BETTER PEOPLE

THE TRANSITION FROM AMATEURISM TO PROFESSIONALISM DIDN’T GO SMOOTHLY FOR THE ALL BLACKS IN THE EARLY 2000s. IT TOOK A BAD NIGHT IN SOUTH AFRICA FOR EVERYONE TO REALISE THAT AND TO CHANGE.

It’s not just that the All Blacks have been great players over the years, they have also strived to be better people.

Throughout 2004, it was becoming apparent to the newly installed All Blacks management team that there were problems in the set-up.

The players had talent and they knew how to play the game tactically. On those two factors alone, they were going to win a lot of tests. They did win a lot of tests.

They began 2004 by twice thumping world champions England, then tearing apart Argentina and the Pacific Islanders, before squeezing past Australia and South Africa.

Performance-wise, plenty of boxes were being ticked, but there was a rising concern among the coaches. They were a little worried that the players weren’t as disciplined and as driven as they needed to be to dominate world rugby.

Professionalism had created a level playing field. The likes of England and France, who had massive financial resources, would now be able to make those work in their favour. They could throw more money into sports science, contract more players and give them the best of everything.

The professional world would be harder to dominate and the key would be the little things. The detail would matter – taking the time to hone skills to the next level would make a big difference.

Players would have to work that bit longer and harder on their fitness, on their strength, on their flexibility and on their game understanding.

They would have to, because their opponents would be doing that and the margins between the best teams would be less. The battle for supremacy would be intense and whatever the All Blacks had achieved in the amateur age, they would have to work almost twice as hard again to retain that success in the professional age.

The coaching team, all of whom had taken their respective posts after working offshore, had seen how standards had lifted in Europe. They had seen how the major rugby nations of the Northern Hemisphere were pushing themselves harder for longer and thinking more about what they could do to become better players.

There was some concern that New Zealand’s best players hadn’t realised how the landscape had changed. The players worked hard, but the coaches felt they could work harder.

There was no culture of doing more than was required. The players trained as a team and then knocked off – that was them for the day. Once training was out the way, the PlayStations would be out, or the cards, or some would head to the golf course.

The coaches started to feel that the players could be doing more to prepare themselves physically and mentally. They wanted to see more hunger in individuals to work harder and longer. They wanted to see players commit to improving their micro skills; to dig deeper into analysing their opponents, to understand more about their post game recovery. In short, they wanted their players to understand and then embrace a high performance culture.

Related to this, head coach Graham Henry had a theory that the professional system had removed key elements from the make up of his athletes. High performance programmes were all about making life easy for the athlete.

Life for the best players came on a plate and was regimented and planned by management. The players just had to turn up and do what they were told. It didn’t instil in them a culture of self responsibility. To some extent, it left them short of key life skills – they weren’t problem-solving on a daily basis. They weren’t having to take responsibility for planning their day and the modern athlete lacked many of the in-built qualities that were acquired by his amateur predecessor.

“When I was coaching Auckland back in the amateur era, the guys worked nine-tofive before coming to training and I think that helped them develop skills and experiences that were useful in rugby,” Henry said.

“I’m sure there is a huge link between developing these skills off the field and being able to apply them on the field. The players need things to take their mind off the game.” That growing suspicion all was not right came to a head in August 2004. The All Blacks travelled to Sydney then Johannesburg for the away leg of the Tri Nations and they fell apart.

They were ragged in Sydney and then simply torn to shreds in South Africa. They were second best by a long way and for the final 20 minutes, they played as individuals. It was a bad day and yet a few hours after the game had finished, the All Blacks didn’t appear to have a care in the world.

The boys were getting hard on the grog because that’s what they did back then. They were having what was known as a court session – a long-cherished rugby team ritual where a judge is appointed to fine members of the team for all sorts of ‘crimes’.

The penalties were always the same – for the guilty party to consume copious amounts of alcohol and this particular session got out of hand.

Midway through the night some of the players had passed out on the lawn of the hotel where they were staying. Their South African counterparts even had to put a few in the recovery position. It was so bad that assistant coach Wayne Smith said that if things weren’t going to change, he didn’t want to be a part of it any more.

The attitudes towards drink were the ultimate illustration of where the All Blacks were failing. They were stuck in an amateur ethos, preserving some of the worst traditions that had no place in the modern game.

There was simply no way the All Blacks could consider themselves the pinnacle of high performance when they were happy to have an institutionalised binge-drinking culture.

It sat at odds – horribly so – with the sort of values they needed to embrace to be the best in the world.

The coaching team knew they had to invoke change. They had to put an end to the bad habits that had become accepted and almost encouraged by previous regimes.

“I was surprised we hadn’t moved forward,” Steve Hansen said of that period after he had graduated to head coach in 2012. “We hadn’t moved on from holding court sessions and I thought we would have. When I was with Wales we would celebrate as a team, have dinner maybe and then the players would go their separate ways. We didn’t have court sessions or the like and it wasn’t really a bingedrinking culture.”

The culture was that if you weren’t playing, then you had the week off. Guys would do the training but they had, I suppose, the attitude of what were once called the dirty-dirties, but we didn’t have mid-week games.’ DARREN SHAND

From a performance aspect, the heavy drinking was symptomatic of a forgotten age when those not involved in the match day squad treated their time as a foreign holiday.

“The culture was that if you weren’t playing, then you had the week off,” says All Black manager Darren Shand of what he discovered when he came into the job in 2004. “Guys would do the training but they had, I suppose, the attitude of what were once called the dirty-dirties, but we didn’t have mid-week games.

“I came from the Crusaders where we had court sessions as well, but only when we won. I can remember in 2004 being surprised that the team had a court session after we had lost heavily to South Africa. Some guys were heavily intoxicated – to the extent they had to be helped to bed. We were staying in a four- or five-star resort and their behaviour was inappropriate.

“In my experience when these sessions got really out of hand was when hard liquor was introduced.”

That night in South Africa was the nadir. The All Blacks returned to New Zealand with a determination to fix their attitude and drag themselves into the professional age. The world’s best team had to rip everything up and start again in late 2004. The mission became to rebuild attitudes in regard to all aspects of professionalism. Standards had to be set at the highest levels for all aspects of preparation and the players’ mindsets had to shift towards doing everything within their power to help themselves.

The binge drinking had to go. The idea that players who weren’t in the match day squad could slack off – that had to go, too.

The new culture was going to be totally inclusive and demand that everyone grasp that to be the team they wanted to be, the All Blacks had to have a deeper work ethic than everyone else.

They had to hold themselves accountable for all of their behaviours and understand that they were All Blacks 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“It required a significant mind-shift around our professionalism and the responsibility of being an All Black,” senior player Aaron Mauger said.

“When rugby went professional there were still five or six areas of behaviour that were not very professional. The All Blacks coaching group were the first side to grasp that concept and ensure the players bought into it and enforced it. If I was to sum up in three words it would be ‘understand the privilege’.”

Mauger’s summation was bang on, but the term coined within the team was ‘better people make better All Blacks’. That was the all-encompassing philosophy that would guide them to the promised land.

What it meant in practice was that the All Blacks were going to go to the next level of high performance and it wouldn’t stop on the field. They would train harder and smarter. Individuals would take more responsibility for their workloads. They would do more to perfect the small things that would make a difference.

When players weren’t picked, they would still work hard. They were still part of the team and their contribution valuable. There would be no condoned binge drinking. Players would take control of their drinking and be empowered to make sensible choices.

If the All Blacks were serious about being the best, then they couldn’t justify the booze culture. They couldn’t be using long periods of the day to lounge around the team hotel, doing little more than playing video games.

But maybe most important of all, they had to find a way to broaden their horizons as people and take on more responsibility away from the field. They were asked to build their self-reliance, to be more resourceful. They were asked to think long and hard about what it meant to be an All Black and to ensure they lived those values all the time.

If they were better people, they would become better All Blacks. It made sense. “Professionalism was different back then,” said 77-test All Black Ali Williams about the period before 2004. “We weren’t training as hard or as long and we weren’t as competitive with each other when it came to all the little things. It was more your competition was on the field. Now – post 2004 – physically we are all doing the same thing, so [if you drink heavily] you get caught out. The game has evolved therefore the drinking has evolved.” It was a long battle for the All Blacks to instil their new culture. Bad habits are hard to break and while the All Blacks lifted their standards after 2004, it took a while for the Super Rugby franchises to follow suit.

Once they did, though, and the notion of what it truly meant to be professional sunk in across the country at all levels of the game, the All Blacks benefited from their hard work.

Would they have won the 2011 World Cup without the ‘better people make better All Blacks’ culture? Probably not. Would they have been back-to-back champions with an incredible win record in between? Definitely not.

The cultural shift made in 2004 was huge. It was one of the most significant reasons the All Blacks were able to improve their win ratio and claim two World Cups.

They became a genuine high performance team. They understood what that meant and they lived their culture. They weren’t perfect. There were a few players who would slip or fail to live up to behavioural expectations.

But it was only a few and the difference was that when players fell from grace, they stood out. They were disciplined and then supported to help them make it back to the squad and deliver what was needed.

The All Blacks became a side full of disciplined young men who were driven to try to be better in everything they did. They became all about striving for improvement and never accepting mediocrity.

“We have moved away from the old ways,” said Hansen after the 2011 World Cup. “We still have a laugh, but we don’t force alcohol down the throats of young men any more. As a leadership group, we [management and players] discuss things like ‘how do we celebrate a test win if we have a performance that we can be proud of?’ We have rules around that and one of those is if you are injured, you don’t drink [ because it compromises recovery]. The culture now is all about performing.”

When rugby went professional there were still five or six areas of behaviour that were not very professional. The All Blacks coaching group were the first side to grasp that concept and ensure the players bought into it and enforced it. If I was to sum up in three words it would be “understand the privilege”.’ AARON MAUGER