The Silver Fern

Tēnā koe. I'm visiting NZ from my home in Sydney for the first time in several years this week and am writing to you from my hotel room in Christchurch. Over breakfast this morning and at the bar last night, I strained my ears to over-hear conversations about 'Bring On Razor', but all the talk was of the Commonwealth Games or, of all sports, golf - which I'm told is experiencing a renaissance here. No sign of roaming lynch squads, which could be a healthy sign for NZ rugby or, alternatively, that the public has given up.

I did note, however, that the front cover of the NZ Herald this morning is plastered with a full-page editorial calling for Foster to be flushed, although in more restrained terms than that: "A decent man who is out of his depth in a brutal business," was the chosen phrase for the death sentence from the anonymous editorial bench. It was just not five defeats out of six matches, the Herald opines, but the manner of the defeats. "Foster's men are too often cluttered and confused in the execution of their roles." This seems to be a nice way of saying they are playing like headless chooks. Which raises the question of why it took them three years to work that out.

On the plane on the way across the Ta$man, I caught up with the Argentina-Wallabies game and had a premonition of the Bledisloe Cup travelling in the other direction this year. The Wallabies played with real rhythm and intent, as did Los Pumas. There is certainly room for argument whether the likes of Hunter Paisami and Jordan Petaia are better players than their All Black opposites, but there is no doubt in my mind that they are better coached. And that is, and has always been, the problem.

It's really not rocket science. New Zealand Rugby made a catastrophic error in appointing Foster. He may be a nice chap, but he is not an innovator and does not have the imagination to take the game forward. As countless others have pointed out, he's like a hack chef who inherited a five-star restaurant and never changed the menu. NZR need to get the cheque book out now and pay Foster out. It seems they almost certainly will at this point.. But that it was allowed to get this far is an indictment on the entire administration.

OK, I had better go and do some real work.

Politics and Pragmatism

In retaining Foster and elevating Schmidt to a more strategic role, the NZR has made both a political arse-saving decision and a sensibly pragmatic one. Fundamentally, of course, this was always about fixing up a public relations mess of their own making.

And what a mess. Given the public uproar over the All Blacks’ performances, It seemed almost certain a week ago that Foster was gone for all money. And I have little doubt that Robinson was on hand in South Africa to accept his ‘resignation’ after the Ellis Park test.

But the ABs’ beating the Boks against all the odds in game II mucked up the plan, leaving Robinson to convene that bizarre media conference in Johannesburg at which he said nothing of substance, while conveying what most of us have known all along - that the real villains in this saga are the NZR board themselves - an indecisive, directionless and poorly organised rabble whose original appointment of Foster in the face of better alternatives was both a poor choice and one they have been scrambling to make up for every since.

Like the AB performances themselves, at least up to Ellis Park, the NZR administration has been a shuffling, stumbling, conviction-less shambles. The right hand does not not appear to know what the left hand is doing, there is no boardroom game plan and no-one appears to be effectively in charge. So they have spared themselves further embarrassment with this 14-month workaround.

That’s the politics. What about the pragmatism? Well, that’s the good part. There appear still to be enough adults in this over-crowded kitchen to stop the next 14 months being a complete disaster. Foster remains the titular head of the galley, though much of his original coaching hands have been turfed out of the kitchen and replaced with smarter rugby brains - Ryan and Schmidt - who should be able to bring together the available ingredients to as to serve up a more palatable outcome.

You would hope that now a firm decision has been made - well, at least the appearance of one - this will end the self-generated soap opera and get people focused back on the task at hand. That starts with the Pumas in Christchurch next week and then onto the Wallabies and the retention of the Bledisloe Cup.

As for Razor Robertson, he may feel a sense of relief, not having to be drafted in at the worst possible moment to fix a mess created by somebody else. This gives him clear air to take over the top job next year, should be still be interested. And it gives the players, who were clearly and rightfully sick of the whole charade, a sense of certainty and direction.

If the outcome is Foster being more consultative, more open to new ideas and less dogged in his selections and game plans, the changes will be an improvement. They certainly couldn’t make things any worse. Could they?

Gracias chicos!

You have to give some credit to a gutsy Argentina. They took the opportunities that were given to them…on a platter mostly.

My sense is the ABs did what they are often are guilty of these days - not respecting the opposition, not respecting the ball, sacrificing structure and discipline for helter-skelter rugby, lacking pragmatism about taking three points when they are on offer, and playing loosey-goosey Super Rugby in the test arena.

Who do we blame for all that? There seems to be a lack of hard-heads in the coaching box and in the on-field leadership. For all his individual gifts, Savea is not a good skipper and seeks to win the game all on his own.

The ABs were 20-8 up at one stage and looked to be a try away from pulling away out of sight, but they let the Argentinians back in with sloppy, ultra-loose play that betrayed the old ‘we’re the Harlem Globetrotters of World Rugby and we can score more tries than you’ mentality.

Then when the pressure came on in the final quarter, they fell apart mentally. Loose and panicky passes, often with little pressure, wayward lineout throws, poor option-taking, and on it went. Same old car crash.

I don’t think Robertson is a bad coach, but I do wonder at the quality of his assistants and whether there are too many of them. It all seems too pally and collegiate. MacDonald has never impressed me, and I wonder what Hansen brings to the party.

In what was a familiar scenario, the whole AB game had a Marie Celeste element to it. There was a sense of nobody being at the wheel and you could see them drifting inexorably toward the rocks in slow motion. Yet the ABs thrashed Argentina in the WC semi-final and it’s tough to believe they suddenly became that bad, and Argentina that good in less than a year.

So it looks and smells like an attitude problem, a lack of leadership problem, an absence of test rugby pragmatism, and the old familiar trap of elevating the desire to put on a spectacle above the requirement to win the game.

The issues are lack of composure, fading concentration and poor structure on defence. Mentally, they are still not there. We continue to see lousy choices on attack, poor positioning on defence and lapses of discipline at key moments. Again, we see their capacity to momentarily look comfortable and in control and then drop their focus like a ADHD teen skipping his ritalin. And all this against a Wallaby team thrown together at the last minute. Something is wrong.

ABs in Razor’s mind:

ABs in reality…

Groundhog Day

Everyone has a theory on the continuing mystifying propensity for the All Blacks, formerly the world’s greatest team, to not only repeatedly shoot themselves in both feet, but then to remove their socks and blow their toes off one by one.

The test in Christchurch was there for the taking in the first half. But poor discipline, together with an incapacity to adjust to the referee’s idiosyncratic style, brought them undone. This was compounded by the head-scratching decision by the coaching box just minutes into the second half to replace the entire front row, including the ABs’ most in-form player. From there, it was just a comedy of schoolboy errors, including the aimless pie-chucking of Codie Taylor into potentially match-winning line outs.

All the Argentinians had to do was to give their opponents the ball and watch them implode. Correct me if I’m wrong, but haven’t we seen this movie before? Ian Foster and Sam Cane are like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, reliving the same nightmare over and over. In this case, however, the adenoidal tones of Sonny Bono on the alarm clock radio were supplied by Michael Cheika.

Murray’s character in that movie was a cynical and self-obsessed TV weatherman feeling trapped in a job and a routine that he doesn’t particularly like. So he is forced to live the same day over and over until he finds his purpose. Ultimately, after much trial and error, he realises he has choices and he has agency. He can’t keep blaming his predicament on everybody else.

In the case of the All Blacks, there are any number of external forces they can point to for their Groundhog funk. There is the coaching soap opera, of course, but also the selection controversies (wings at centres, open-sides at number eight, fullbacks at wings etc;). There is the ageing of faithful old warriors and the apparent lack of equally competent young replacements. There is the argument that Super Rugby, particularly without South Africa, is failing to prepare them for tests. There is the raiding of NZ coaching and playing IP by cashed-up NH clubs and an associated thinning of development programs at home. There is mounting concern among parents about stories of premature senility in repeatedly concussed players. Add to that stale game plans, refereeing controversies and inconsistencies and the vagaries of the rule book.

The point is there is always something externally you can blame for the state this team is in, but none on its own explains it. If you held a gun to my head and told me to boil it down to one thing, it would be a failure of leadership across the board. No-one is taking responsibility - from the NZR to the coaching set-up to the players themselves. The feeling is one of drift. Like the Mary Celeste, the All Black machine is a pilot-less ship lost at sea. And the failure of leadership is creating a crisis of confidence, of second-guessing that led to the debacle on Saturday night.

In short, no-one is in charge. And it shows.

So according to Rennie, Rieko Ioane gave some lip to Folau Faingaa about the Wallabies disrespecting the haka with the arrow formation. From what I can understand (and it seems hearsay upon hearsay), this comment was made on-field after the ABs scored the winning try.

Seriously? Here’s what’s going on here. It’s finals weekend in Australia for the actually popular codes. The Swans play the Cats and the Rabbitohs play the Panthers. The ARU needs eyeballs on their code and, by implication, their advertisers. So one of the spin doctors sends Rennie out to fan a confected controversy over a throwaway comment by one player to another in the heat of a game.

This happens constantly in Australia with rugby union. The hacks, desperate for column inches, are complicit with these five-minute manufactured controversies and lame attempts to fan outrage. And of course the rest of the media, including NZ’s own tumbleweed newsrooms, buy it.

It really is pathetic.

The Long, Sad Retreat

At half-time in that game, NZ looked to be well-positioned. They had had plenty of opportunities and were showing more on attack than the French. But in the second, they opened the door to their opposition through poor exits and an appalling strategy of mid-field bombs. Credit must go to the French, but it didn’t take much.

Indeed, we could see it all unravelling in slow motion. Worse, this was a movie we had viewed countless times before these past four years, or more. That it never changes can leave one doubting one’s own sanity. But the culprits are easy enough to spot.

Ever since the glory days up to 2015, NZ rugby has been keeping players (and coaches) well past their use-by dates. When he was gifted the succession by virtue of it being his turn, it quickly became apparent that Foster was not up to it. His ‘strategies’ were worked out by the other top teams years ago, but like a dog returning to its vomit he kept at it.

The corralling of new assistants in Schmidt and Ryan last year papered over the cracks for a while, but it has remained clear since that this remains Foster’s team and his vision. Knowing his contract is over after this tournament, he has clearly decided to go out playing his greatest hits to an audience that moved on years ago.

Of course, the responsibility ultimately lies with a week NZR which has repeatedly accepted Fozzy’s assurances that all was on track - against the evidence to the contrary. That allowed Foster to keep selecting people like BB, who has been on the world’s longest farewell tour.

The players, understandably, have declared their allegiance to Foster and have been repaid in turn with his fidelity, but that seems to have resulted in a lack of candour or willingness to suggest the emperor has no clothes. One wonders at what Ryan and Schmidt think.

On the field, the players look to some of the tiring old officers like Whitelock, Smith and BB to rally around the flag. But it’s hard to fight for a general whom you don’t ultimately respect and who you know is due to be decommissioned after this latest and last and bloody campaign.

Like Napoleon’s march home from Moscow, it’s a long and sad retreat and one you would hopehope would not destroy too many younger souls along the way. But I fear the damage will be too great. Unfortunately, that hope, on this grim evidence, may be forlorn.

@Dan54 My thoughts too. I knew a pasting was coming while watching the anthems. They weren’t up for this at all. And the Springboks clearly were. Mindset, attitude and mental strength are still the key underlying problems, which gets back to my earlier post about the Foster effect. I think he wants to be everyone’s mate, which is fatal for a head coach.

The Great Teacher

Who can hate the Irish? This is the country that gave us Yeats and Joyce and Wilde and Beckett, after all. A good chunk of us in this part of the world have roots in Ireland. And does anyone recall that the Irish, of all peoples, probably hate the English more than anyone?

But aside from their outsized contribution to literature, drama, music and oratory, the Irish have recently become rather good at rugby. To be sure, they have picked the brains and talent of other countries to do that, but in the process they have developed their own style, cohesion and power to the point that they have struck fear into the hearts of the traditional rugby superpowers. As that Irishman Wilde said: “Be yourself; everyone else is taken”.

Ireland’s exit in the quarter final of this World Cup is no disgrace. They just came up against an All Black side that was wounded and may have wanted it more. As well, to quote Andy Farrell in his post-match presser, these knockout games can swing on small moments - Jordie Barrett’s try-saving tackle, Sam Whitelock’s steal at the end, Sexton’s missed shots at goal. A tiny adjustment in the curtains of fate could have changed the denouement entirely.

That the ABs, to win that match, had to dig deeper than they have done in probably any other match since the 2011 final against France spoke volumes not only for their new-found resilience and self-belief but also for Ireland’s never-say-die commitment and ability to keep picking themselves up from setbacks. This Ireland team were never beaten, until the final whistle. Every drop of blood that could be shed on both sides was done so.

As for Sexton, sure he can be ornery, mouthy and hard to like at times. But is he more so than Fitzy or Coles or Marshall? Put it this way, if this 38-year-old warrior been playing in black would any of his most bitter critics here have been so quick to condemn him? And could anyone in their heart of hearts really claim that Ireland’s recent successes have not made watching rugby union a richer and more thrilling experience?

As for the All Blacks and their lame duck coach, it has been a tough few years, unquestionably, with a host of undesirable ‘firsts’ on the team resume. One could almost smell the regret seeping from the hard-nosed money men at Silver Lake. But the quarter final felt like a form of redemption and a reminder that sport, like life generally, can swing on the smallest of moments.

To quote another great Irishman in James Joyce:

“To learn, one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.”

From a grumpy old rugby fan comes this contribution:

The ADHD Blacks

Is Ritalin the best prescription for the compulsively hyperactive, ritually self-destructing 2024 All Blacks?

Clearly, a pattern is emerging. They spend days before each test in media interviews regurgitating vacuous self-help management nostrums about ‘walking toward the pressure’ and ‘embracing the opportunity’ - only to set their dials to full-throttle for 60 minutes on-field before running out of gas.

Perhaps we can put it down to generational change - a break-dancing, surf-riding, Gen-X guru of self-discovery indulging a bunch of over-pampered, over-stimulated, over-praised Gen-Z whizz-kids with a complete deficit of patience, grit or an ability to think on their designer-booted feet.

To me, this looks like attention-deficit, hyperactivity-disorder on the rugby field. It works in flashes as the adrenaline kicks in among the players, eager to impress teacher and add to the highlight reels. Then when the buttons they are pushing on their virtual X-Boxes no longer respond they cave into fits of ill-discipline. “I’m bored now.”

It’s hard to see any grown-up, hard-nosed thinking going on in the AB circles. Perhaps it’s another consequence of what happens when you sell out your culture to US private equity who are all about ‘brand value’ over substance.

Of course, there are the real, practical problems facing the squad - the vacuum left by the departure or retirement of the likes of Whitelock, Retallick, Aaron Smith and Mo’unga, the forced reliance on old warriors past their use-by dates, the absence of impact players off the bench, questions over Scott Barrett’s on-field leadership, questions about poor conditioning and late game fades.

But beyond all that is a suspicion that apart from motivational New Age nostrums about self-expression, there really is little going on below Razor’s sun-bleached locks. If there were, why is his team throwing the same tantrums in every test? It is becoming so predictable - his charges race out of the blocks like men possessed, build a handy lead and then blow it in a flurry of low-percentage miracle passes, Hail Mary high-balls to nowhere and brain-dead ill-discipline.

Are boots applied to backsides anymore, or are the grieving miscreants ‘counselled’ and denied their PlayStations for a day?

Nurse?

@kev It also ensures that only one style of play dominates in World Cups. The Springboks individually have fantastic skills and are capable of so much more than that. But Erasmus, justifiably cynical about how rugby is run, has developed techniques to squeeze out games in knock-out competitions by playing very little actual rugby. And that’s because he knows the game’s rule-makers and power centres have engineered it to produce an attritional battle that caters to the Northern Hemisphere mindset. Watch a game with a non-rusted on and see how they react to the increasingly stop-start and judicial-dominated nature of the event. Genuine curiosity at first gives way to quiet bemusement, then dismissal. If someone like me now dreads watching international rugby at this level (waiting for the inevitable voice of God from up in the box directing the referee to another card) I’m pretty sure that more footloose people looking to spend their (increasingly limited) discretionary income are going to tune out completely and look somewhere else for entertainment. Because that’s what this game is at the end of the day - entertainment. And if it doesn’t entertain beyond you few diehards that like watching scrum penalties, kicks for the corner and rolling mauls all day, it’s going to die a slow painful death.

Real Rugby wins against a robotic steroid-enhanced rolling maul machine.

The Springboks did what they always do and we didn’t adjust. This perplexing failure of the ABs to deal with the predictable is the biggest worry.

They didn’t adjust quickly enough to the referee, who like most northern hemisphere whistlers seemed to intent to show his superiors his affinity with every minor clause in the rule book.

They knew what the Boks would bring, but continued to put themselves under unnecessary further pressure with poor exits, dropped balls and constant infringements.

Their heads clearly weren’t in the right place and the Boks, having had their arses smacked in Auckland a couple of months ago, were up for this one.

I don’t think the ABs turned into a bad team overnight but I do believe this humiliation suggests the mental fragility that bedevilled them for much of the past four-year World Cup cycle is still there.

Perhaps they’re reading too many of their own positive press notices or perhaps many of the veteran members of the team like Beauden Barrett feel they’re on a victory lap. Either way, there’s a residual flakiness to the team. If their tails aren’t up, they are instantly flustered and then compound the damage with stupid errors and acts of outright stupidity like that of the other Barretts.

What is the source of it? While Schmidt and Ryan have clearly brought the team forward on a technical basis, the top two inches are missing and that comes down to Foster. He seems a genuinely nice bloke and is clearly well-regarded by many of the players. But the mental softness I think comes from him, as shown in his own undying loyalty to Cane as captain and Beauden Barrett.

Can they turn it around in the WC proper? I very much doubt it. World Cups are won by teams with strong set piece, impregnable defences, astute kicking, mental and physical discipline and an ability to adapt to the ref.

On all those measures, I wouldn’t be putting money on the ABs.

They’re taking only three working locks? They’re travelling with only five loose forwards and expecting Frizell to cover for broken Brodie at a pinch? They’ve got (count ‘em) FIVE outside backs on board, plus BB? This is like launching an airliner with multiple wings, a small engine and no reserve power. I’m sure everything will be fine.

These All Blacks appear to lack the top two inches. Make that six inches. Not really Mensa material are they? They’re like Wiley C. Coyote dreaming up endless ways of blowing up the Roadrunner only to tie the kit dynamite stick to their own tails

Redirect Notice

Foster really is clueless, isn’t he? No feel for selection, no willingness to take a chance on players. He just moves the pieces around the chessboard without any sense of an over-arching strategy at work.

Someone is going to have to explain to me what Foster sees in Christie.

England -especially Ford - showing the All Blacks the virtues of pragmatism. The ABs always seem to up against two opponents - the guys in the other coloured shirts and their own myth.

Roigard’s great advantage is his ability to keep oppositions guessing.,A Sid Going-style player around the fringes, he offers a clear point of difference to Smith’s style. Why Foster has stayed true to Christie is one of life’s great mysteries