All Blacks: Hansen's men ready for fresh challenges

Coach Ian Foster has been named assistant coach of the All Blacks. Photo / Christine Cornege

The seeds of the Ian Foster-Steve Hansen partnership were sown more than a year ago when the Chiefs supremo was considering offers to take his mentoring skills offshore.

While the "Aussie and Fozzie Show" was unveiled only yesterday, Hansen and Foster had been in talks for much longer.

Hansen, Graham Henry's successor as All Blacks coach, used his powers of persuasion to convince Foster to stay in New Zealand to work on "special projects" until after the World Cup, rather than weigh up offers in Europe.

Going back even further, Foster had doubts about returning to the Chiefs for his eighth and final year, believing that both he and the team had reached the end of a cycle, but there was always the lure of landing his dream job working alongside a man he had developed close coaching ties with.

"There's been some conversations going on for a while," Foster said. "The public should expect that. It should expect some pre-planning, but that doesn't mean there's any certainty about it going through.

"Certainly, Steve's spoken to me about it over the past year or so about the possibilities, but coaching is a funny business, you never know what's going to happen."

Indeed, if the All Blacks' 2011 World Cup campaign had ended in similar ignominy to the one four years earlier, there was more chance that Hansen would have been issued with a restraining order to stay 5km from the All Blacks, than there was of him becoming head coach.

Foster's coaching fate was then essentially tied to the All Blacks World Cup success despite him having no input into it.

Ironically, that success has now made his task as Hansen's backs and attack coach even harder - with success comes great expectations.

The coaches, players and administrators have no doubt recalibrated their expectations to marry in with the loss of some senior players and huge rugby knowledge in Henry and Wayne Smith - the public aren't quite so forgiving.

"It's been a fantastic year for New Zealand rugby and going forward there is going to be high expectations and big challenges," Foster acknowledged.

"There's going to be guys that need a new focus, a new challenge as players."

Foster is confident he, forwards coach Hansen and defence coach Brian "Aussie" McLean can provide the stimulus for another golden era of All Black rugby.

Although they've never worked together before, he sees them as complementary coaches and personalities.

To those who question his credentials after eight years of largely unfulfilled expectations as Chiefs coach, he has a simple riposte: "I'm pretty proud of the time I had at the Chiefs. It's been a challenge at times. I had eight years there and we achieved some good things."

Hansen, too, is unconcerned by Foster's perceived lack of success at Super rugby level.

"There's no doubt he's a good backs coach," Hansen said. "He's brought through a lot of All Blacks. He may not have won too many championships, but not a lot a of our current Super 15 coaches have."

It is a step up for Foster, but then again it is a step up for all of them.

Hansen is proven as a loyal ally to Henry, but doubts remain as to whether he has some of the more statesmanlike skills that are a necessary component of coaching the world's highest-profile rugby team.

Like Hansen, McLean can sometimes come across as a curmudgeon.

McLean is known as a coach's coach and his ties to Hansen go back to the days when he was convinced to go into coaching by Steve's father Des, his coach at Marist.

"Aussie is very strong in analysis and he understands attack well. If you understand attack well, you understand defence well. To me, it was a logical fit," Hansen said.

McLean accepted that in following Henry and Smith, he had "pretty big shoes to fill".

"It's another rugby team - it's a pretty special one, but it's another rugby team. And the game isn't ... rocket science."