Attack coach defends style
Don’t expect the All Blacks to ditch the implementation of their tweaked playing style any time soon.
Having scored just one try in their past two games, including Sunday’s 16-9 loss to Ireland in Dublin, doubts the changes the coaching staff started embedding at the beginning of the season are hitting home have ramped up.
Assistant coach Ian Foster, who runs the team’s attack, was peppered with questions related to it by the media in Rome yesterday, as the All Blacks began preparing for Sunday morning’s (NZT) test against Italy.
Foster started by downplaying the ‘‘new game plan’’ tag, insisting it’s subtle tweaks to their style of play, designed to help them combat the different styled opposition they will meet at next year’s World Cup in Japan.
‘‘It’s not that we’ve got some sort of cunning plan to have this different game plan, but we’re trying to be very open to what’s happening in front of us and what other teams are doing,’’ Foster said. ‘‘We might be making some changes but so are other teams.
‘‘Coaching groups, we’re always impatient and want to get there straight away, but we’ve been around long enough to know we’ve just got to keep chipping away.’’
The All Blacks have five tests confirmed before they kick off the 2019 World Cup against South Africa in September, although a sixth fixture could yet be added to the calendar.
Unlike this year, All Blacks will not be required to spend time away from their Super franchises to attend training camps in 2019, a year which features a condensed Rugby Championship and an uninterrupted Super competition.
‘‘I don’t think there is a deadline,’’ Foster said when asked if they had enough time to get their game right. ‘‘We’re really happy with large parts of what we’re doing. This is the beauty of now, we’ve got real test matches where if we don’t get them right we get hurt, so we get tested under a lot of pressure.’’
Foster said it wasn’t just the players under scrutiny to get it right. The coaching group was also analysing how it was delivering the tweaked system.
‘‘We’re all trying to just dig deeper into smaller areas to make sure we are really clear as a team, and we’re getting there.’’
The All Blacks’ loss to Ireland, which followed a scratchy onepoint win against England, sparked panic among fans and some figures in the media.
Captain Kieran Read has come under particularly heavy criticism, while Hansen’s selection policy at fullback and first-five eighth remains a talking point.
Foster has heard it all before. ‘‘There’s always a lot of panic around us when we drop a game, and that’s to be expected.
‘‘But it’s happened before, it will happen again. That’s just the passion of our supporters, isn’t it? We’ve got no issues with high expectations and disappointment when we don’t play at the levels we want. But it doesn’t change what we’re doing.’’