The reinvention of Ian Foster
The new head coach of the All Blacks recognised there was a desire for change and he had to meet that headon.
Amid the hand-wringing and postulating around the flawed appointment process, one important factor has been largely overlooked in the promotion of Ian Foster to be All Blacks head coach. The man ran a brilliant campaign and won because of his ability to marry two important factors.
Foster is both something new and the tried and trusted. He’s change and stability at the same time. He’s new-old school, and he has done it brilliantly to nudge out the most compelling of rivals in the form of serial winner, and ubercool, Scott ‘Razor’ Robertson.
If you haven’t picked up on Foster’s clever approach, then you simply haven’t been looking closely enough. Sure, he had certain things going for him in his campaign to follow eight years as an assistant under Steve Hansen with the top job. Continuity and succession planning have become key pillars of the modern All Blacks and the former Waikato and Chiefs first five-eighth represented that in spades.
But he also read the tea leaves brilliantly. There was an appetite for change in the All Blacks – in the public arena at least. Hansen was a fabulously successful head coach with a wonderful win-loss record. But his reign also ended on a down note rather than a triumphant blast of the horn. He couldn’t defeat the Lions at home, he lost twice in quick succession to Ireland, saw the Springboks close the gap markedly and, finally, exited the 2019 World Cup with the conclusive defeat to England. Not a single shot was fired in a dispiriting semifinal anticlimax.
That left a distinct whiff that these All Blacks needed a rethink on how they go about things. It was why Robertson had such strong public support for the top job.
The Crusaders coach had a lot going for him: his youth, the hip factor, the freshness of his views and philosophies and his immense likeability. Plus, he wins with
almost indecent regularity. The surfing, breakdancing, freethinker might not fit the mould of your traditional All Blacks coach, but there were a lot of people who believed it was worth making the seismic shift.
Foster and his advisers realised he couldn’t just stand on the ticket of continuity, stability, consistency. Essentially Hansen’s loyal henchman, who had given so little away in his occasionally irascible dealings with the media, had to reinvent himself.
To his credit, he would appear to have done so brilliantly.
Foster masterfully positioned himself as both the champion of change and the count of continuity in a campaign that won over the people that matter. It’s thought that once he assembled the highly capable coaching crew he had to as part of his ticket (it just remains for Brad Mooar to negotiate his release from his Scarlets contract in Wales), that his appointment was fait accompli.
That may have been true. But he still had to negotiate the interview forum – an area that threw him some curve-balls, Foster admitted – and also the rampant populism of the charismatic Robertson. The warm favourite in the two-horse race still had to get his side of the equation right.
Clearly he did. He distanced himself just enough from the Hansen regime to make it clear he was his own man, with his own vision and own way of going about things. He also understood the strengths of continuity but didn’t get hung up on them. So his main platforms were around freshness, tweaks, changes, lessons learned, and so forth.
It was clearly what the panel wanted to hear: in him they got someone who had invested eight years in the All Blacks way, but who now had the perfect perspective with which to improve the system.
Foster’s first words as new All
Blacks head coach told us exactly why he had won this campaign. He talked about ‘‘adding my own flavour’’ to what he had learned, about the need to ‘‘rethink’’ some things. He spoke about having a coaching group (reportedly Mooar, John Plumtree, Greg Feek and Scott McLeod, plus maybe one or two others in the mix) that are ‘‘willing to challenge’’ and ‘‘add some spice’’ to the All Blacks game.
Then he uttered his most salient words. ‘‘I’ve got a job now to reinvent myself with the public and media. Now it’s time for you to see me in a new light, and it’s up to me to show you I’m innovative, I’ve got a sense of direction about where I want this team to go and I’m extremely passionate about adding a new touch to it and to get some mana back on the field which we felt we’ve lost a little.’’
Later Foster expanded on those thoughts in an interview with the Star-Times when he continued to establish some clear distance between his role as Hansen’s assistant and this far more all-encompassing one.
‘‘When you’re assistant coach . . . often you’re contributing to another plan. You have to react and adapt to the style of the big fella. So the way I talk and when I talk and who I talk to has all been part of that role. [But] you’ve got nowhere to hide in this role. This job is about making sure I explain to the public what we’re doing and how we’re going about it. Hopefully they’ll see a bit of my personality in that.’’
Foster spoke about a long period of introspection after the World Cup and leading into his interview. He thought a lot about what he needed to do to personalise this ambition to coach this team he treasures above all.
‘‘It’s important I project a vision of how we’re going to change and grow,’’ he says. ‘‘We’ve never been a team that wants to sit still . . . but you’ve got to use events in your growth, go back and be really hard on how you review yourself. There are some reasonably significant things that we need to change.
‘‘There’s going to be a change with me as head coach. I’m a very different person to Steve.’’ The lost mana thing?
‘‘We want to be the No 1 team in the world, and we’re not. We wanted to win a World Cup, and we didn’t. We played a game where we didn’t fire the shots we wanted to and we got beat up a little bit. We have to respond because that’s our job.
‘‘The All Blacks have done some great things the last eight years, but we’ve interspersed those with some performances we haven’t been proud of. There’s a degree of mental consistency we’ve got to get better at. We went into a World Cup where everyone thought South Africa and Ireland had our measure . . . we played some great rugby in those games, but didn’t get to the same point against England.’’
Of course it’s not all broken. Not by a long shot. Foster talks about the ‘‘wisdom’’ required to understand what you leave alone, and what you tweak.
‘‘The great thing about the All Blacks is we keep moving,’’ he says. ‘‘The World Cup is a great catalyst for change and we need to use that.’’
Playing personnel wise, Foster recognises some challenges in the second row specifically and pack in general. There are spots that will need filling and contenders to assess. But he also understands he operates at the head of a system that throws up a heck of a lot of solutions.
‘‘There are some reasonably significant things that we need to change.’’ New All Blacks head coach Ian Foster