Shag still raging at the ghosts of '22
Four more long reads to savour; a sceptic sees through NZR's financial results in The Week That Was; and the beer cups are flying in The Weekend That Will Be
Steve Hansen was back in the news this week, appearing on the Times of London’s Ruck podcast, bemoaning Ian Foster’s treatment while All Blacks coach.
“It’s not that he’s my mate, it’s that he’s an All Black coach,” [Hansen said]. “If we appoint someone to the job, whoever that person is — and at the moment it’s Scott Robertson — we’re duty-bound to support them the best we can.
“That narrative didn’t happen in Ian’s time from day one, I felt, and it got worse and worse. As an ex-coach I found it really frustrating. You’ve got to support your people.
“I made that disappointment pretty clear at one point. He didn’t appoint himself. They appointed him, so support him and give him every opportunity to be the best he can be. At times I don’t think they did that well, and if they had their time again maybe they’d do it differently. I don’t know.”
It’s not dissimilar from sentiments scrum guru Mike Cron expressed when decamping to Australia to work with Joe Schmidt at the Wallabies.
Am I alone in finding this school of thinking baffling?
The All Blacks, perhaps more than any other global sports brand in the world, lean heavily into the concept of legacy; of being guardians, not owners, of the jersey.
That legacy is based upon one thing above all else — on-field success.
Why does a coterie of professional New Zealand coaches — who all move in the same small circle of self-interest — demand that the rules of engagement change when it concerns them?
Rather than not receiving enough support, couldn’t you instead make the argument that Foster was given uncommon leeway?
The 2020-23 All Blacks broke all sorts of the wrong records. The 2021 end-of-year review was particularly damning when it came to players assessing the quality of the coaching they were receiving.
Did Foster lose his job? No.
Two assistants did, yet Foster was essentially given a new, beefed-up coaching team to make amends.
A lack of support, or, with heavy hitters Schmidt and Jason Ryan brought in, an unprecedented level of support?
When 2022 started even worse than 2021 ended, he was on the verge of being moved on again, until this time a couple of influential players intervened during a late-night doorstop of chief executive Mark Robinson. A new coaching team being assembled in the background was quietly stood down.
A lack of support, or an unprecedented display of player power to boost Foster?
The All Blacks are meant to exist within an apex high-performance environment, yet when one of the key pillars of the environment, coaching, is showing obvious signs of regression, hard decisions are fudged, wagons are circled, egos and feelings are nursed.
NZ Rugby did not handle everything in a neat and tidy way during the saga. Some of their comms when Foster’s reign was under the most scrutiny were woeful, but this idea that he was without support is not borne out by facts.
Yes, it was a “noisy” reign, and some of that noise must have been uncomfortable for Foster, but it was no more than the sort of scrutiny that one of the highest-profile jobs in the country demands.
It’s the sort of scrutiny that his successor will now find applies to him whether he thinks it is fair or not, unless the All Blacks mean something very different from the message they have been pushing for much of the past 120 years.