With Twickenham in sight, Ian Foster has struck a tone of intent. Photo / Photosport
With Twickenham in sight, Ian Foster has struck a tone of intent. Photo / Photosport
OPINION
Sam Cane spoke for a nation when he said he was over the whole circus that has been built around appointing the next All Blacks coach.
New Zealand Rugby, in delivering a few vague lines in a media statement about why it wants its next coach to be determinedby April, has created another first of delivering a farce that is entirely devoid of comedy.
Such has been the haphazard decision-making on this topic, that the last six months have played out like an endless episode of Benny Hill – everyone fascinated by its awfulness, gripped to see if somehow it could get any worse, and now it’s impossible not to wonder whether NZR headquarters is just people driving around in milk floats, wearing white coats and randomly finding discarded bras in their pockets every now and again.
You even wonder whether a day at the office is punctuated with canned laughter. Whatever goes on these days at the administrative centre of the national game in New Zealand, it’s not producing the sort of strategic thinking that the sport needs.
No one is showing the sort of bold and considered leadership that high-performance athletes expect and instead, it would seem that NZR’s executive and board are driven purely by a desire to win public and media approval.
Rugby in this country is now governed by the court of public opinion, the masses somehow having managed to take control, knowing they can get what they want by posting their thoughts into cyberspace.
It’s not such a bad thing for administrators to give the fans what they want, but there’s only so far that idea should be taken because as has been witnessed in the All Blacks coaching saga, the populist move is not the same as the right move.
This whole confused mess began in late 2020 when NZR’s high-performance team recommended All Blacks coach Ian Foster be granted a two-year contract extension through to the World Cup.
The board, without a single member having even the faintest experience in high-performance, rejected the recommendation, only to change their minds in August after the All Blacks beat Australia for the second time in 2021 to secure the Bledisloe Cup.
If they were unsure about Foster, why have their minds swayed by two wins against Australia and not wait until the All Blacks had played the Springboks, Ireland, and France later in the year?
Things became yet harder to fathom in February 2022 when the board signed off on Foster’s plan to retain his battling assistants John Plumtree and Brad Moaar.
Foster said both men should stay and that he’d up-skill them on the job. It was an obviously bad idea that no one should have agreed to, evidenced by the fact that three games after both men had been granted two-year contract extensions, they were fired.
But it got worse in August last year when no one at NZR could bring themselves to actually fire Foster despite seemingly being desperate to do so.
They came so close but in the end, were persuaded to stick with Foster on the basis that Joe Schmidt had no interest in working with anyone else.
That, then, at least felt like some kind of rational thinking was going on. Schmidt was seen as a coach vital to the organisation – a man with in-depth knowledge of the Six Nations and a key figure in helping the All Blacks in 2023 and beyond.
The big mistake NZR made last August wasn’t sticking with Foster, it was telling the world that they were sticking with him through to the World Cup.
LONDON, ENGLAND - NOVEMBER 19: Ian Foster, Head Coach of New Zealand looks on prior to the Autumn International match between England and New Zealand at Twickenham Stadium on November 19, 2022 in London, England. (Photo by Paul Harding/Getty Images)
It wasn’t so much naïve as plain silly to make such a bold declaration given the unconvincing form of the All Blacks since November 2021.
The smarter play would have been to tell the world that Foster and his coaching team would be judged again at the end of the Rugby Championship, or reviewed at the end of the year.
Silly because by early February this year, it became clear the board had lost faith in Foster and wanted everyone to know it.
No doubt the executive and directors want their decision to bring forward the All Blacks coach re-appointment process, to be seen as bold and proactive, but really, it just screams of confusion, panic, and a lack of any real insight into how high-performance works.
Most alarmingly the statement released by NZR to explain the decision around the appointment process contained big hints as to the real drivers for making it.
There were references to having noted the diverse range of views on the topic and the lessons learned from 2019, suggesting NZR hasn’t built its logic around high-performance best practice, but in the hope it will win public approval.
The most ridiculous part of all is that having put so much faith in Schmidt, NZR is now readily throwing him away as the former Ireland coach doesn’t want to be involved with an organisation that will seemingly flip and flop all in the hope it will gain a few likes on Instagram.
And that’s the problem – there doesn’t appear to be any strategic thinking going on around high-performance to ensure that the organisation at least looks like it’s operating to a considered plan.
It is exactly like a Benny Hill episode, random, tedious and chaotic and no wonder Cane is over it.
