KEY POINTS:
The All Black management shake-up has provided an admission of sorts of where the incumbents believe they went wrong last year.
The decision to allow two conditioning coaches to move on and hire only one suggests the panel might have been too focused on the athletic preparation of
the side last year.
Allowing kicking coach Mick Byrne and scrum coach Mike Cron to spend more time working with provinces and franchises could be seen as an acknowledgment that the support team had bloated during the World Cup.
Assumption remains the only tool available to piece together the big picture as communication from the All Black camp remains uncritical about their own work.
Direct admissions about where mistakes were made at the World Cup will not be delivered until a full review of the campaign is completed.
Come May, when the review is likely to be finished, there might be some honest appraisals around the conditioning programme and numbers of support staff.
Any fault the All Blacks do admit to will be around the timing of the programme and the commercial damage caused by taking 22 leading All Blacks out of the early rounds of Super 14.
With head strength and conditioning coach Graham Lowe having decided to move on - he's understood to be taking a job with America's Cup syndicate BMW Oracle - there is a temptation to see him as a fall guy for the unloved reconditioning programme.
All Black manager Darren Shand is adamant, though, that the athletic side of the programme achieved all its goals and that after more than a decade in rugby, Lowe was ready to move on to a new challenge.
"We looked to create a pre-season window where our players could prepare for the next nine months. In terms of the programme the results were very good and we achieved what we wanted in terms of the players' results. Graham delivered in his role.
"He's been involved in rugby since about 1996 I think and he has opted to look at different opportunities.
"I don't want to pre-empt the review but the comments that have been made about the conditioning programme relate more to the timing and the effect it had on crowds and other commercial factors."
Lowe's assistant, Ashley Jones, will now focus solely on his role with the Crusaders as Shand confirmed there was no longer a need for two conditioning coaches to be attached to the All Blacks.
'We knew we were going to have the players for a long period last year and we felt it was going to be too big an ask for one man," said Shand.
The NZRU is now advertising for a new head conditioning coach and unlike Lowe, the new appointment will work only with the national team.
Lowe's post was split 50:50 between the All Blacks and the NZRU High Performance Unit where he was overseeing the work being done at Super 14 and provincial level.
The difficulty for Lowe's successor will be the uncertainty about what rules the All Blacks will play under. As evidenced in the opening weeks of Super 14, the new rules have significantly increased the aerobic content of the sport and players need to prepare for that.
Much work is being done to determine how test players can be granted an off-season in coming years that does not force them to miss the early rounds of Super 14.
The All Black conditioning coach will be given significant input into that research. "This is something that is high on the agenda," said Shand of the need to have clear guidelines on how All Blacks are managed between their end of year tour in November and the beginning of Super 14.
The All Blacks will now have 11 full-time management staff - Graham Henry, Steve Hansen, Wayne Smith, Shand, Deb Robinson (doctor), Peter Gallagher (physiotherapist), Errol Collins (baggage) and Scott Compton (media) as well as conditioning coach, video analyst to replace Andrew Sullivan and muscle therapist to replace George Duncan. There were 23 staff employed during the World Cup.
