Sometimes it is the little things that betray greatness. Even for supposedly trained observers with a ringside seat, they can be easy to miss. Nor do a team like the All Blacks often divulge their innermost secrets, particularly away from home. Only very occasionally do the best of the best relax, lift the veil slightly and offer a glimpse of exactly how they make the magic happen.
Happily, Sunday afternoon was one of them. Neither Steve Hansen nor his backs coach, Ian Foster, had had much sleep but a fog of rare contentment surrounded them as, individually, they sat down to discuss how their New Zealand team had made history. What they had to say on the subjects of man-management, mindset and coaxing more from already successful athletes was utterly fascinating.
Take Dan Carter, for example. Foster has been credited with helping the world’s best fly-half regain his form but how does a coach instinctively know when his No10 is firing again? Clue: it has nothing to do with a team’s results or the goals he kicks. “The big thing for me is when he catches the ball early,” says Foster, himself a former first-five eighth for Waikato. “The more time great players have you know they’ll make good decisions. When he catches the ball late or he buckets it [clutches it to his stomach] that’s when he struggles for time. For the last two to three weeks all his skill stuff has been crisp.”
So brilliantly simple. Contrast that with the “let’s bash it up first” orthodoxy of too many European coaches. Or how about this from Foster on why the All Blacks selectors stuck with Carter when he was not playing well. “No10s need to be playing consistently, to get a feel of a team and to know when to push what buttons. Some will say we took a punt on him but for us it was about giving him as long a run as we could. By his own admission he wasn’t anywhere near his best earlier this year but there was a belief Dan was the player for this tournament. Sometimes big players need the big-pressure moments to bring the best out of them.”
Note the shrewdness of that judgment. Now look at Hansen. What do you perceive: a dour, lugubrious, risk-averse former forward? Wrong. Not only was the 56-year-old once a centre, he possesses one of the keener sporting brains, plus a sense of perspective gained from a stint in the police force. “You learn a lot about yourself when you’re in uniform. You learn to face your fears and how to deal with situations. I did a lot of jobs. One of the best I ever did was working in a freezing works. It was like a university in its own right. Some scallywags work in there … you just learn about life. I’m pretty non-judgmental, I don’t think it’s right to judge people other than the way you find them. That’s what I do in the rugby team. I just judge everybody how I find them and treat them accordingly. We don’t have a lot of rules but we do have a lot of expectations. If people aren’t living up to those expectations we’ll tell them.”
Hansen, in short, is well ahead of the herd. He has even looked to Spanish football to try to help New Zealand improve further. “I thought Spain were a great model when they won the European Championship then the World Cup. They just about won everything but then threw it away.
“Something’s happened there – people say it’s cyclical but you only go cyclical because you get comfortable and stop working hard. You’ve got to be honest with yourselves. At some point we’ve now got to ask: where do we go next? Ask some really hard questions and try to find the inconvenient facts. The stuff that winning sometimes glosses over and you don’t want to admit to yourself.”
None of this bodes well for the 2017 Lions in New Zealand. So what advice from afar would Hansen and Foster give northern hemisphere rugby?
Hansen barely hesitates. “The one thing we have got right at home is that the best players are owned by province, franchise and the All Blacks. Sitting down together and working out how you can make a player better – and including that player in the conversation – is something we have got right. The most important thing in the whole thing is the player.”
Foster reckons that, perversely, it can also help the All Blacks when their players are sought by clubs overseas because it “forces a regular change of the guard” and refreshes the squad. Despite the imminent departure of several star players – he singles out Conrad Smith’s off-field leadership as a particular loss – he sees no reason for Kiwi panic. And why should he when the crowning achievement of the Hansen era has been the ability to make good players better still?
So let us give Hansen the deserved final word. “When I first came in we were the No1 side in the world and had just won the World Cup. Was it going to be same old, same old or were we going to set an aspiration so massively high people would probably think it was stupid? Or are you going to set the bar low? I decided we’d set it really high and leave it to others to say if we’ve achieved it or not.” Anyone wishing to overtake the All Blacks will have to catch them first.
Say it ain’t so, Sam
Sam Burgess’s impending return to rugby league does no one in union much credit. Burgess, having decided to switch codes, owed it to his employers Bath to hang around a while longer. England’s coaches have been made to look silly for placing so much faith in a player whose commitment to their cause has now wavered prematurely. By picking their sparkly-eyed man prematurely and shoe-horning him into a completely different position to the one he occupied for his club, they pretty much set him up to fail. It has been both a sorry tale and a cautionary one.
Worth watching this week …
English club rugby. Four of the leading teams in the Premiership happen to be meeting in two of this weekend’s fixtures. Whether Exeter beat Leicester or Northampton defeat Saracens, however, is rather less pertinent than the quality of rugby they produce.
The World Cup set a wonderful example in terms of pace, ball-handling and snap decision-making. The northern hemisphere has to aspire to higher standards with immediate effect.
