cleaning out the incumbent All Blacks staff - retaining just two of a 15-strong wider management team - and that once he starts in the role, he will consider lobbying the board to allow him to pick players from overseas.
Cleaning out the incumbent coaching and management team is Robertson’s prerogative, and there is a strong case to be made that change was overdue.
The best high-performance teams tend to constantly refresh their support staff, whereas the All Blacks have senior figures in important roles who have been with the team for almost 20 years.
The issue is not, however, that the new man wants new people, the issue is the overt and implied messages it sends to the incumbent group who have been entrusted by their employer to take the All Blacks to the World Cup.
Change on the scale Robertson has made sends an undeniably strong message that he doesn’t think the All Blacks are on the right track.
He’s salvaged just two people from the existing regime, and you only throw away that level of institutional knowledge if you don’t think the knowledge is worth much.
For the last two decades, New Zealand Rugby (NZR) has believed in continuity of ideas, personnel and routines as a key part of All Blacks’ success.
Robertson is openly rejecting this thesis, pinning his tenure on his conviction that the All Blacks need new people, new direction and new ways of doing things.
Leon MacDonald will join as Scott Robertson's assistant at the All Blacks. Photo / Getty Images
The issue is not whether he’s right to do this. Succession planning worked for the All Blacks when long-time assistant Steve Hansen took over from Graham Henry.
Having a consistent management team brought stability and certainty that helped the All Blacks between 2010 and 2019, but for the last few years, the team has at various times displayed all the endemic frailties of the wider New Zealand rugby ecosystem.
The landscape of today is almost unrecognisable to how it was even four years ago.
Schools rugby hit peak professionalism in 2018 and the Super Rugby playing base is filled mostly with young men who have only ever known the rhythms and routines of institutional rugby systems.
The collapse of Super Rugby as it was, and the arrival of the new 12-team Pacific competition, has left holes in the physical development of many players and bringing Robertson in as an agent of change feels right as it does appear that the All Blacks need new thinkers, with new solutions to fix new problems.
But how must Foster and his almost entirely rejected management team have felt last week to have seen their employer give the floor to the All Blacks coaching team elect to herald their impending arrival?
There is figurative blood flowing through the All Blacks changing room because NZR believes there needed to be.
New Zealand coach Ian Foster looks on prior to the Autumn International match between England and New Zealand at Twickenham Stadium on November 19, 2022 in London. Photo / Getty Images
Chief executive Mark Robinson made sure to say that the incumbent All Blacks coaching team continue to have the organisation’s support, but he’s asking New Zealanders to be simultaneously excited by the total cleanout and bright new future that is on its way, and to believe that the right coaching group, with the right ideas, is taking the team to the World Cup in September.
Robertson’s statement that he will talk to the NZR board about the All Blacks eligibility policy only heightened the sense of how awry he feels things are.
Presumably his intent was to warn the board that he intends to challenge the status quo, but the fact he’s discussed it six months before starting the job has had the inadvertent impact of implying that the incumbent regime were either oblivious of eligibility being a performance issue, or failed to do anything about it.
It certainly appears that Foster saw it that way, as he took the opportunity to tell Jason Pine on Newstalk ZB that opening selection to offshore players would be a disaster - and in doing so, created what may become the first of many occasions where the incumbent and incoming All Blacks coaches publicly contradict each other and fans feel caught in the middle.
