Ian Foster has survived as All Blacks head coach, with the NZ Rugby board hailing the team's "magnificent" weekend win in South Africa. Video / NZ Herald
OPINION:
Joe Schmidt has been painted as the All Blacks and Ian Foster's saviour, the man with the potential to relaunch the national team as the most innovative and creative attacking team on the planet.
He's a smart hire and certain to be influential. His strengths align with the AllBlacks' weaknesses and he's in a role where his attention to detail can be indulged and free to a large extent from the wider responsibilities and pressures that perhaps weighed him down in his final year as Ireland coach.
But Schmidt, for all his attention to detail, hard edges and astute analysis, is unlikely to be the biggest factor in rejuvenating the All Blacks in the next year.
He and his fellow new assistant Jason Ryan can help Foster build the robust environment the All Blacks need and haven't recently had. They can toughen attitudes, push for higher standards and build more dynamic and flexible game plans and wider skillsets.
But still, the arrival of those two will only take the All Blacks so far unless World Rugby is prepared to accept that test football is in the entertainment game and needs to be managed accordingly.
The All Blacks forwards, including Ardie Savea, are more mobile than most of their counterparts. Photo / Photosport
The national team have been the lead architect of their own demise these past few years. There has been an erosion in their ability to execute the basic skills under pressure. They have failed to keep pace with the physicality being produced by the likes of Ireland, South Africa and France and too often have looked naive and under-equipped in the art of collision warfare.
The results of the last 10 months reflect their self-inflicted issues, but as much as the wider professional New Zealand rugby fraternity has lost its way in recent years, there has been a second and significant narrative weighing against the All Blacks and one that has largely been unrecognised or at least not acknowledged.
An unprecedented level of cynicism has crept into test rugby since 2017 and it has mostly been enabled, or at least ignored by the game's governing body.
The recent series against the Springboks perfectly illustrated how big games can be so heavily influenced by a referee's tolerance for cynicism.
In the first test, played in the searing heat of Mbombela, South Africa expertly slowed the game down with feigned injuries and glacial-paced movement to set pieces.
It might seem petty to rail against this, but the way South Africa huddled before each lineout then slowly walked into position, as well as the way they so painstakingly formed each scrum, occasionally finding a way to pull out of the engagement process at the last minute to reset themselves, was all part of a deliberate and highly managed strategy to prevent the contest from developing an aerobic factor.
The Springboks took their time against the All Blacks scrum. Photo / Photosport
It matters way more than fans may realise because South Africa have built power athletes – heavier men with less aerobic stamina - and so they want the pace of the game to be slower, the collision content higher and hence they manipulate breaks in play to elongate their recovery time.
The All Blacks, on the other hand, have built hybrid athletes, men who can survive the physical exchanges, but who also have the endurance and aerobic capacity to play high-tempo rugby for 80 minutes.
New Zealand need to generate fatigue in the game for their athletes to take advantage of their conditioning programme and the fact they were helped in that quest at Ellis Park by referee Luke Pearce, who hurried the Springboks along during breaks in play, had a material impact.
The All Blacks scored two tries in the last 10 minutes – largely because the game had flowed, and the Boks hadn't been enabled in their cynical means to get their breath back.
Fatigue became the factor the All Blacks wanted it to be and if anyone doubts the importance of managing cynical game-slowing tactics out of the game, look at the influence of Sam Whitelock and Scott Barrett in the final 10 minutes of the Ellis Park test compared with their Springbok opposites.
Sam Whitelock and Scott Barrett were hugely influential in the closing stages of the second test. Photo / Photosport
Rugby needs to embrace the variety of styles that the various international sides employ. Scrummaging for penalties is a highly legitimate ploy.
So is the rolling maul and relentless box kicking. The entertainment is often built on the clash of styles, but World Rugby have to wake up to the fact that prolonged stoppages and highly developed strategies to generate extended breaks in play and sustained periods of inactivity are not helping test rugby win and retain audiences.
The Boks execute their legal strategies well enough to not need any additional help to slow games down and keep fatigue at bay and World Rugby, if it wants the World Cup to be gripping and absorbing, needs to empower its referees to manage cynicism out of the game.
