Sky’s Tony Johnson pays tribute to the retiring Wayne Smith.
TONY JOHNSON IS A COMMENTATOR AND PRESENTER FOR SKY TV’S RUGBY COVERAGE IN NEW ZEALAND.
THE GUARD CHANGES slowly in the All Blacks’ management these days.
Gone are the days when New Zealand Rugby bowed to the ‘sack the coach’ mentality whenever anything went wrong, and let’s face it not much has gone wrong in the last seven or eight years.
Consistency and succession planning have been the keys with the only significant departures in recent times being Graham Henry post World Cup 2011, Doctor Deb Robinson in 2013, and more recently skills guru Mick Byrne.
But soon they will face a landmark departure, and the end of an association that stretches back an incredible 37 years.
I vaguely recall the first time I clapped eyes on Wayne Ross Smith.
He was 21, I was 18 and serving time as a radio cadet in the glamorous halls of Radio Forestland in Tokoroa, doing everything from getting the morning tea from the local bakery, which I hated, to filling in the afternoon shift on the radio, which I loved, but was utterly terrible at.
I also did some parish pump news reporting and when required a bit of sport… when the bloke from Hallensteins who doubled as the sports guy was away.
And so it was one Tuesday afternoon in 1978 when I was sent down to the showgrounds to cover a Peace Cup match, a midweek tradition featuring the Waikato sub-unions.
South Waikato had a hell of a team. Forwards Paul ‘Bam Bam’ Koteka, Brian Morrissey and Geoff Hines would become All Blacks, giant lock JJ Williams might have been one also had there not been such widespread ignorance in those days of the concussions that wrecked his career.
Frankie Little, older brother of Walter, was in the backline, and directing operations was this skinny bloke from Putaruru with a mop of curly hair and hands coated in Super Glue. That would be Smithy. Within two years he was an All Black, having moved to Canterbury where he took over from the legendary Doug Bruce, raced away to score against Wellington and started an epic Ranfurly Shield reign.
He was an All Black for six years, on and off at first but a regular by mid decade before ending his career, like many, with the Cavaliers.
But good a player as he was, it’s his coaching career that will have him in the halls of fame.
It was Smith, along with Steve Tew and Robbie Deans, that transformed the Crusaders from an embarrassing also-ran to a centre of rugby excellence and a champion team in the space of just two years.
His potential, his smarts, were recognised by John Hart who wanted him in the All Blacks mix, and when the Hart era fell apart in 1999, Smith stepped into the furnace.
It all started so well, with that fabled test win in Sydney in 2000, but the Aussies were a smart outfit in those days, and truth be told probably had better players in key roles, and success in the Bledisloe Cup tests was hard to come by with any regularity.
It might have been different had Tappe Henning spotted a knock on in the lead-up to the winning try by Toutai Kefu a year later, who will ever know, but when the chorus of public outrage erupted, Smith’s self doubt and the impact of the reaction on his family won the day.
Called to Wellington for a regular, scheduled appraisal session, Smith delivered what panellist John Graham described as a quite brilliant summary of where the team was at, where they needed to be, and what they needed to do to get there.
The panel went to lunch satisfied they had the right guy. But in the afternoon he came back a different man, shorn of confidence, openly questioning whether he was cut out for the job.
And that was that. The wise men felt they simply couldn’t reappoint him, and he seemed almost relieved to be relieved.
Smith went to Northampton, away from the fishbowl, until he was persuaded by Graham Henry to be the attack component of his coaching team post another World Cup debacle in 2003.
He’d walked once, and there was never really an end to the possibility that he would walk again. Indeed, it nearly happened but a few months into his new job, following a ridiculously boozed up court session in Johannesburg.
That was the time players were found passed out in hotel flower beds, when TV3’s Clint Brown had his eyebrow shaved off on the flight home by players who hadn’t stopped drowning their sorrows.
“If this is what it’s going to be like,” Smith told manager Darren Shand, “then I’m out.”
It wasn’t what it was going to be like, it was the end of it. Culture change, forthwith.
He had to be persuaded again, in late 2007 after it all went up the spout in Cardiff and the country turned septic over rest, reconditioning and rotation…when the real problems were far more widespread, and included too many players planning their post-All Black career moves.
Henry, Smith and Hansen hadn’t quite got the balance right. It had been too much about attack, and not a lot about when things went wrong.
They really didn’t get it right until a couple of years later when, after getting munted by the Springboks kick chase game, the coaching roles were shuffled.
In what transpired to be a move of genius, someone decided that Smith’s best contribution to the team might be to turn that analytical, professorial mind to the defence portfolio, a role that morphed into defence/counter-attack. A weakness, so ruthlessly exposed by the Springboks in 2009, became a strength.
His influence was never more vividly demonstrated than in the epic 2011 World Cup semifinal against Australia, when Smithy’s ‘bomb squad’ of Dagg, Jane and Kahui not only took every grenade the Wallabies threw at them, they threw them back to explode in Australia’s face.
“I thought after a while, well, they’ll stop now,” Smith said in the Weight of the Nation documentary, “but they just kept doing it, and the guys just kept defusing the bombs.”
That was perhaps his greatest strength. With his considerate, empathetic manner, Smith was the master of player buy-in.
He made them believe, and ultimately he got the results. It took some heartbreak, a lot of doubt and some pain, but in the end, he and his mates, Henry and Hansen, got the chocolates.
The All Blacks would love him to stay on, no doubt, but Smith has always felt a debt to his wife and family who had allowed him to spend so much time chasing his dream, perfecting his role, pursuing excellence and getting those elusive prizes.
He’ll be missed, but it’s time to let him go. People make the mistake of assuming we commentators hang out with the players and coaches. We don’t.
But I have been lucky to interview Smith plenty of time over the years, and yes, share the odd red wine with him.
It’s always been great to listen to such a rugby intellectual and to do a bit of reminiscing…going right to where it started, the skinny bloke from Putaruru with the mop of hair and the Super Glue hands, running the cutter for South Waikato in the Peace Cup.