The All Blacks need to look outside the tent
It’s ludicrous NZR believe continuity is the god of coaching appointments with All Blacks,
Steve Hansen is a fine coach. We all get that. But no-one knows just how good a coach he is. We are all guessing. We haven’t a clue how he would get on trying to coach the current Australia team or South Africa team, other than his winloss ratio would plummet. What job would he do coaching France, juggling a mad box of frogs, or Samoa or anywhere else but New Zealand?
New Zealand Rugby is very pleased with itself right now. It’s high fives and back slaps all round. And why not? A lot of the current success is down to them. It’s down to all the work being done with schools and age grades and communities. It’s down to the excellence of player development and the brilliance of lads such as Rieko Ioane, who continue to pour through the system.
But the dangerous assumption is that a huge part of this success is all down to the current coaching team. Frankly we have no way of knowing. The current squad of All Blacks is so much better than the rest of the world that any coaches worth their salt would have a huge winning percentage with them.
New Zealand teams are dominating Super Rugby. South Africa is a mess, torn apart by quotas and French poachers. Australia is fractured by European exodus and a union who is sacrificing quality in a desperate attempt to stay solvent.
And while the northern hemisphere have spent the past 25 years banging into each other, New Zealand has emphasised skills. The divide has never been so great.
So let’s hold off the mutual lovein. The reappointment of Steve Hansen until 2020 made me uneasy. Right now there are a lot of good coaches around in New Zealand, from Dave Rennie, at the top of the list, to Chris Boyd and Jamie Joseph, to Tana Umaga coming through.
Rennie had planned to go to Italy a year back but held on, partly because of the Chiefs, partly because the top job looked like being available. Diplomatically he now says, ‘‘Why would you push someone out the door when he’s doing such a good job? Who knows, he might be here until 2023 or 2027.’’
To his discredit, Hansen did not rule that out. He should have done. He should have said it’s 2020 and bust. He should have said that the next wave of coaches need to have something to aim for. So win or lose in Japan, I will be stepping aside. Instead he said, ‘‘You never say no.’’ Well, sometimes you should say no.
Hansen’s boss was smarter. Steve Tew said, ‘‘We’ve kept the guys that we consider worthy of being on that list fully informed ... Particularly through Don Tricker, our high-performance guy, (we) spend a lot of time talking to the coaches, both here and overseas. I think probably the best option will be whoever takes over in 2020 is at the World Cup in 2019, in one capacity or another.’’
Tew was going just fine until that last bit. NZR have got this idea that they should always promote from within. They have noted that Graham Henry was not sacked, kept going and suddenly success has flowed their way. They now believe continuity is the god of coaching appointments.
Statistically this is ludicrous. New Zealand Rugby’s sample size is nothing like big enough (by several thousand) to make such an assumption.
I suspect there were much more important factors at work, such as the demise of the rest of the world; the growth of youth development; and the belated realisation the All Blacks squad is not a separate function, inward-looking and neurotic, but the heart of global rugby expansion.
I think probably the best option will be whoever takes over in 2020 is at the World Cup in 2019, in one capacity or another. NZ Rugby boss Steve Tew
The All Blacks no longer stagger about under the weight of four million people. They are now held aloft by the country. They are supported and loved, and part of that is because they turned out in 2011 and asked for the love. This is the heart of the All Blacks success. Junior development provides the hands and the head (look at the German football academies and their success in a far more competitive market).
So it worries me that NZR is hung up with continuity. With the right people it is just fine. It worked at Liverpool Football Club brilliantly for a while with Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley. Then a little later Roy Evans was appointed and he was not up to it. He was an assistant coach striving to be a manager.
Evans had a fine team but some of them were on the laddish side. Jamie Redknapp, David James, Steve McManaman, Robbie Fowler and Jason McAteer became known as the Spice Boys. They wore cream Armani suits to the ‘96 FA Cup final and lost. They were loyal to all the clubs in Liverpool, not just the football club, and would run out of legs at the end of the season.
Continuity is not a failsafe system or everyone would be doing it.
Alex Ferguson came to Manchester United from Aberdeen. The important thing in Ferguson’s career was that he had been mentored by Jock Stein, the man he called ‘‘a one-man university’’. So let’s not get hung up on this continuity thing or it may turn out that Ian Foster is the new Roy Evans.
Tew can go ahead and call Hansen ‘‘the best coach in world rugby’’. New Zealand Rugby has earned bragging rights, however limited the evidence.
But it would be a shame to lose sight of the future because of too narrow and self-congratulatory a view of the present.
In my head I can hear ex-British chancellor Gordon Brown proclaiming, ‘‘No more boom or bust.’’