Sacking coaches helps the Boks

My personal view is that the removal of All Blacks assistant coaches John Plumtree and Brad Mooar was the wrong move.

I’m a strong advocate of harnessing team cohesion and keeping groups together. I think the coaching changes at this moment in time are not a good thing for the All Blacks. For me, it’s a poor decision to have got rid of any of the coaches, and NZ Rugby should have given them more of a chance.

New Zealand have been a shining light in the world of sport and one of their legacies is the fact that they are not a team who chop and change coaches. Since the professional era, they have hardly ever fired coaches. They have seldom had knee-jerk reactions even when they have lost consecutive test matches.

They lost to us three times in a row and that 2009 year is well documented. It’s also well recorded that Wayne Smith and Steve Hansen said they were able to keep their jobs at the time and it led them to factfinding missions and learning more about the group and themselves. Hence the rest is history as evidenced by being World Cup winners in 2011 and 2015.

To say that someone had to take the fall for the series defeat to Ireland and the slump in the All Blacks’ recent form is old-school thinking. In my opinion, that is poor administration and I don’t think it should have happened.

Jason Ryan has since come in as forwards coach and he has a wonderful reputation from his time with the Crusaders. There is no question he’s a great coach with outstanding pedigree, having worked under Scott ‘‘Razor’’ Robertson for as long as he did. He will face a baptism of fire on a two-match tour to South Africa.

The Boks will be favourites coming off a series win and playing at home. The cohesion this group have now got is growing phenomenally and everything Jacques Nienaber and Rassie Erasmus do is well thought out and strategic.

The All Blacks will come up against the famed Bomb Squad – the forwards-dominated Boks bench – and they might find it a difficult element to defuse. The Boks have magnificent strength in depth among their forwards and coupled with that the All Blacks will have their hands full with our maul and the variations off it as well.

Gary Gold, the current USA head coach, was assistant coach for the Springboks when they beat the All Blacks three consecutive times in 2009 and won the Tri-Nations title.