The All Blacks have a new coaching team,
A new All BlAcks coAching pAnel will tAke A microscopic view of super rugBy in 2020 hoping to uneArth A hAndful of legAcy plAyers.
headed by Ian Foster who says he will be delving deep into Super Rugby in search of new talent for the national team.
Selectors will say their eyes and minds are always open. They are, that's true, but the year after a World Cup is always a little different and 2020 will see a new
All Blacks selection group scour Super Rugby particularly hard.
There's a number of reasons for that. Firstly, the All Blacks, like most other countries, saw a reasonable cleanout of senior personnel after the last World Cup.
Kieran Read, Ben Smith, Sonny Bill Williams, Ryan Crotty and Matt Todd who were all in
Japan at the World Cup, have gone offshore. So too have Owen Franks and Jackson Hemopo who were in the test squad last year prior to the World Cup cull being made.
Others such as Liam Squire, Luke Whitelock, Nehe Milner-Skudder and Matt Proctor who were regular All Blacks or on the fringes in 2018 have also gone and of course, Brodie Retallick is unavailable this year due to his decision to have a sabbatical in Japan.
There is, then, an obvious supply and demand issue. The team has to be rebuilt to some extent and that fact alone obviously sharpens the selectors' need to be vigilant and focused throughout Super Rugby.
But there's a deeper sense of a post-World Cup year being one of significant opportunity to cast the selection net that bit wider and find the next generation of legacy players.
Think back to 2012 and the first squad of the year contained a handful of young players who were not, at that stage, particularly well known but have gone on to be the bedrock of the current side.
New caps in June that year included Retallick, Sam Cane, Beauden Barrett, Aaron Smith and Julian Savea. Later Dane Coles came into the squad and five of them remain integral to the All Blacks fortunes and probably will do so through to 2023.
In 2016 more new faces were introduced.
Squire was brought in as the man to succeed the long-serving Jerome Kaino. Ofa Tuungafasi was selected at prop, Liam Coltman at hooker, Damian McKenzie as a utility back, Ardie Savea as
But if you look at our World Cup squad yes We have lost a feW players But We aCtually have a higher perCentage of younger players that are still there.’ Ian Foster