Jason Holland is exiting his role as an All Blacks assistant coach at the end of the upcoming Grand Slam tour.
Holland’s exit follows that of Leon MacDonald, who departed last year.
Scott Robertson was appointed as head coach in March 2023, after twice being considered for the job previously.
That the All Blacks coaching structure is unravelling amid a prolonged period of inconsistent performances and mediocre results is hardly a surprise, given the contrived manner of events that led to the appointment of the incumbent group.
Last year, assistant coach Leon MacDonald walked out days before theAll Blacks headed to South Africa for a two-test series. Now, fellow assistant Jason Holland – the day before the team flies to the US – has announced he’ll move on after the Grand Slam tour.
The optics are being presented as Holland choosing not to seek a renewal to his soon-to-expire two-year agreement, but the All Blacks’ lack of potency on his watch and their slide away from being the world’s greatest counter-attacking team erodes the credibility of the heavily crafted narrative being spun by the establishment.
If everything was working out as it should be, why would Holland walk away from the All Blacks? There was, poignantly, no mention of him having been offered an extension.
For the All Blacks to lose one coach in this manner could be deemed unfortunate, but to lose two like this is most definitely careless – symptomatic, certainly, of a dangerously flawed and seemingly predetermined decision by New Zealand Rugby (NZR) to give the All Blacks head coaching job to Scott Robertson in March 2023, and then operate with limited oversight or critical feedback to his proposed choice of assistants and structure.
Given the results to date, the lack of silverware and the two dramatic coaching departures, history won’t be kind to the executive and the high-performance regime that ran the process to appoint Robertson.
The All Blacks coaching staff (from left): Jason Ryan, Jason Holland, Scott Robertson, Scott Hansen and Leon MacDonald. Photo / Photosport
No doubt there will be all sorts of unqualified attempts to explain Holland’s departure – but the answer to why he has left and why the All Blacks have prematurely lost 40% of their original coaching group lies exclusively with the way NZR appeared to be overly influenced by public opinion and not guided by best high-performance practice when it tackled the question in late 2022 of how and when to make plans beyond the 2023 World Cup.
Understanding the back story is the only way to understand the present and make sense of why heads keep rolling within the All Blacks coaching group.
Robertson applied for the head job in 2019, missing out to Ian Foster, who had greater international experience but who was also deemed to have presented with the higher-calibre wider coaching group.
When NZR then quietly sounded out Robertson about potentially taking over from Foster midway through 2022, it asked him to present his theoretical wider coaching group.
It is believed he suggested the same group he’d had in mind in 2019 – an ensemble that the NZR board felt lacked experience, so they asked Robertson to meet former Ireland coach Joe Schmidt to see if there was any way he could be accommodated in the set-up.
When Schmidt felt there was no compatibility – and senior All Blacks players made an impassioned plea to retain Foster – Robertson was once again rejected for the role.
It was at this point where there is evidential cause to believe NZR instigated a pre-ordained plan to ensure Robertson was finally rewarded with the job he coveted.
Several things happened to explain why NZR had plausible motivation to pursue this course, but broadly, they can be condensed into three key things.
Secondly, Robertson, having led the Crusaders to a sixth consecutive Super Rugby title earlier in the year (including the two Covid-era New Zealand-only tournaments), was, understandably, making noises about his desire to coach at the international level and his willingness to go offshore in search of a job.
NZR, perhaps in lieu of a clear strategic goal, was sensitive to the public backlash it would face should the most successful Super Rugby coach in history end up in charge of a rival nation such as England or Australia.
There is agreement among the game’s stakeholders that this was a period in which NZR was being overly influenced by public and media opinion, to such an extent that there was a concerted push to rewrite the constitution to create stronger, independent governance and which led to a total overhaul of the board in late 2024.
And thirdly, following the arrival of US fund manager Silver Lake as an equity partner, there was a stronger commercial narrative being built around the All Blacks. Various influential figures within NZR are believed to have viewed Robertson as a more charismatic and engaging figure to have at the helm of the national team.
Robertson was effectively deemed more on-brand than Foster and the sort of engaging, accessible character who could win the All Blacks a new audience and serve as a better frontman for its content hub NZR+, which would form the centrepiece of the commercial strategy.
In Foster’s book, he details how Robinson and NZR general manager of professional rugby Chris Lendrum began hinting to him in late 2022 that the board was considering making his job contestable in early 2023, even though he would still have nine months of his contract to run.
That was confirmed privately to him in early February, the justification for which, Robinson and Lendrum told him, was to give Super Rugby Pacific clubs certainty for their future planning and to bring New Zealand’s high-performance thinking into line with other nations such as England, Wales and Australia.
All Blacks head coach Ian Foster (left) and New Zealand Rugby CEO Mark Robinson in 2022 at a press conference announcing Foster's retention. Photo / Photosport
If the reasoning was already contentious, it became more so when Foster became aware that Robertson was seemingly being fed details about the likely appointment process directly from the board – and before such information was being relayed to the incumbent head coach.
The conclusion Foster reached was that NZR had given Robertson assurances in August 2022, after he missed out on the role for a second time, that it was unlikely to happen a third time.
The previous concern about the mix being devoid of a seasoned veteran was addressed by announcing that Sir Wayne Smith would serve in the newly created role of performance coach – but the specifics of the job remain ill-defined and it appears to be no more than a light-touch consultancy position.
The upshot of all this is that a board that wasn’t convinced by Robertson and his proposed team’s readiness to coach the All Blacks in 2019 and 2022 suddenly decided it was the right mix in 2023.
A board that wasn’t sure about Robertson’s proposed structure, in which he would effectively serve as what he calls culture coach and where there would be an NFL-like focus on individual coaches having responsibility for specialist units, suddenly saw this as the epitome of high-performance thinking in 2023.
And now, given Holland’s impending departure, questions have to be asked about whether NZR applied the requisite scrutiny on Robertson’s coaching appointments and set-up, or whether the objective of getting him into the job was the only consideration.
