KEY POINTS:
A tangled web of political alliances and fractured relationships will have a huge bearing on who wins the battle to become the next All Blacks coach.
Robbie Deans may be far and away the strongest candidate for the position outside the recently deposed panel of Graham Henry, Steve Hansen and Wayne Smith, but a glowing CV won't necessarily be the deciding factor in who gets the job.
Plenty of success has flowed the way of archetypal Cantabrian Deans but there have been fallouts with those he's worked closely with.
NZRU chief executive-in-waiting Steve Tew is widely believed to be one who has a strained relationship with Deans. Hansen is another.
The tension between the three apparently stems from their time together at Canterbury at the turn of the millennium, when Tew was the chief executive and Hansen an assistant coach to Deans at the Crusaders.
A Herald source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, confirmed there was plenty of substance to rumours of a rift between the trio.
Deans and Tew were "strong personalities" whose opinions differed on key issues, but the pair had shown in the past they could work together, the source said.
The same, however, could not be said of Deans and Hansen, who split in acrimonious circumstances following the Crusaders' 10th-placed finish in 2001. An inability to work with Deans was a major reason Hansen left to coach Wales, the source said.
Hansen and Tew, on the other hand, are firm allies. If the All Blacks had won the World Cup, Hansen is believed to have had Tew's backing to succeed Henry. The All Blacks' shock defeat to France changed all that.
History suggests that World Cup failure results in heads rolling. The culling doesn't usually stop at the coaches. When John Mitchell's All Blacks bombed out in 2003, the vast majority of the regime's backroom staff were also forced to walk the plank. Deans was among them. There are more jobs on the line right now than just the head coach's.
The man who may find himself in the most awkward position could be CEO-designate Tew. Having backed the current regime to the hilt and played a significant role in approving their every request, he is inextricably linked to October's failure.
Having been led down a path they were assured would lead to World Cup glory, it remains to be seen how much faith the NZRU board retain in their management. If the decision to open the head coach's job to applications is anything to go by, the answer may be "not much".
Either the board will fully back Tew and reappoint Henry or Hansen - assuming they even apply for the job - or they face being stuck with a chief executive who doesn't get on with the man most likely to be charged with winning the 2011 Cup.
Then again, after four years of management kowtowing to the coaching team's every wacky request, perhaps a little disharmony is just what is needed.
Let the power struggle begin.
