The jury is still out on whether the All Blacks will be able to sustain their current ascension to world rugby’s No 1 ranking throughout the Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry series, but what was shown in their 33-16 win in the first test is that Dave Rennie has proved an astute choice as coach.
Not since Steve Hansen took the All Blacks to their second successive Rugby World Cup title in 2015 and a bit beyond that have the New Zealanders looked as aligned as they are now. Rennie seems to be universally popular in his home country in ways that Ian Foster and Scott Robertson weren’t.
And there may be something in the fact that in Rennie they have what they had in Hansen and his predecessor Graham Henry - a coach who has spent some time outside of New Zealand honing his craft and is therefore not possessed of the potentially insular view that may hold back coaches who have done most of if not all of their coaching in New Zealand.
His awareness of what is required to win in other theatres of world rugby, such as the northern hemisphere, where he coached the Glasgow Warriors for some time, and during his time in Australia, which was rather bizarrely cut short and may have cost the Wallabies when you consider what came next, has set him up well for his current job.
FOSTER WAS PART OF A SUCCESSION PLAN
Just as Henry’s time with Wales and his series as coach of the British and Irish Lions, and Hansen’s stint with Wales and overseas clubs, did. Of course with Hansen, as with Foster, there was something else in play - he took the job as part of a succession plan after serving an apprenticeship as the previous coach’s assistant.
Hansen was Henry’s assistant for eight years before ascending to the main job in 2011, and Foster served for a similar period under Hansen. The All Blacks had continuity in their coaching group post the axing of John Mitchell at the end of 2003 right through until Robertson took the job after the 2023 World Cup.
When it comes to Foster, the view of him from Kiwis depends on who you talk to. Some of the touring media contingent feel that Foster was a good technical coach, as was shown by big wins over Australia in his time and making the last World Cup final, where the All Blacks had to beat Ireland along the way and also just lost the decider to South Africa by one point.
That camp will argue that he was a bad selector, and that would explain why his team suffered the ignominy of a rare home series defeat to Ireland, some unexpected losses to Argentina in successive Rugby Championships, and also presided over some comprehensive defeats to the Boks, such as the 26-10 reverse in Nelspruit in 2022 and 35-7 in the 2023 World Cup warm-up game.
ROBERTSON WASN’T A GOOD TECHNICAL COACH
Regardless of the reasons, Foster wasn’t always safe in his job, and had the All Blacks not scored an unexpected win over the Boks at Ellis Park the week after the aforementioned Nelspruit loss, he would have been dropped then.
Robertson, who was known to be actively campaigning for the job, something that did not endear him to everyone in New Zealand rugby circles, was primed to take over.
It seems a fairly universal view on Robertson that he was not a good technical coach. He thrived at Super Rugby on the culture built at Crusaders, where team leaders and assistants played a big role in the technical preparation of the team and the strategy the side employed.
He’d only ever coached in New Zealand and his reputation was built entirely on his Crusaders success and a culture that could not be carried over to the All Blacks.
Rennie also won Super Rugby. He did it twice with the Chiefs a decade and a half ago, and that followed on from his success with the New Zealand under-20 team - three Junior World Championship titles in a row. There is deep respect for him within the New Zealand game, and that was evident when he was a somewhat surprise appointment as head coach of the All Blacks above the favourite, Jamie Joseph.
RENNIE PRESIDED OVER TACTICAL MASTER-CLASS AT ELLIS PARK
And he’s delivered so far on his promise. The win over the Boks in Johannesburg was the result not only of the resilience shown by his players under almost unbelievable pressure from a highly physical and dominant home team, it was also a tactical master class.
There were small but significant points to the All Black game, strategies, that made all the difference to the result and this time it is not possible to defend Bok coach Rassie Erasmus from accusations that he was out-thought and out-strategised, as indeed was the case when Joe Schmidt, another astute Kiwi but that time in the role of Wallaby coach, visited Ellis Park 12 months ago.
Erasmus could well redress that on Saturday in Cape Town, but he will know he is up against a formidable adversary who devised clever ploys to disrupt the flow of the Bok game, mainly by isolating the scrumhalf Grant Williams, and just doing his homework from a technical viewpoint.
RASSIE’S IMPACT SHOWED WHAT A COACH CAN DO
The identity of a coach can make a huge difference to a team’s fortunes. In 2017, when the Boks lost 57-0 to the All Blacks in Albany under the coaching of Allister Coetzee, they had Jesse Kriel, Siya Kolisi, Franco Mostert, Eben Etzebeth and Malcolm Marx from the current Bok double World Cup winning squad in the starting team, and Pieter-Steph du Toit and Handre Pollard on the bench.
Tendai Mtawarira, Steven Kitshoff and Trevor Nyakane, plus Elton Janties, were part of the World Cup winning group just two years later when Erasmus had taken charge.
Coetzee’s team that lost to Italy in Udine in 2016 had Willie le Roux, Damian de Allende, Lood de Jager, Du Toit, Mtwarira, Vincent Koch, Bongi Mbonambi, Kitshoff, Nyakane, Mostert and Faf de Klerk in it, all of them going on to be World Cup winners.
When you look at that, you realise just how good Rassie is, what a massive impact he has made as a culture of failure has given way to a culture of excellence.
Rennie doesn’t have as much to fix at the All Blacks as Erasmus did at the Boks when he took over. But in the early stages of his tenure he looks poised to have a similar effect.
They are obviously going to have to improve some core basics of their game, and regardless of how the RGR series turns out, their creaky scrum should stop us from rushing into giving them the favourites tag for next year’s World Cup. For instance, until they sort that out they are more vulnerable to a team like England, or France, who also have good scrums, than the Boks are.
Right now though, under a coach everyone in New Zealand appears aligned with, the All Blacks are trending upwards, and it feels like a long time since we could last say that.