Kieran Read came into the All Blacks captaincy with a goal of breaking down the old social barriers that were preventing genuine unity within the team.
FOLLOWING RICHIE MCCAW INTO THE ALL BLACKS’ CAPTAINCY WAS A NEAR IMPOSSIBLE JOB FOR KIERAN READ. BUT HE MADE ONE SIGNIFICANT CHANGE THAT WILL BE HIS LEGACY.
There was never any way Kieran Read’s record as captain would stand comparison with the man he replaced in the job.
His predecessor, Richie McCaw, will probably never be surpassed in terms of longevity and success. His 10 years as All Blacks captain saw him lead the team more than 100 times and win the World Cup twice.
There was that and six Rugby Championships, three World Player of the year awards and a win ratio of close to 90 per cent.
So it was never going to be fair to compare and contrast the respective captaincy periods of McCaw and Read and make comparisons based purely on the statistics.
Read actually posted numbers that would stand impressively against any other captain. Just not McCaw. He captained the team 52 times which is one more than Sean Fitzpatrick managed.
Under Read’s leadership, the All Blacks won 85 per cent of their tests, retained the Bledisloe Cup and won the Rugby Championship three times out of four.
The failure to win the World Cup will forever upset Read and forever count against him when he knocks on the door of the Pantheon looking to take a place among the greats.
But to see his career in numbers only is to miss the essence of what he brought to the role and what he did for the All Blacks. It was no surprise to hear Sonny Bill Williams sign off his All Blacks career by saying Read was the best captain he ever played under.
Williams would not be alone in thinking that because Read led the team with an inclusivity that had never previously been witnessed in the All Blacks.
He was a leader with time for everyone. He was a captain who wanted to bring down the real and perceived barriers that were preventing the team from being truly united.
Read changed what others couldn’t and to understand his impact, we have to go back to a different time: a period when the All Blacks were riven with internal struggles and quaint ideas about how they should operate.
There are many All Blacks of the amateur era who found their opposition to be significantly less intimidating than their team-mates.
Plenty, particularly in the distant past, discovered that the hardest part of being an All Black was surviving a hierarchical culture that was effectively institutionalised bullying.
There was no welcome party thrown for new caps. No smiling face waiting to greet them with open arms and friendly words when they first pitched up in camp.
It was a tough environment. It was a lonely place and many new boys didn’t survive. They couldn’t find a way to settle or find a way to be themselves in a world where they were initially not respected and forced to fend for themselves.
Even tough men such as Richard Loe came into the team as nobodies, with no rights and no respect. Loe ended up being feared all over the world but on his first All Blacks assignment, he shared a room with senior prop John Ashworth, whose only utterance in three days was, “milk, no sugar”.
Andy Dalton was the non-playing captain at the 1987 World Cup, but a decade before, he was called to the back of the team bus where he stood quaking in front of the senior players as they told him that he would buy them beer and stay quiet until they decided he no longer had to.
This was how things were back then. The new men had to do their time. They had to earn the right to speak. Earn the right to have a voice or an opinion. No one cared much for the new lads until they had been around for long enough to stop being seen as new.
That culture of new players being ritually humiliated until they had served enough time to earn respect softened throughout the professional era, but the concept of paying dues wasn’t eradicated.
To some extent the hierarchy is natural – a by-product of the human condition which naturally orders itself according to seniority. So even as many of the bad old habits of institutional drinking were
eliminated from the professional scene at the turn of the century, the idea of new boys having to do their time never really died.
Even at the last World Cup that culture existed, not so much by design but because of the reputation and strength of the personalities and their respective longevity within the team.
Richie McCaw didn’t mean to intimidate his younger team-mates, but he did none the less, as did Dan Carter, Ma’a Nonu, Conrad Smith, Keven Mealamu and Tony Woodcock, and new players tended to be terrified about saying anything when they first arrived.
Julian Savea said that when he made the All
Blacks in 2012, he once hid when he saw McCaw coming his way as he was so in awe of the captain and fearful about how a verbal exchange might turn out
McCaw was a brilliant captain who led a brilliant team, but it was a team run by a cabal of senior players, all of whom were products of the tough love environments they had endured and whether they realised it or not, they projected that same sense of expectation that new boys were to be seen and not heard.
This wasn’t deliberate as such. It was how things had been and what the players knew.
It certainly didn’t prevent the All Blacks from being successful. But when Read took over the captaincy in 2016, he had this vision of creating an egalitarian team where those with one cap were treated just the same as those with 100.
He didn’t feel for a second that the All Blacks were broken. It was more a case of him believing that they could be even better if they made it easier for new players to come into the team and contribute immediately.
There was no doubt that some new players still struggled to make their mark in the All Blacks when they first arrived. Some found the environment debilitating.
Read wasn’t convinced that starving new players of confidence and having them fearful of speaking their minds would be conducive to performance.
For some, the environment would be motivating, but he suspected others would find it intimidating to the point of crushing and it seemed counter productive to pick talented youngsters and then not support them to deliver what they had been put in the team to do.
“I guess I came in at the end of that era where as a young player you didn’t talk, sat quietly and earned your respect on the field which I don’t think is a bad thing,” says Read.
“And certainly that was kind of the way – until you did what you needed to do on the field, then you got the respect of the senior guys and perhaps got a wee conversation with them. That was just the way it was.
“For some guys it works. I was capable of doing it. I was a quiet guy back then so I wouldn’t have said anything anyway.
“So in some ways yes it helps you but also having the confidence to go out there and play comes from having trust in these guys and talking to them. “That for me that has become crucial. When new guys come in, if you can have a conversation with them, then on the field where they may need to say something to you, they will be more inclined to tell you something you need to know rather than not.”
Read didn’t set out with a deliberate plan to create a different world for new All Blacks. He came into the job with an open mind and while he says there was a vision somewhere in his head he sensed that the team would take the shape he wanted more by evolution than revolution.
He sensed that because he knew that he would lead with an inclusive style. He knew that he would make himself accessible to everyone, including the new players and he knew that if he set the example, other senior players would follow.
There was no intent on his part to paint the previous regime in a poor light as can often happen when a new leader wants to see significant change. He wasn’t being critical of McCaw by setting out to be more inclusive.
His respect for McCaw was enormous and the two had many similarities. Read shared McCaw’s single-minded desire to win and conviction that the best way to lead was through the quality of his own performance.
They were, though, different people and personalities. Where McCaw was shy and perhaps unwittingly aloof in his final years due to his incredible standing in the game and legendary focus and determination, Read by nature was more relaxed, more inclusive and more conscious of how he interacted with others, particularly new All Blacks.
That may have been down to his upbringing. His formative years were spent in South Auckland where he was exposed to all walks of life. He saw diversity as a strength and therefore he new that the newest players in the team could bring something worth harnessing.
He understood the danger of excluding someone from being able to actively contribute to the betterment of the team and hence he had this desire to embrace his Generation Y and Millennial team-mates in a way McCaw never did.
To help new players settle, Read felt he needed to understand them – have some sense of what makes them tick and find a connection point.
“The guys coming through now have grown up with iPads and iPhones and all that, social media, which is different to when I grew up,” says Read.
“But the key thing for me is that because of my upbringing in Counties it didn’t matter where you were from or what your background was. I played with lots of different guys and it was just team-mates. So you adjusted to that and I could hang with whomever in the team.
“Consciously, in recent times I have come to realise this generation are potentially more emotionally charged and fluctuate more than perhaps me and guys older than me because you never really had those opportunities to be that way when you were growing up.”
Read recognised that Generation Y operate on a different emotional plain with different expectations and he bent the culture of the team to accommodate rather than isolate.
His captaincy was defined by his ability to break down the barriers that had previously prevented the All Blacks from being genuinely inclusive.
It was a matter of some importance to him that a player with one cap could feel that they mattered as much as a player with 100. It was important to him to have a culture that allowed the new boys to contribute as soon as they arrived and feel that their input was valued.
Everyone selected had earned the right to be there was his view and they didn’t need to be made to suffer until they had delivered something on the field to prove that the coaches had been right to give them the opportunity.
“I know exactly what they are feeling because I had all the same feelings when I came into a side with Dan Carter, Reuben Thorne and Richie McCaw,” he says.
“It is about having a conversation with them to find out about them. I can’t expect them to initiate that. Any chance you get, be it over lunch or dinner to sit next to them and maybe find out one thing about them, you take it.
“And then you can tell them to back themselves, ‘you are here for a reason, go play’ and then they truly believe it.”
Change is never easy for everyone to embrace and some of the senior All Blacks of the last four years admit that they had to work hard to embrace the idea that new players were immediately given rights that they had to work that bit harder and longer to win.
It wasn’t easy for some players to come through a school of tough love and then see the new generation not suffer in the same way.
“Most of the kids are pretty good but you get some who have come out of First XV which is televised and they are big rock stars,” says long-serving hooker Dane Coles.
“When they come into the professional environment they want it straight away. I had to wait three years. I played three years off the bench behind [Andrew] Hore because that is what I had to do.
“Some of these young guys are impatient and have to understand their time will come. Just put the work in and your time will come but it is a generational thing.
“The hard conversations are sometimes what they need. A few words from an older player can help them see what is going on. But you have to encourage them too and tell them when they are playing well because things have changed and there is a lot more getting around the young fellas, having a yarn with them when they arrive.
“We are more inclusive now and it doesn’t matter if you have played one test or 100, we are treated all the same. But I still think there is a little bit of room for the old school mentality.”
Sam Cane, who has captained the All Blacks twice since coming into the team in 2012, is another leader who has had to adjust to the fact new players these days don’t understand or buy into the idea of earning the right to speak.
“It is the evolution of high performance environments,” he says. “Eight years ago when I came in you wouldn’t speak much for the first couple of years, but if you went back 10 years again it would be worse.
“I think the leaders set the tone and the leaders of that time had transitioned through that era so they had that little bit of old school mentality about them of having to earn your stripes which I still think there is a little bit of a place for.
“It [All Blacks] is an environment now where you are encouraged to come in and be yourself and if you have something to say then it is valued straight off the bat.
“I remember my first training and I was terrified about dropping the ball because I was unknown and unproven and I was probably doubting myself because I didn’t have the self-confidence to know whether I should be there.
“So now, I definitely make a conscious effort to not take things too seriously. Away from the rugby I try to be myself and in my down time let my guard down to let them know [ younger players] they can take the piss out of me and I can do the same.”
Other All Blacks leaders such as Sonny Bill Williams and Ardie Savea found it relatively easy to embrace Generation Y. It felt more natural for them to reach out and make the path easier not harder for new players and much of that was due to their own experiences and a desire to not see others feel the way they did.
Williams was in the unique position of becoming an All Black after only a few appearances for Canterbury in the 2010 ITM Cup and yet being a massive superstar because of his profile built in the NRL.
The juxtaposition of having such a major media following without having earned it through deeds in the black jersey didn’t sit will with some of the leaders at that time and Williams cut a lonely figure in those early years.
“When you come with a big profile, it was really tough,” says Williams.
“At times I probably didn’t help myself because I was shy and quiet instead of making myself a bit more vulnerable.
“That was the era of the old school guy - to shut up and get on with it but that is not the case now.
“Yes, we want young guys to fulfil their potential and speak up and be themselves but it is a two-way street as us older boys need to be vulnerable enough to say ‘hey how are you, how are you going, what’s happening?’.
“Over the years I guess that barrier is being broken down and I feel like that is one of my strengths - having the people smarts and social understanding to get down and talk on that level and connect with them.”
Savea, too, had a unique situation in that he was selected as an apprentice to tour with the squad in 2013.
He had played for Wellington, but he
was 19, hadn’t experienced Super Rugby and was training with players he’d idolised since primary school.
“I was shit scared to be honest,” he says. “Rubbing shoulders with guys you idolised as a kid, to be around them when you are a fan is hard. I was this shit-scared, star-struck kid and that is part of my brief now to stand up and speak because I know what it is like to feel that way.”
The ultimate proof of how Read changed the All Blacks could be seen in the make-up of the All Blacks team selected to play the major games at the World Cup.
The team was loaded with Generation Y players and Millennials who had been around for the veritable five minutes.
And the reason they were in the team was because they had made an irrefutable case to be included. That was the proof – the ease and speed at which the new men had been able to stake their claim.
The impact new players were able to make in the 18 months leading into the tournament changed the complexion of the team.
Richie Mo’unga and Jack Goodhue, both 23 when they won their first caps last year, were so composed and effective they ousted world class All Blacks to become regular starters.
No one would have picked in 2018 that they would be the preferred midfield at the World Cup ahead of Williams and Ryan Crotty.
George Bridge scored two tries on debut late last year and after two more appearances off the bench leapfrogged Ben Smith. That was unthinkable but Bridge deserved his place because in just two tests he proved he was ready – the right choice.
And then there was Sevu Reece, the 22-year-old try-scoring sensation who began the year without a Super Rugby contract, but kept Rieko Ioane out of the team.
Ioane, of course, himself being testament to the empowerment of new players as he was picked in the first test of the Lions series in 2017 as a promising 20-year-old and finished the season nominated for World Player of the Year.
As he says: “The old heads want to connect and for that transition to be seamless. It has definitely moved away from that old school culture.”
These young players exuded confidence. They played beyond their level of experience, made strong decisions and while they held the leadership group in the highest respect, it’s apparent no one was intimidated into silence or fearful of challenging that with which they didn’t agree.
“We want people to trust their instincts and their skill-sets on the park and go and do it,” said assistant coach Ian Foster.
“You can’t expect that on the park and have a system off the park where the young fellas feel like they can’t say anything.
“There is certainly a desire from young players, just as there is in society, to have their voice and be heard. So we have had to move with the times and make those judgements.”
The World Cup didn’t end the way the All Blacks wanted but Read at least had the satisfaction that he built the egalitarian team he hoped he would. He created the team he wanted – one where age, experience and background mattered not as everyone was able to be the best version of themselves.
The average age of the backline was 25, compared with 2015 when it was 29 and the energy and creativity of the 2019 All Blacks came from the new boys.
It was a Generation Y team in make up and mind-set and giving youth a voice made the All Blacks a better team than had they continued to stifle and restrict the influence of those who hadn’t paid their dues.
“I think we were heading in that direction before I took over the captaincy,” he says. “But as a whole group we have got better at it. I think, naturally as a leader that’s where I wanted it to be because that is how I lead, how I approach people and who I am.
“I think it shows. When you see the new guys, the younger guys come in and perform, it means the culture of the team is spot on. It means they can be themselves and they can be relaxed to know what they have to do but yet go out and show it.
“There haven’t been too many guys who come into this environment and haven’t lasted. Mostly everyone has come in and found a way and I think that is a great sign for what we have here.”