All Blacks coach-elect Scott Robertson. Photo / Photosport
OPINION
One of the knock-on effects of losing three Super Rugby head coaches at the end of this year has been to highlight that New Zealand may not be the bastion of high-performance excellence it thinks it is.
Admittedly it’s unusual for three teams to be looking for a new head coach at the same time, but still, there’s no shying away from the fact that the lack of heavyweight candidates chasing New Zealand’s best jobs suggests New Zealand needs a massive, collective rethink about how much it invests in coaching.
So too does there need to be consideration given to whether there’s enough being done to help coaches understand and manage their careers.
Something is definitely wrong when none of the Blues, Crusaders or Hurricanes are drowning in quality applicants for their about-to-become vacant head coaching roles.
The Hurricanes, reportedly, are down to a three-man shortlist – none of whom have any, or certainly no significant experience, operating as a head coach in the 15-a-side game.
Meanwhile the Blues, according to the scuttlebutt, have been passed over by their two top choices Dave Rennie and Joe Schmidt.
The Blues, Crusaders and Hurricanes shouldn’t be madly scrambling to find respective replacements for Leon MacDonald, Scott Robertson and Jason Holland – all of whom are stepping up to be part of the All Blacks coaching team next year.
But they are, because New Zealand has no problems identifying and developing emerging coaches, but few means to keep them once they have established their credentials and the rest of the world has been able to pick off who they want.
New Zealand has a wildly influential coaching diaspora – Warren Gatland, Kieran Crowley, Pat Lam, Robbie Deans, Milton Haig - one that domestically has long been viewed as validation of the country’s rugby intelligence.
There’s a smugness that has come with seeing the likes of Italy, Wales, Ireland, Japan and Australia stick Kiwis in charge of their national teams and then tell the rest of the world to watch out.
So, too, has this dissemination of talent been considered an inevitable byproduct of New Zealand’s relatively tiny professional market: proof that these coaching Dick Whittington’s take off to foreign lands as victims of supply being greater than demand.
But now that three Super Rugby clubs find themselves surveying an almost barren landscape, there’s nothing to be smug about.
New Zealand’s coaching diaspora stands as a testament not to a country blessed with an embarrassment of riches, but instead, as evidence that the talent pool has been drained by foreign predators primarily because the domestic system is offering neither enough money nor opportunity at the top end of the pyramid.
The yet more powerful illustration of how the system is failing is the absence of any internal candidates at the Blues, Hurricanes or Crusaders being in the frame to step up.
Some might be tempted to blame the clubs themselves for this – to say they have a responsibility to develop and then promote from within.
But such an argument fails to understand the economics and constraints placed around Super Rugby coaching appointments.
NZR pays for the head coach and one assistant at each club and must approve both appointments.
Whatever additional positions Super Rugby clubs create, they have to fund themselves and the money simply isn’t there to recruit assistants with the standing and experience to be groomed into potential head coaches.
That raises questions about whether NZR is investing enough money in developing and retaining coaches and whether there is a need for a clearer, managed pathway to be established that gives individuals a better sense of how and when they might gravitate through the ranks.
The issue with expenditure is not so much how individual salaries compare with similar jobs in Europe and Japan, but how much of the total high-performance budget is being attributed to coaching roles.
Coaching has changed beyond recognition in the last decade. It has become highly specialised, collaborative and most definitely recognised by fans as having significant influence.
Coaches have become big-ticket items capable of swaying public opinion and no story has gripped New Zealand sport quite like the drawn-out saga to determine who could be at the helm of the All Blacks next year.
Coaching is such an integral piece in the high-performance system and yet NZR continues to fund just two Super Rugby positions per team, as it did back in 1996.
That seems not only archaic but most likely a contributing factor as to why so many of New Zealand’s best coaches are not operating in New Zealand.
A similar exodus was threatening in the player market 15 years ago, but NZR tackled that head-on by throwing more money at the talent and contractual perks such as sabbatical periods.
Now that the coaching pool has been revealed to be so shallow, surely it’s time for NZR to fund more Super Rugby coaching positions, up the value of the contracts anddevelop a regulated, centralised and integrated employment market.
Coaches are every bit as important in the high-performance world as players, and yet while the latter operate under the most detailed collective contract imaginable which dictates, almost to the dollar, how much will be invested in salaries, the former have no such framework protecting them.
So, too, does some thought need to be given to helping aspiring coaches better understand their likely career pathways and opportunities in New Zealand.
Some players are afforded the right to play in Japan as part of their New Zealand contracts, so why not extend this sort of thinking to coaches?
Could an aspiring provincial coach be enabled to spend two years in Europe, knowing he would be returning as head of a Super Rugby club?
Some kind of new thinking needs to be encouraged to enable New Zealand to take back control of its coaching talent before it becomes the sporting equivalent of the medical industry – expensively training its best people for the rest of the world to employ.
All the action as the Crusaders and Chiefs clash for the title.