Scott Robertson has announced his first team of 2025.
The All Blacks coach has selected Billy Proctor at centre.
Proctor’s selection suggests Rieko Ioane will move to the wing.
In an exercise in interesting but ultimately irrelevant statistic gathering, the All Blacks came out of 2024 as the world’s best creator of gilt-edged try-scoring opportunities.
No other side was better than them at opening defences and leaving themselves just one smart decision or execution away from scoring.
It’s interesting because it does succinctly and accurately tell the story of last year. The All Blacks were the Auckland Council of the rugby world – capable of starting ambitious projects but not so good at seeing them through to completion.
And irrelevant because being the champions of being not particularly clinical is not something to herald for any reason other than recognising it as a priority problem to fix.
Billy Proctor will start in the No 13 jersey against France. Photo / SmartFrame
And maybe most importantly, it is a move that says Robertson is starting to trust himself and to back his intuition, and to understand that the country can get behind a guy with a vision and the decisiveness to impose it.
Proctor, for the past two seasons, has shown himself to be the best ball-playing 13 in the country.
He plays with an all-action energy, but it’s his calm and the accuracy of his decision-making that always stands out the most.
He has that skill of facilitating rather than debilitating the attack and his value is not just in his ability to recognise the opportunity and determine the best course of action – it is also his ability to execute with a high degree of precision.
Having missed the first half of Super Rugby Pacific, Proctor’s influence on reshaping the Hurricanes when he returned to action was almost as significant as the way Ardie Savea revolutionised Moana Pasifika.
An attack that lacked flow and width was suddenly going around defences and Proctor, time and again, showed he is arguably the best midfielder in the country at knowing how to exploit a two-versus-one scenario.
“Yeah, for sure,” Robertson said to the question of whether Proctor is precisely the sort of player that has been picked to improve the All Blacks’ conversion stats.
“He’s had a great couple of seasons and it was a shame that on the end-of-season tour last year he had the bumps and couldn’t get back to play at the end.
“He’s been consistent, he can play square, he’s good both sides of the ball and he complements the backline beautifully.”
By implication, the selection of Proctor at No 13 suggests that the man he is replacing, Rieko Ioane, was a significant factor in the All Blacks not capitalising on half-chances last year.
Rieko Ioane returns to the wing for the All Blacks. Photo / Photosport
Ioane, since his own decision to focus on the midfield in 2020, has been a maligned public figure at times.
His muscular brand of rugby has not been to everyone’s taste and last year there were clear-cut examples where he didn’t see the chance to pass and others when he recognised the right play but struggled to deliver the required accuracy.
The narrative twisted against him unfairly at times because while he may have lacked some finesse in his option-taking and distribution, his defensive contribution was significant, and he did use his size and timing to crash through the line and build momentum at times.
But on balance, it always felt that his limitations outweighed his positives and that two birds could be killed with one stone by shifting him to the wing.
Not only do the All Blacks now have a more rounded operator at centre, they have in Ioane a player who, despite his perceived reticence to slip back into the No 11 jersey, could remind the world that he is one of the best finishers in the international game.
The set-up, whether it turns out this way or not, at least makes better sense in terms of giving the All Blacks more ability to create and finish and to maximise the full array of their backline talent.
