A new biography of former All Blacks coach Steve Hansen should be required reading for sideline critics.
A new biography of former All Blacks coach Steve Hansen should be required reading for sideline critics.
The role of All Blacks coach is probably the most scrutinised yet least understood position in New Zealand elite sport. One of the attributes of rugby writer Gregor Paul’s biography of Sir Steve Hansen is the light it sheds on both the scale of the job and the behind-the-scenes components – setting strategy, managing individuals, establishing and maintaining a team dynamic and ethos – of which many rugby followers are only dimly aware. For that reason alone, it should be required reading for those who think they know who should and shouldn’t coach the All Blacks, ie, most
Kiwis over the age of 10.
Steve Hansen The Legacy is also an indepth account of an era of unparalleled success: between 2012 and 2015, the All Blacks played 54 tests, winning 49 (including a World Cup final), drawing two and losing three. More illuminating and pertinent to the current state of affairs, however, is the review of Hansen’s second, less-successful, term. The spiciest revelation is of thenassistant coach Hansen’s alienation from f Sir Graham Henry, his predecessor c as head coach, during the 20112 World Cup campaign: “Hansen felt the vibe had turnedt distinctly boarding school. Henry had begun to treat the players like children … Hansen came to see that heh and Henry were vastly different people who, beyond b rugby, didn’t
“There was a view that anyone – Steve Hansen or Mickey Mouse – could have coached that All Blacks team.”
really have anything in common … Throughout 2011, they drifted further apart in coaching methodology and even further apart as people.”
Hansen resolved to ditch Henry’s one-size-fits-all style of man management and the joyless, suffocating environment created by the latter’s “personal demeanour and brooding
intensity”. He installed an off button and a pressure valve. He lightened the mood by giving free rein to his “selfproclaimed world-class” comedic talent. Although the intensity levels remained as high, if not higher, on the training paddock and in performance reviews, he gave the players time and space to relax and be themselves – for the most part pretty uncomplicated young Kiwi blokes.
That said, he also challenged them to become the most dominant rugby team in history. They duly obliged. In 2016, Hansen kicked off his second term by challenging the rebuilt team to go one better: to be the most dominant sports team in history. To describe this goal as nothing if not ambitious is an understatement; nothing if not hubristic might be closer to the mark. An iron law of sport is that staying at the top is harder than getting there.
Just as Hansen used criticism and slights, real and imagined, to motivate his team, he was driven by a burning sense that his peers didn’t acknowledge him as the architect of All Blacks dominance: “He felt there was a view within the international coaching fraternity that anyone – Steve Hansen or Mickey Mouse – could have coached that particular All Blacks team.” (In fact, Mickey Mouse wasn’t available for the gig; as Hansen would later tell what he thought was a private audience, M Mouse aka Michael Cheika was coaching the Wallabies.)
The corollary of his fellow and rival coaches’ Mickey Mouse theory was their belief that the break-up of the 2015 World Cup-winning team, the loss of all-time greats Richie McCaw and Dan Carter, Ma‘a Nonu and Conrad Smith, Jerome Kaino, Keven Mealamu and Tony Woodcock, and their combined 800-plus caps experience, had left the All Blacks ripe for the plucking.
Hansen was hell-bent on proving them wrong. Initially, he succeeded spectacularly. In 2016, Wales were swept aside in a three-test series, the Bledisloe Cup was retained, the Rugby Championship was won without dropping a game and a new record for consecutive victories was set: “Together with the warm satisfaction of a world record was the even greater pleasure that came from knowing he’d once again proved wrong those who had doubted him.”
Although Hansen’s peers had underestimated him, it soon became clear their analysis of the post-2015 All Blacks wasn’t altogether wishful thinking. The team lost to Ireland in Chicago and the last act of the Hansen drama was under way. It wouldn’t have a happy ending.
The 2017 British and Irish Lions series was a harbinger of this year’s dire and damaging Lions visit to South Africa: negative and cynical tactics, bitter refereeing controversies and acrimony between the rival coaches. Having begun his tenure as the anti-Henry, Hansen replicated his predecessor’s mistake by radiating a force field of debilitating tension.
That series also signalled a shift towards territorial, attritional, defensive rugby that persists to this day. In a sense, the All Blacks were victims of their success: as Paul writes, it was “suicide to play an attacking game against the All Blacks … No matter how good others became at attacking rugby, they would never be as good.”
Hansen replicated his predecessor’s mistake by radiating a force field of debilitating tension.
Inevitably, the book occasionally lapses into hagiography. Paul’s judgment that “Hansen was the conductor of this crazily talented orchestra” is more realistic and respectful than some laudatory passages that effectively reduce great players to pawns deployed by a Grand Master.
Paul convincingly portrays Hansen as good cop and bad cop rolled into one, but is prone to straying from the time-honoured principle that less is more. Thus, within a few lines, Hansen is labelled “dominating and intimidating” and a “control freak and bully” with an “almost pathological need to argue and be right”. Two pages later, and again in the space of a few lines, he’s “a big personality whose presence filled the room” and “hugely charismatic” but with a heart of gold: “deeply considerate … empathetic … compassionate”.
And although there are insights into Hansen’s relationship with and sometimes sensitive handling of a number of players, there’s a curious and disappointing silence on the subject of Sonny Bill Williams, who surely presented a unique manmanagement challenge.
Overall, though, this is a thoroughly worthwhile assessment of a great coach and compelling personality who cast a long shadow from which his successor, Ian Foster, is still struggling to emerge. We’re told Foster is “clever and robust”. Given Foster spent eight years as Hansen’s assistant, his robustness can be taken for granted. l