Jamie Joseph has been appointed to coach the All Blacks XV for the next two years.
This move by New Zealand Rugby acts as a contingency amid pressure on Scott Robertson.
Robertson’s All Blacks have delivered inconsistent results.
The announcement that Jamie Joseph had been locked in to coach the All Blacks XV for the next two years had the feel of New Zealand Rugby taking the first step of a contingency strategy as pressure mounts on Scott Robertson and his coaching team to provide certaintyabout their ability to lead the national team.
The timing of Joseph’s promotion is in line with previous appointments, and it is therefore coincidental that NZR has handed the shadow All Blacks job to an ambitious veteran with ample international experience, while doubts continue to build about whether Robertson and his team can produce the consistency of performance and results that are hard baked into public expectation.
Coincidental and yet pointed. This is NZR facilitating and extending the career pathway of a proven international coach, but it is also, presumably, an investment in a short-term insurance policy to ensure there are options if the decision has to be made to make changes to the incumbent All Blacks coaching team.
NZR, with $120 million of sponsorship and $35m of match-day revenue coming directly from the All Blacks, can’t afford to be without a contingency plan around its coaching set-up given the importance of results to the broader commercial strategy.
And results to date under Robertson have put him in a grey area – a kind of no man’s land where they have been good enough to engender hope, but not consistent enough to build confidence.
The All Blacks won 10 from 14 last year (71%) and have won six of eight this year (75%), but face a tough run in the next seven weeks with five away tests against Australia, Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales.
The All Blacks perform their haka before facing the Springboks. Photo / SmartFrame
Five wins would see the All Blacks finish 2025 with an 84% success rate, four would leave the number at 77%, three for 69% and two for 61%.
On current form, the prospect of the All Blacks winning their next five is feasible but not probable, and the same could be said of the prospect of them only winning two of their next five – it’s feasible but not probable.
Robertson can’t exist indefinitely in no man’s land, and therefore the future of his tenure hangs on the next five tests.
NZR chair David Kirk has been clear in his messaging about where expectations sit. Speaking with the Herald in July, he said: “One thing you have to do is win. So we have to maintain our winning ratio (76%) over time.
“And we have to do it in a way that we have always done. That is our legacy and there is no one in the All Blacks camp who would be prepared to do anything other than live up to the legacy.”
David Kirk: "I just don’t feel as if the All Blacks are playing consistently well enough".
He followed that up in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald last week, before the first Bledisloe test, by saying: “It’s less mourning, and more, you know, unacceptable”, of the All Blacks results this year.
“We [the board] are not happy, no one is happy. I take my chair hat off and put my fan hat on, because that’s the lens through which I answer these questions.
“I just don’t feel as if the All Blacks are playing consistently well enough. They’re playing really well when they play well, and they’re letting their standards drop, as they’ve done twice now this season.
“So, as a fan, just feeling like they can do better.”
The end of this season will mark the halfway point of Robertson’s four-year contract, and the question the NZR board will have to answer is whether they have seen enough to believe that all his regime needs is more time, or whether a continuation with the same group without any significant change is going to continue to deliver the same underwhelming outcomes.
The concern with Robertson’s regime runs deeper than results, however.
The fact that there is such low confidence in how the next five tests may play out is indicative of the lack of enterprise shown by the All Blacks in the last 18 months.
There’s been so little innovation in their game plan, limited growth in their attack structures, no apparent evolution in their defence patterns and with the odd exception – Fabian Holland, Wallace Sititi and maybe Simon Parker and Leroy Carter – we haven’t seen the emergence of a next generation of All Blacks.
In comparison, the Springboks have gone to the next level, injecting a platoon of young players around a core of veterans who are still advancing their individual growth, and have scored 110 points in their last two tests.
The Boks have given definitive evidence they can be a better side in 2027 than they are now, something the All Blacks haven’t yet done.
Argentina and Australia, too, are more obviously growing their individual skill-sets and improving their collective understanding of who they are and how they play, than the All Blacks are.
As much as the next five tests need to deliver victories, so too do they need to heighten belief that Robertson’s All Blacks will enhance the sense of other worldliness that has clung to New Zealand’s national team for the past 100 years.
The All Blacks legacy is not built exclusively on their win ratio, but a deeper mystique that their players are born with preternatural instincts and abilities and that New Zealand is the place where all good rugby ideas are hatched.
As Kirk also told the Herald, the All Blacks brand proposition relies on people seeing something compelling in the cohesion, culture and competencies.
“You don’t become a favourite team just by being loved,” he said.
“We are going to be… ‘I love how accurate they are. I love the way they carry themselves. I love the way they communicate their culture and their love of where they come from and who they are as people through the way they play rugby’.
“Most of all the way they play and our style of rugby. The All Blacks have played a style of rugby for a long time now which is world leading.
“I think we will get lots of people loving the All Blacks because we are different and who we are and we win.”
It is, then, a happy coincidence that Joseph has accepted a gig that has enabled NZR to park him safely in reserve – like a Thunderbird, just waiting to be activated.
‘A big personality’
NZR’s head of professional rugby Chris Lendrum was offered the chance to be interviewed for this story, but declined, on the basis there was “nothing to update or speak to”.
But while it’s understandable NZR didn’t want to talk about its views on the All Blacks leadership jigsaw, it would be remiss for NZR to not have given the current situation with the All Blacks coaching group considerable thought and due consideration to what the alternative options may be.
This has not been a tenure with many, if any, secure anchor points from which the team can elevate itself to greatness. The past two years have given no indication that a golden era is around the corner.
Even if there is a determination to support Robertson and his group through the entirety of their four-year contracts, it would still be good practice, given the timeframes involved in negotiating and extricating in-demand coaches from existing commitments, for NZR to be talking to the many high-quality New Zealanders not currently working in the country.
They should also signal how and when they intend to make All Blacks appointments for the post-2027 period.
It would be staggering, having failed to generate significant interest in the All Blacks role in either 2019 or 2023, if NZR has not learned the importance of building stronger and more transparent relationships with potential contenders to enable and encourage them to apply.
And this is why the whole situation with Joseph carries more significance than it may appear, as it suggests NZR has learned from its previous mistakes and has begun the process of widening its options to compete for the All Blacks job after the World Cup, if not earlier.
The situation has changed, NZR just doesn’t want to say so. It is understood to have campaigned hard to persuade Joseph to return to New Zealand in 2024 to take up the specially created role of head of rugby at the Highlanders, before taking over as head coach this year.
Jamie Joseph has been coaching the Highlanders. Photo / Photosport
Joseph, having coached the Highlanders to their only Super Rugby title in 2015, spent eight years with the Japanese national team – taking them to the quarter-final of the 2019 Rugby World Cup – and is believed to have applied (unsuccessfully) for the All Blacks job when it was contested in early 2023.
In taking the All Blacks XV assignment, Joseph stated that his desire to coach at the highest level remains strong, and while missing out to Robertson in 2023 may have hurt, there is no doubting that the 55-year-old has brushed that off and still wants to one day coach the All Blacks.
He was close to getting the job the last time it was contestable, but he was closer still to being part of former coach Ian Foster’s team in 2020.
“Towards the end of the World Cup, I had a preliminary discussion with Jamie Joseph about being my forwards coach,” Foster wrote in his autobiography, Leading Under Pressure.
“Jamie was keen, and I wanted a big personality like him in the group. He could have justifiably been the head coach in his own right, but that never left me feeling threatened.
“The All Blacks need a coaching group that is prepared to have robust and frank discussions that keep everyone – including the head coach – accountable.
“Steve Hansen had a few strong personalities in his coaching group too – Wayne Smith for a while, and of course Mike Cron, and I was a strong voice for a while.
“You need a group that will challenge you – hence my desire to bring Jamie on board. When we spoke, there was a nice synergy about it. I felt he was going to bring an edge to the set-up.”
The presence of Jamie Joseph looms large over Scott Robertson's result. Photos / SmartFrame; Photosport
Foster’s assessment that Joseph could be an invaluable assistant within the All Blacks begs the question of whether this is a viable option to consider should Robertson’s team underachieve in the next five tests?
Could Joseph be injected into the coaching mix in the same way Jason Ryan and Joe Schmidt were midway through 2022 after Foster axed assistants John Plumtree and Brad Mooar?
Or could history repeat, and Schmidt, who will finish as head coach of the Wallabies at the end of November, be tempted back to New Zealand and slot into the All Blacks as an assistant under Robertson?
The unwritten code of conduct
The likelihood of Joseph and/or Schmidt being willing to join a reshuffled coaching team under Robertson is thought to be low.
This is the price both NZR and Robertson have to pay for the way the post-2023 appointment process was run.
Having missed out on the job in 2019 to Foster – and then again midway through 2022 when NZR approached him to get a sense of who he would have in his wider team should he be asked to take over, only to then retain Foster – Robertson is perceived by his coaching peers to have lobbied and pressured the national body into finally giving him the job.
NZR deviated from historic practice and opened applications for the role seven months before the 2023 World Cup – rather than after it – and clearly some of Robertson’s peers feel he agitated for that outcome by talking about other opportunities he was pursuing and sending NZR a “come-and-get-me” message.
The elite coaching fraternity is a tiny cohort and the unique pressures of the job and the lifestyle that comes with it have built a culture of solidarity within the fraternity. There is an unwritten code of conduct where they don’t undermine each other or engage in any overt political campaigning to secure a coveted job.
Schmidt has been the most vocal about Robertson’s campaign strategy, saying in Leading Under Pressure: “A big part of it was about integrity. The pressure that was being exerted was contributed to by not just New Zealand Rugby, but people aiming up at Ian.
“There was a podcast with Jim Hamilton and Scott Robertson. That’s in the public domain. That was a pressure point and an advertisement that he [Robertson] wanted to win the World Cup with two different teams.
“And he [Robertson] applied pressure by starting an interview with ‘Bula’ when there was talk of the Fijian job being open. That was happening in the foreground, not the background. That was the tip of the iceberg, and it was bloody awkward for Ian.”
Schmidt stood by those comments last week, saying: “That was a few years ago. Probably where I was, I was just seeing the impact it was having on Ian Foster and that accumulation of pressure”.
And interestingly, unless they had already encountered each other and exchanged pleasantries earlier, Schmidt and Robertson didn’t shake hands when they had the usual coach-to-coach catch-up before the game as their two sides warmed up at Eden Park.
Wallabies coach Joe Schmidt and All Blacks coach Scott Robertson before the Eden Park Bledisloe Cup test. Photo / Photosport
The other potential barrier to bringing in heavyweight assistants to bolster the current team, is the unusual role Robertson has assigned himself as culture coach, in which, as the Herald understands it, he doesn’t do any hands-on coaching as such.
Robertson’s current assistants – Jason Ryan, Scott Hansen, Tamati Ellison and Jason Holland – may be comfortable with the arrangement. But figures such as Joseph, Schmidt and Blues head coach Vern Cotter, who has had charge of both Scotland and Fiji, could have questions about where the set-up leaves the burden of accountability and responsibility.
Understandably, NZR wants to publicly hold a position that portrays unflinching support for Robertson, which is why Kirk, when asked by the Sydney Morning Herald if more All Blacks losses would lead to the national body considering a change of coach, said: “There is no contemplation of that. At all. We’re fully supportive of the current team and management”.
But shifting Joseph on the chess board is evidence to the contrary, that NZR might not be planning change right now, but that it accepts if results and performances don’t improve, it will have to revise its position.
