by Richie McCaw
I think about Uncle Bigsy and the G.A.B. What do I want to be remembered as? The guy who gave up when it got hard?
In late November, Graham Henry makes it public that he’s going to reapply for All Black coach, and Wayne Smith and Steve Hansen recommit as well. It doesn’t take me by surprise—I reckon that if I deserve a second chance, so do the coaches—but it seems to surprise many in the media. From the time the NZRU announced there’d be a review and that applications would be invited for the All Black coaching position, a lot of people simply assumed that that amounted to the chop for Ted and Smithy and Shag.
That’s probably the way Ted & Co. viewed it too when I saw them in Wellington earlier that month. I was up there for other business, and banged into them at NZRU just after they’d been told the news that if they wanted their jobs back they’d have to reapply, and they were debating whether it was worthwhile even putting themselves up for it.
I told them they should. I told them that I wanted another crack and so should they. I accepted that after Cardiff there were no guarantees for anyone involved, that I was expecting to have to fight to retain the captaincy, and perhaps even my place in the All Blacks, and that was only right because I was one of the ones out on the field who had stuffed up. We’d made mistakes collectively, and it’d be nice to think that we all got a chance to profit from them. I was trying to reassure Ted that he hadn’t lost the changing room, and other senior players were telling him the same thing. Ted seemed down, but I could see that he was open to the idea at least.
All Black coaches are very accountable. Every year, they undergo 360ies, an anonymous on-line review system. Players, co-coaches, management, NZRU staff, some media and sponsors complete a series of questions about each coach. They even do some public focus groups. Ted and Smithy and Shag must have been reassured by what the 360ies were telling them as they came in, because at the end of November, Ted says they’re going to reapply. I’m pleased.
Robbie Deans has also thrown his hat in the ring, though when he tells me he’s done that, he also says that he’s not sure that the position is genuinely up for grabs. I tell him that’s news to me.
The fact that I’m hearing the same doubts from both the major applicants indicates how conflicted I feel: up to my ears. I owe both Robbie and Ted huge debts for my development as a player.
Robbie has been my mentor at Super 14 level since 2001, and was also there as John Mitchell’s assistant when I first made the All Blacks. When we were dumped out of the 2003 tournament in the semi by the Aussies, both were sacked, but their subsequent career paths have been very different. John Mitchell has had to struggle to rehabilitate his reputation, but Robbie returned to the Crusaders and won back-to-back Super titles in 2005 and 2006, and got us to the semis in 2007, when we were battling to get our top team on the park. By December 2007, when the interviews are being conducted, Robbie Deans is the only credible alternative to Ted & Co.
The problem is that some in the media have already anointed Robbie Deans and they’re affronted that Ted has had the gall to put his name forward again. It’s pretty brutal: if he’d won the RWC, he’d have been up for an Order of Merit at the very least, whereas now they’re clamouring for the Order of the Boot.
Publicly, I have to maintain a strict neutrality, but privately, when I start working through my own evaluations of them, I develop a strong preference as to which choice would better serve the All Blacks and our chances in the 2011 RWC.
The first step in that evaluation is to be rigorously honest about what went wrong in Cardiff.
As the who-will-coach-the-All Blacks saga develops, with formal applications to the NZRU and interviews, Hayley and I rent a bach at Raglan, the west coast surf spot near Hamilton, a great place to lie low and think. We’re joined there by Ali Williams and his girlfriend, Casey.
Ali has remained loyal to Ted, and down at Raglan, in so far as we discuss developments at NZRU HQ in Wellington, Ali speaks as highly of Ted as ever. He’s got no regrets about the last four years with Ted, and has gone public with his view that his involvement in the All Black set-up with Ted and Shag and Smithy has not only made him a better player but a better person.
That motto, ‘Better people make better All Blacks’, has been a guiding philosophy for the All Blacks since Ted & Co. were appointed in 2004.
By that time Ted was already in his late fifties, a former headmaster from southern stock, and could have been excused for sticking to methods which were tried and true across a long career. But what you see of Ted—a slightly curmudgeonly, at times grumpy-looking and conservative late-middle-aged man—is not what you get. In the last four years he’s proven himself to be an innovative, enlightened thinker, with the energy and openness to new ideas of a man half his age.
Instead of harking back to what worked so brilliantly with the likes of Fitzy and Zinny and the great Blues team of the mid to late nineties, Ted recognised when he took over the All Blacks that the make-up of the modern team had inevitably changed along with the demographics of the country. The modern All Blacks are culturally and ethnically more diverse, and Ted and the people around him made a point of embracing all that, not fighting it.
One of the first signs of Ted’s approach was appointing Tana Umaga to be his captain. I’ve spoken to players of Ted’s vintage who tell me that not only would someone with dreadlocks never have been in the running for All Black captain in their time, he would have been lucky to have worn the silver fern in any capacity.
Ted’s said that being principal of Kelston Boys’ High School, a decile 4 school, helped immensely. There was a high percentage of Polynesians in the school and he got to know a wider cross-section of New Zealand society than he might have done down south, or if he’d stayed at Auckland Grammar. He learnt that what was important to the European kid might be quite different from what was important to the Samoan, or to the Tongan or Fijian, and he learnt to respect the differences.
He’s carried that over to the All Black environment, where he’s worked hard to make sure that everyone in the team knows and respects everyone else’s culture.
But if there’s one single outstanding and innovative element to what he’s done with us since he took over in 2004, it’s the ownership he’s encouraged each player to have over what we’re doing as a group. The coaching team put a lot of effort into growing us as people, and developing our leadership and decision-making skills. The only way of doing that is by giving us players real power over our own systems and protocols, and by integrating them into all the major decisions.
The perfect illustration of this is the controversial rotation and reconditioning system, which was endorsed by the players. The pity of it is that we didn’t get far enough through the RWC tournament to show its true value. If we’d had to play a semi-final the week after Cardiff, we’d have been without a number of front-line players, and the game time that some of the other guys had had during the year and in the earlier RWC matches against the likes of Italy and Portugal and Scotland would have been of critical importance.
Okay, we got stuffed in the quarter-final, but you have to plan as if you’re going all the way.
There’d also been a lot of criticism about the NZRU taking the All Blacks out of the early Super 14 games, and the way we rotated through the Tri Nations etc, but from my own point of view, I was absolutely knackered at the end of 2006, and I needed that extra window of recuperation and conditioning at the beginning of 2007.
In retrospect, it’s a hard one to call.
It’s true that in 2007, we never quite had the physical edge we had in 2006. Maybe the critics are right and it was due to the fact that the core of the team didn’t play together enough. The other possibility is that our opponents stepped up a gear. The timing of the RWC means that the northern hemisphere teams get a six-week window to prepare solely for the tournament with no other distractions, and that can turn them into a different proposition from the teams we play at other times, when the demands of their
long club season wear them down.
That’s the thing: Ted & Co. have given us huge success at every level, except the RWC.
Me and Ted—2006 was a very good year.
We were the Laureus Sports Academy team of 2006, along with the Italian soccer team and the European Ryder Cup team, and in their time at the helm Ted & Co. have cemented the All Blacks as one of the premier global sporting brands.
That’s terribly important: the All Blacks don’t have the critical mass of fan base and revenue that an England or a South Africa has. New Zealand rugby simply can’t afford for the All Blacks to stuff around and get it wrong for three years in the hope that they’ll pull everything together for the RWC. We’d be down the drain. The number-one ranking is almost as important as the RWC.
However, for virtually every success attributed to Ted, you could say the same about Robbie Deans.
The All Blacks have won 42 out of 48 games under Ted, and won 22 out of 27 under John Mitchell and Robbie. Before the 2003 RWC semi, the All Blacks under John Mitchell and Robbie played stunning rugby, running up record scores against the Aussies and Springboks. And Robbie’s record at Super rugby level with the Crusaders is phenomenal—three Super titles in his seven seasons as head coach, so far, and only missing the play-offs in one season. Robbie’s also enhanced a culture where a diverse group of players could thrive—guys like Ron Cribb, Rico Gear, Mose Tuiali’i, Ross Filipo, Norm Berryman and Rua Tipoki have all come to the Crusaders with question marks against them, but have produced the goods in the Crusaders environment.
No one can afford to stand still, and, like Ted, Robbie’s had to keep developing his skills. In 2004, the Crusaders were not all happy campers. There were a lot of disgruntled players and discontented rumblings, mostly about Robbie’s man-management around who was playing and not playing. While there’s a view that the only thing a player hears when he’s dropped are those words—‘You’re out’—the reality in the professional environment is that every player needs to be told why he’s not playing and what he needs to work on. The truth may not be what he wants to hear, but it’s what he needs to hear: every player wants to improve, it’s a basic light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel aspiration. If he’s not being given the right information, or any information, it’s difficult for him to move forward. Players were being told they were playing okay, but being rested, or were being told that the minor niggle they’d reported was the reason they weren’t playing this week. Robbie may have been trying to keep everyone happy, but fudging the truth had the opposite effect.
So, before I took on the captaincy in 2005, Reuben Thorne and I asked for a sit-down with Robbie. We discussed the situation, told him that some players were unhappy and why. It turned into a very human moment, when Robbie opened up and said that telling players they weren’t selected was the part of the job he found most difficult. Once the problem was identified, he addressed it in a professional way and improved that aspect of his communication with the players.
I feel I owe it to Robbie to give what happened in Cardiff more than a quick once-over. There are questions arising out of that game that need honest answers, now that I’ve got the time to do it.
Reuben and I frame Robbie.
Where was the vaunted leadership group in that last 20 minutes?
Quite a few of them weren’t on the field. Anton, Byron, Dan and Jerry had either been injured or subbed. Guys like Aaron Mauger and Dougie Howlett were sitting in the stand.
For all the work Ted & Co. have done on our leadership and decision-making skills, I’d be struggling to give myself or anyone else in our leadership group a pass mark when it came to the crunch in Cardiff.
Down there in the cauldron of noise, it was bit like the silence of the lambs. Carl Hayman and others in the pack were still voluble, but where we most needed direction, there was a lack of decisiveness. Luke was inexperienced and had inherited first-five by default after Dan and Nick went off. Perhaps I should have seen that he needed more help and direction from me, particularly when he had Ice, equally inexperienced, outside him.
We did a lot of good things in that last 20 minutes, got ourselves into positions where we should have won the game. The fact that we didn’t wasn’t for lack of effort—if anything, individuals began trying to win it on their own. But we needed a little more coolness under fire in critical positions.
I keep replaying one sequence in my head. With 90 seconds to go, Ali had secured the pill from the lineout, Siti had stepped through to their 22, and Rodney bulldozed it on and then I piled in to secure the recycle. We were right in front of the posts, 20 metres out, but the only one standing in the pocket was Woody, a prop.
If Dan or Nick or even Aaron had been on the field, I like to think they would have been in the pocket, making the call, taking the responsibility for winning or losing the game.
The guts of it is that in that moment, our leadership group failed under pressure. That includes me. Rather than saying, ‘Have a pot if it’s on,’ I should have been more directive—and so should the senior players in the backline. But it also includes the coaches: we didn’t have a drop-kick in our play-book.
We hadn’t as a group run through the scenario of what happens if it gets tight and we need one or two things to happen to win the game. We believed that we were good enough to go out and play well. We never imagined ourselves to be in a sticky situation like that, despite history showing that all RWC-winning teams have been in those situations. In that sense it was a failure of imagination as much as anything.
If there’s a next time, we need to expect to be in that situation, rather than hope we won’t be.
Were the tactics right?
We went out there to play our game, high pace, high intensity, believing we could win by scoring tries.
We had variations on that plan of course, but we never considered for a moment that we’d be in the kind of hole that required a kick, whether a penalty or drop-goal, to win the game. That wasn’t an option, and when it came to the crunch and we needed a drop-kick, we didn’t have a play we could go to in order to execute that. We had to fall back on the improvisational abilities of our play-makers, and when you’re down to your third first-five in the game, that’s something you can’t rely on.
The All Blacks have routinely been labelled arrogant by some of the northern hemisphere media. I’ve always thought the New Zealand media have brought that down on us by not respecting the opposition in their pre-game analyses. Some of the predictions about how much the All Blacks are going to win by are both ludicrous and disrespectful. But while I think the All Blacks are generally pretty grounded and humble as individuals, maybe the arrogant tag is true of the way we try to play in world cups.
France knew what we were going to do; we had no idea what they were going to do, really. When we’d whacked them in Lyon and Paris in 2006, they’d tried to play rugby against us, what we might call traditional French rugby, keeping the ball in hand and running at us. We lapped that up. We turned the ball over and punished them. It should really have been no surprise that they tried something different in Cardiff.
Instead of employing that running game, known in France apparently as the ‘Toulouse style’, they decided to implement the ‘Biarritz style’, which is shorthand for spoiling rugby, keeping it tight and kicking. They kicked very well and defended brilliantly, stopping our go-forward and our offloads. We got frustrated and made mistakes. They did a Biarritz on us and it worked—as, I’m told, that style usually works against Toulouse.
I don’t think we played dumb on the day. We adjusted hugely in fact, narrowed our game drastically in the last quarter, and played for a mistake that never came—or if it did, was missed by the referee.
Nevertheless, tactically we were arrogant and naive. We thought we would roll them with Plan A, and when we didn’t, our Plan B lacked options and execution because we hadn’t anticipated having to use it.
Were the selections right?
Robbie Deans in his New Ze
aland Herald column made two important points: that because the RWC knockout is like nothing else the players have ever experienced, you need to select players who have been there before, and you need to select established combinations to operate under that pressure.
Robbie’s wisdom was hard-earned: he was instrumental in not selecting a fit Tana Umaga for the semi-final in 2003. Instead, he and John Mitchell pushed Leon into an unfamiliar role at centre. The Australian centre Stirling Mortlock was a dominant figure, just as he was when we lost to Australia in Melbourne in June, this time against Luke, who was playing out of position at centre. After that game Stirling was reported as saying that the All Blacks hadn’t solved the problem of how to replace Tana.
We hadn’t solved it by Cardiff either. Conrad Smith had been injured earlier in the tournament and there were doubts about his match fitness, so, once again, we improvised at centre for a crucial RWC knockout match. So much so that when Mils got the nod at Tuesday practice that he was playing at centre against France, not fullback, he was surprised.
One lesson from history that we ought to always keep in mind is that the best All Black teams have very experienced specialists at centre. Crusties like Joe Stanley and Frank Bunce and Tana Umaga had hard-headed attitudes and considerable age in common: all of them played great rugby into their early thirties.
But who played centre wasn’t the only pertinent question.
Doug Howlett would have been a stronger defensive option on the right wing, and might have been a critical element when France scored their second try. And while Luke McAlister played very well, particularly in the first half, there’s no doubt in my mind that we lacked Aaron Mauger’s experience and decisiveness in that last 20 minutes, and that he should have at least been on the bench. But who would have guessed that neither of the starting first-fives, Dan and Nick, would be there for the end-game?
