Now that Scott Robertson is finding his feet in the international arena, it would be a mistake byNew Zealand Rugby’s high-performance department to retrospectively argue that his coming-of-age validates their rationale for conducting the All Blacks head coach appointment process both when and the way they did last year.
The All Blacks have beaten England and Ireland in consecutive weeks and are on a five-game winning streak while playing more cohesive rugby, providing an evidential basis from which NZR can say they got the right outcome by installing Robertson as head coach in 2024.
They put Robertson in to refresh and reimagine the All Blacks – the way they played, the players they picked and the way they interacted with their public – and while it may have taken a while for definitive signs of his vision to manifest, there is a sense now that he’s getting closer to fulfilling the brief.
And by extension, NZR can use the outcome to justify the process – because a big part of the reason they decided to find their next All Blacks coach eight months before the World Cup and not wait until after the tournament, was to ensure that Robertson was still available to apply and not snapped up by a rival nation.
But it’s important, for two reasons, that NZR do not use confirmation bias to convince themselves they were right to break with convention last year.
The first is to remember that there is no control group in this scenario.
While Robertson and his coaching team are starting to come to grips with the nuances of international rugby and get a handle on who to pick and how to play, that is, not of itself, hard proof that the All Blacks are better off in 2024 than they would have been had NZR retained his predecessor, Ian Foster.
Foster’s reign endured a tough period between late 2021 and through a fair chunk of 2022, but once it was reset with the arrival of new assistant coaches Joe Schmidt and Jason Ryan, the All Blacks started to play with verve and imagination and came within a missed goal-kick of winning the World Cup.
All that can be concluded is that the All Blacks have a good coach in Robertson and would have had a good coach in Foster had they retained him.
Ian Foster came within a missed goal-kick of winning the Rugby World Cup, writes Gregor Paul. Photo / Getty Images
But the real danger in using confirmation bias to say the right call was made, is that it will wrongly endorse NZR’s contentious belief that conducting an appointment process months before a World Cup was best high-performance practice because it brought them into line with other leading nations.
This argument was always abject nonsense, something that has been unquestionably proven by looking at the three nations who went down this path – England, Australia and Wales.
All three of them opted to fire their respective head coaches in December 2022 and find new ones less than a year out from the tournament.
New Zealand, of course, opted to keep Foster in his role through to the World Cup, but that doesn’t lessen the argument that it was high-performance suicide to conclude that keeping up with the Jones’s was a valid strategy for the All Blacks to pursue.
Wales, England and Australia all made distressed decisions to do what they did. They reacted to political pressures and personal agendas inside their executive and governance regimes, and made decisions that were reactionary and not considered.
Australia were an absolute shambles in 2023 after they fired Dave Rennie and appointed Eddie Jones, who lasted not quite a year, a period in which he drove the Wallabies as low as ninth in the world.
If Australia had retained Rennie and then run a process to determine whether to keep him or replace him after the tournament, they almost certainly would have been better off.
Wales sacked Wayne Pivac to appoint Warren Gatland in December 2022 and are now on a 10-game losing streak with former players in the Principality calling for the Kiwi coach’s head.
And England, despite showing signs of promise at times under Steve Borthwick, have only won five tests out of 10 this year, and that’s after finishing fourth in the Six Nations last year and losing to Fiji before the World Cup.
The point for NZR to be clear about is that they may – or may not – have made the right call to appoint Robertson, but they can’t also conclude that the timing and nature of the process to get him into the job was the right one.
And it is important to conclude that the process was flawed so that when Robertson reaches the end of his four-year contract, there is a deeply considered strategy about what to do next and when to do it, that is driven by what is right for the All Blacks and not motivated by a misplaced narrative that best high-performance practice is to follow what other nations do.
All Blacks v France, Sunday 9.10am - live commentary on Newstalk ZB, Gold Sport and iHeartRadio. Live match blog at nzherald.co.nz
Sign up to the Premium Opinion newsletter for a wrap of the week’s best commentary and analysis, compiled by our Opinion Editor and delivered straight to your inbox every Wednesday.
