Robertson’s mistake was to blur the narrative: to make it appear that his motivation for wanting to change the eligibility rules around All Blacks selection was exclusively driven by a desire to gain access to Mo’unga.
He brought the issue into the public domain, but his PR campaign was a disaster – a triumph for mixed messaging and vagueness. Above all else it lacked conviction.
His manifesto needed to be direct, simple and well-reasoned – an all-in, public submission of why and how he felt the eligibility rules needed to change.
It’s a complex area. Change proposals need to be carefully reasoned, but Robertson never went beyond his standard line of saying he’d asked the New Zealand Rugby board to retain an open mind on eligibility.
He did, however, make one specific, unprompted mention of Mo’unga in Sydney, saying he’d gone surfing with Andrew Johns and that even the NRL legend had asked when the former Crusaders No 10 would be coming home.
But fortunately for Robertson, he’s been given a second chance to fight the fight – on one clearly defined front (the way he should have last year) – because NZR has cleaned out its old board and the new one is presumably open to hearing persuasive arguments both for and against making any adjustment to eligibility settings.
He shouldn’t be shut down on the basis he lacked style in presenting a vision which is loaded with substance.
Robertson, even during his six-month tenure as All Blacks coach-elect, had formed a view that New Zealand’s eligibility policy needed to be changed.
He felt it was no longer fit for purpose, that global market trends had shifted so significantly in the wake of Covid-19 that New Zealand needed to at least review its settings in a new and much-changed landscape.
The most obvious threat was Japan, whose Top League is now played at roughly the same time as Super Rugby and which has built critical mass in terms of player base, coaching intellect and financial horsepower.
Robertson’s pitch to the board was to adapt the current thinking around sabbatical clauses: currently a leading All Black can be based offshore and remain eligible for the national team for one season – he wants that extended to two seasons.
He also wants to be less prescriptive about who qualifies for a sabbatical – currently players with 70 test caps are considered – and allow a high-performance committee a degree of flexibility to make decisions on who should and shouldn’t be sanctioned to spend time offshore while also remaining eligible for test selection.
It’s a plan designed to give New Zealand a revamped legislative framework that recognises the new dangers Japan poses, and specifically, it’s pre-empting the inevitability of the current one-season sabbatical clause becoming ineffective as a retention tool because Top League clubs are losing their appetite to sign players on such short-term deals.
Baked into Robertson’s proposal is an acceptance that Japan is not the rugby backwater that so many in New Zealand like to portray it as, and that it’s not mission impossible to be based there long-term and still be well-prepared to play test rugby.
A third of the Springboks squad is based in Japan – and this fact became a secondary strand of Robertson’s PR campaign in 2024: he continually referenced South Africa’s ability to retain experienced players by having no restrictions on eligibility as a critical reason why they beat the All Blacks twice and are back-to-back world champions.
His argument found an ally in former All Blacks coach Sir Steve Hansen, who has been with Toyota Verblitz since 2020, and who said in a recent interview on Sport Nation.
“Just the ease of getting back from here [Japan] to New Zealand, the number of New Zealand coaches that are up here that the All Blacks or New Zealand Rugby could rely on and help facilitate the players returning to New Zealand rugby for the All Blacks.
“The communication that would be needed and the trust that would be needed around strength and conditioning programmes and those sorts of things.
“There’s a heap of people and connections that can help. Those sorts of things say to you that maybe it could work.”
If a rugby authority of Hansen’s standing – someone who coached the All Blacks to unprecedented success and who understands the direction in which Japanese club rugby is heading – is saying there is now a genuine case to consider an eligibility change, then it does feel New Zealand needs to have this conversation.
Robertson can’t be made to feel that he has lost his licence to push the issue in the public domain just because the campaign has lost its poster child.
The issue runs much deeper than just one player and nor can arguments against making any change be made on binary and nonsensical suggestions that to allow a few senior players to be picked from overseas means New Zealand is giving up on its own development programmes.
It’s not a case of either/or: New Zealand can invest heavily in its own programmes while allowing the All Blacks, if there is a need, to bolster their squad with a few offshore selections.
