Blues coach: ‘Expectation can’t pull us backwards’ as Super power shift looms
Super Rugby’s big movers of 2020 believe they’ve got the pillars in place to be even better next year.
FOR many years New
Zealand’s northernmost rugby franchise has been the punchline of numerous Super Rugby jokes. You know the ones. How do the Blues prepare for the playoffs? Hot dogs, cold beer, a comfy armchair and a big-screen TV.
Ha-dee-ha-ha. The joke was decidedly on Auckland’s professional rugby franchise for the simple reason that they had become a self-fulfilling prophecy of underachievement and dysfunction. The Blues won the first two Super Rugby titles in 1996 and ’ 97, narrowly missed a threepeat in ’98, and then nabbed one more in 2003. But they had becomemired in mediocrity since their last semifinal appearance in 2011.
They failed to finish better than ninth over eight straight seasons from 2012-19 and had become perennial woodenspooners in an otherwise superb New Zealand conference. But no longer. The franchise finally got its house in order by shaking things up from the top down, installing a new board, bringing in a new chief executive and restoring order among its catchment unions. There was also amajor rejig of the coaching setup, Leon MacDonald – a lifetime Crusader – whistled up to head the on-field turnaround, with Tom Coventry as his learned lieutenant and former boss Tana Umaga moving sideways into amore hands-on role that has allowed him to take the lead on mentoring. The latter has been an masterstroke.
The results weren’t immediate. MacDonald’s Blues went 5-1-10 in his first season (2019) with a playing group he largely inherited. But Rome wasn’t built in a day. The sort of habits the new boss knew he had to build took some time, as did the profile of the player needed to transform this group from gallant saps into hardnosed winners.
Sure enough, 2020 delivered a Blues team we hadn’t seen in a decade. They went 5-2 through an impressive opening stanza to Super Rugby proper before the pandemic arrived. Then they went 5-2 over Super
Rugby Aotearoa to finish a gallant runnerup to the Crusaders. What’s more their fans jumped on board in their thousands. They had one home sellout, and were cruelly denied a secondwhen the finale against the champs was called off because of the Auckland community Covid-19 cluster.
Still, with a pack full of muscle and hustle, star signing Beauden Barrett adding his class after a belated start, and the likes of Rieko Ioane, Caleb Clarke and Mark Telea spearheading a dazzling attack, this was a different Blues outfit in 2020. They finally learned how to win those tough Kiwi derbies, too.
As MacDonald readies for a 2021 campaignwith an even better squad (he has retained his core group, minus Barrett on sabbatical, and added a fresh strata of hard-nosed vets and young comers), he is well aware the expectation goalposts have been shifted.
‘‘It’s where we want to be,’’ he tells Sunday News in a revealing interview. ‘‘To be a successful team at some point you’re going to have to start winning games which creates a different expectation. Now we’ve got to learn how to manage that expectation so it
doesn’t pull us backwards.
‘‘We’re where we want to be. But we understand the Chiefs are going to be a lot better than they were [in 2020], we understand the Highlanders are going to be a lot better, we know the Crusaders are always strong and the Canes [Hurricanes] are in a good place. If anything the competition is going to be stronger and we’ve got to keep moving forward and be better as well.
‘‘If we think we’re going to turn up, do what we did last year and be successful, we’re going to be caught short and disappoint a lot of people.’’
It’s interesting, then, to ask
MacDonald his chief takeaways from 2020 as he plots to go one better in a campaign that will contain a second, trans-Tasman element to supplement the grind of Aotearoa, travel permitting.
‘‘We learnt a lot. We learnt the following week after a good performance, even thoughwe lost, we didn’t get it right against the Hurricanes, and that was probably the defining week for us. We built up well for the Crusaders [in Christchurch], played really well for 65 minutes, didn’t get it right for 10-15 minutes, and that was the difference between potentially finishing top of the table and number two.
‘‘We’ve got to prepare really well week-in, week-out. If there’s a ‘soft’ game, then that’s our most dangerous week and we’ve got to prepare to a certain level each week to perform.’’
The absence of Barrett for 2021 will require adjustments. Otere Black, Stephen Perofeta and Harry Plummerwill carry the load at 10; new faces Jacob Ratumaitavuki-Kneepkens, Zarn Sullivan and maybe Perofeta will cover fullback. They will miss the All Blacks star’s X-factor. But MacDonald believes a single season with Barrett will have its spinoffs for his game drivers.
‘‘The most impressive
thing with him was his preparation from Sunday to Saturday. When everyone else had Sunday off, that’s when he started getting to work. The texts would start rolling in or the phonewould ring Sunday afternoon. That’s Beaudy – he’s driven and works really hard to get the success he gets on field.
‘‘He doesn’t just turn up and flick a switch. That’s the big lesson a lot of our guys witnessed and started to implement, and our young 10s took a lot away and tried to implement that through the Mitre 10 Cup campaign. All three of our 10s played really well.’’
The 2021 squad has depth. He has four All Blacks’ props with the addition of Nepo Laulala, outstanding loose forwards spearheaded by the international trio of Akira Ioane, Hoskins Sotutu and Dalton Papalii, and a back division brimming with firepower (think Rieko Ioane, Clarke, Telea, RatumaitavukiKneepkens).
‘‘How we manage that depth is our biggest challenge ... It’s going to be a squad effort to win a title and we need to make sure everyone is engaged and playingwell.’’
The mountaintop feels close. Next comes the hardest part.