Chris Rattue: Stale Ian Foster's All Black win shows why New Zealand rugby is in deep trouble

Scott Robertson...rare rugby ability to connect. Photo / Photosport

It didn't look that way, far from it.

But compared to solving the actual problems facing New Zealand Rugby, appointing the new All Blacks coach should have been a doddle.

Yet as the vibrant sports world twists and turns at high speed down the digital highway, rugby has still got liniment and beer dregs in the veins.

Scott Robertson offered a breath of fresh air, while Ian Foster is as stale as the All Blacks team which ran up the white flag against England in the World Cup semifinal.

The convoluted search for the new All Blacks boss portrayed a national administration that was in hiding, rather than dynamically driving rugby forward.

At a vital moment, with most rugby health indicators bar women's sevens plummeting, the national sport's leaders showed why the game is so run down.

NZR needed a new vision, to provide inspiration, and display a confidence in their own hopefully revolutionary thinking.

Instead, they hid behind a process, involving an amusingly long list of candidates and an ad-hoc committee. The more you look, the less you see sometimes.

The people running New Zealand rugby are still mainly grey men in dark suits, all cut from the same cloth. If anything, they are getting even greyer.

I'm not sure when Mark Robinson took over from Steve Tew as CEO, or if he has really taken over at all. And the old NZR found itself in one heck of a mess.

Rugby is a dead game walking.

Clubs are collapsing, schoolboys are leaving in droves, hardly anyone is interested in the provincial competition, Super Rugby is an exhausting bore and the magic of Pacific Islands rugby has been shoved firmly back in the hat.

Even test match rugby is under threat as top southern hemisphere stars take riches and an easier ride overseas, attempts at aligning and reducing playing schedules having failed.

As for the physical structures? Hamilton and Dunedin have excellent arenas. But the stadium situation elsewhere and particularly Auckland is a disaster and one primarily of rugby's making.

It doesn't stop there.

When the top job came up in the New Zealand game, most of our top coaches didn't want a bar of it.

And an inability to prevent player head injuries is the biggest issue of all.

Really, things couldn't be much worse, and yet they will - absolutely - get worse.

The scary bit, for any rugby fan, is that NZR seems to still believe that the answer to all of the above is to win the World Cup.

The underlying theme to hosting and winning the 2011 tournament was that a triumph long in the making would set rugby on a glorious path forward. They dolloped icing on that cake by winning in 2015.

End result: rugby has never been in greater trouble.

Robertson's elevation to All Blacks coach would have given the game a lift and re-positioned rugby as an inclusive meritocracy rather than an in-house dynasty determined to survive the Tew years.

This was a watershed moment lost.

It's a tremendous pity that Jamie Joseph, Tony Brown, Joe Schmidt, Dave Rennie and Warren Gatland did not throw their hats in the ring.

A field of such incredible quality would have encouraged the NZR to understand that it was time for an All Blacks regime change, along with recognising that the once-supreme Steve Hansen brigade which included Foster lost its way long before Yokohama.

Instead, Foster has produced the greatest performance by an average stayer since Prince of Penzance won the Melbourne Cup. He was assisted to the finish line by Tew's administration, which failed to encourage the higher quality runners.

Just as Robertson isn't the finished article, nor is Foster as a head coach. He may do a great job, he may not.

But the much younger and rather quirky - by traditional rugby standards - Robertson has by far the better head coach record, by far the greater public appeal, and by far the greatest potential to engage with the public, the last point being critical.

Judging by his triple Crusaders success, Robertson also enthuses players young and old.

If international experience is the sticking point, then Foster - like Robertson - has none as a head coach, even though he acknowledged this issue along the way but did nothing about it

The problems facing rugby are way more substantial than whether test matches are won or not, and the NZR - by going out of their way to overlook Robertson - doesn't appear to understand that.