Since I can’t watch the Super Rugby U20 tournament in Taupō, I’ve turned my energy and time reserved for age grade rugby towards the past, looking at the longer term history of the NZ age grade teams and their tournament performances.
NZ U20 and the Junior World Cup: a look back in history
People around the world love age grade sport. In the popular mind, it represents both a purer, more innocent version of the game as well as the sense of unbridled potential, a glance into a future yet to unfold. Looked at in the latter manner, there’s a certain ritualistic quality to it, much like how seers and soothsayers would look at tea leaves, palms and entrails for any signs of hidden wisdom. Ron Hansen wrote a fictionalized account of Robert Ford’s life, the 19th-century killer of U.S. Southern outlaw Jesse James, and describes how Ford would sit in the dark, anguished and alone, flipping “over playing cards, looking at his destiny in every king and jack”. One can imagine Bob Ford living today sitting in a basement somewhere, watching March Madness and searching for prescient signs in Gonzaga’s 4 out-1 in motion offense.
Another Hansen, Sir Steve, also considers himself to be something of a diviner. Reflecting on the NZ U20s lack of tournament victories in recent Rugby U20 World Cups, the former AB coach proclaimed that “[i]f we’re not winning under-20 World Cups, we’re not producing world-class players at a younger level to bring into this team [the All Blacks].” It’s a divination which has been professed over and over, ever since the NZ U20s have failed to win their age grade world cup since 2017. The narrative should be well-known by now. With the start of the U20 Rugby World Cup in 2008, New Zealand Rugby was a dominant force, winning the first four tournaments. Then, however, things started to unravel, and while they still won two tournaments – in 2015 and 2017 – their dominance faltered until they eventually started falling behind, finishing a lowly 7th in both 2019 and 2023.
Adam Julian, the NZ rugby journalist, provides a nice summation of this narrative in a 2023 piece for RugbyPass, written after the poor tournament results of the team in South Africa: “The New Zealand Under 20s are in the doldrums. At the World Rugby Championship in South Africa, they finished in seventh place with a 50-26 win over Georgia U20 after suffering their heaviest loss in tournament history to France (14-35) and then conceding their highest score against Australia (44) in another loss.
It’s the second consecutive tournament that New Zealand have contested a lowly consolation fixture. Since winning the first four World Championships between 2008 and 2011, New Zealand has only won twice since 2015 and has missed the semis three times in the last five tournaments.” [https://www.rugbypass.com/news/its-time-for-a-rethink-for-the-new-zealand-u20s-after-another-low-finish/]
There is something that annoys me about this narrative. It’s not so much the dreary and implicitly fatalistic tone but rather the particular use of history. Yes, the U20 tournament started in 2008, and yes, this means that 44 points is their highest conceded score and 14-35 their biggest loss. But what this does is ignore 13 years of age grade rugby history, when NZ Rugby started participating in international age grade tournaments in 1995, through U19 and U21 teams. And while 13 years, from a historical point of view, isn’t a particularly long time, the U20 tournament is only entering it’s 17th year of existence, three of which were lost due to the Covid-19 health crisis. So, in other words, the non-U20 rugby period is almost the equal of its successor. So why, exactly, do we need to act as if age grade rugby didn’t exist before 2008? Do we really think U19 and U21 rugby is that different from U20 rugby that any comparison is invalid?
Because if we didn’t do this intentional forgetting, this narrative of “NZ age grade rugby being in the doldrums” would become a lot more complicated, and this in three distinct ways. First of all, New Zealand rugby wasn’t at all unbeatable before 2012. The four tournaments wins between 2008 and 2011 weren’t so much the standard as they were a blip in results, the NZ U19s and U21s never producing such a streak themselves in the period before 2008. Secondly, the current drought at tournament level – four tournaments without a win – is not unprecedented. If anything, NZ Rugby had worse periods and worse results than 7th place finishes in the 1990s, the so-called disaster year of 1998 fully living up to its reputation, even at age grade level. And finally, we can gain a bit more insight into how age grade success correlates with senior success. The longer-term view indicates that success at age grade level does not so much predict future success at senior level as much as it coincides with it. It allows us to make the case that what really is at stake, in both age grade and senior rugby, is all-round institutional excellence and effective governance. So let’s look at these different ways in a bit more detail.
1. The late noughties blip
If we look at the results of the NZ U20s since 2008 through win percentage, we get the following graph.
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Four tournaments wins a row with zero losses from 2008 to 2011, after which the results become a lot more patchy, the two solitary wins in 2015 and 2017 looking like aberrations in an increasingly volatile and competitive age grade arena. If we include the win percentages of both the NZ U19s and NZ U21s between 1995 and 2007, however, a very different picture appears.
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Suddenly, that flat line at a hundred percent winning rate between ’08 and ’11 doesn’t look so much like the standard affair as much as a blip in normal proceedings. Looking more closely at the results between 1995 and 2007, it becomes obvious that exceptional cohorts – the ’99 U19s including the likes of Richie McCaw, Jerry Collins, Mils Muliaina, Aaron Mauger and Tony Woodcock – alternate with talented yet less successful cohorts, such as the ’05 U21s who lost multiple games, despite containing future ABs such as Kieran Read, Liam Messam, Hosea Gear, Richard Kahui and Isaac Ross.
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So the idea of a dominant NZ age grade system which has been on a downward trend since 2012 can be pretty easily disproven by looking at the longer term, including the now-defunct U19 and U21 competitions. Kiwi teams were anything but unbeatable in those competitions, the U21s, for example, winning only 2 out of 6 tournaments between 1995 and 2000. The NZ U19s were slightly more dominant – winning 5 tournaments out of their 9 total participations between 1999 and 2007 – but even they never pulled off a tournament win streak like the U20s did between 2008 and 2011. It is fair to say, in other words, that this particular period was more an outlier than anything resembling the norm.
2. Believe it or not, things can and have been worse
While the entirety of 1998 was a year to forget for NZ rugby fans, one particular week in July certainly didn’t help matters. Between the 11th and the 18th of July, the NZ U21s would play no less than four games, against Argentina, England, Australia and South Africa. They would demolish England (93-7) but they would lose all of their other games, including a 12-11 loss to Argentina, a team they are yet to lose a game against at U20 level. During those years it were the Australian U21s who formed, much like their senior team (intense foreshadowing), the dominant force in the 1990s, winning three U21 tournaments in a row between 1996 and 1998.
A win-rate of around 60% – which has been reached by NZ U20 teams on 6 occasions (2012, ’13, ’14, ’18, ’19) and which has been the cause of some existential angst in Kiwi rugby circles – was not unfamiliar territory for the earlier NZ U19 and U21 teams, which also reached those lows on 6 occasions (U19: 2005; U21: 1996, ’97, ’98, ’05, ’06), 1998 being the NZ Rugby disaster year in more ways than one, the AB win rate of 28% being matched by a 25% win rate of the NZ U21s.
In terms of individual results, there were also some notable losses, which further contextualize the relatively big loss against France U20s in 2023. In 2006, for example, again only two years before the four-year streak of dominance, the NZ U21s lost 40 to 23 in their semi-final against South Africa U21. In 1997, in the tournament-deciding game against Australia U21, the New Zealand U21s would go down 33-14, again a considerable and not dissimilar margin to the one put on by France U20s in 2023.
The current situation of the NZ U20s – two titles out of the past 7 tournaments, not winning a title for 4 editions – is by no means ideal, but it also isn’t unprecedented. The U21s didn’t win a title between 1996 and 1999 (3 wins Australia U21, 1 win South Africa U21), and this was a tournament with a shorter, more dynamic format (four games played across a single week). The overall tournament win-rate of the NZ U20s since 2008 – 6 wins out of 14 tournaments for a rate of 43% – is not too dissimilar to the combined rate of the U19s (55%) and the U21s (42%) at 48% as well.
Instead of a dichotomous trend often perceived and proclaimed by the rugby commentariat – of a steady decline of the Southern Hemisphere nations and a supposed rise of European rugby – it makes more sense to think of these teams on their own complex and individual trajectories, with multiple team cycles – of institutional peaks (AU ’96-’98; NZ ’00-’04; ’08-’11; ENG ’13-’16; FRA ’18-’23) and subsequent rebuilds – alternating with each other at the top. What would be worrisome is that NZ Rugby were simply satisfied with the status quo and unwilling or unable to make changes to their development structures. The recent implementation of an NZ U18 side shows that, at least for now, that is not the case.
3. Success is synchronic, not predictive
What this also shows is that success at age grade level not so much anticipates future success, as it corresponds with senior success in an almost simultaneous fashion. Throughout these examples, it is noteworthy how certain age grade results mirror their senior equivalents, something which is given further weight when looked at in a slightly more structured manner. As the graph below shows, the golden line of AB win percentage between 1995 and 2024 doesn’t so much track age grade success (and disappointments) with a time-lag as it strongly corresponds with it, synchronically.
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One possible explanation for this is that success at senior and age grade level is not so much interlinked with each other, but that both are rather connected to a shared, supra-institutional level, that of organizational excellence. This would mean that the effective government of the coordinating structure – NZ Rugby – represents a condition of possibility for the success of all of its teams, instead of vice versa, as the recent Silver Lake discussions seemed to suggest.
Another good example of this principle can be found in the recent development in French representative rugby. The recent high-fliers of age grade rugby, France U20s, were unable to win the U20 world championships before 2018, despite the presence of present-day luminaries such as Antoine Dupont, Thomas Ramos, Gaël Fickou, Damian Penaud, Peato Mauvaka, Julien Marchand, Anthony Jelonch, François Cros and Cyril Baille. None of these players ever won an U20 World Cup, despite their obvious abundance of talent and winning pedigree. French success at that level only started to change from the moment the French Rugby Federation started making serious efforts to properly develop its age grade pathways, with its increasingly professional approach to the appointment of age grade coaches, like Sébastien Piqueronies, rather than relying on former French internationals, like Philippe Sella, Fabien Pelous and Thomas Lièvremont to coach the team.
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Similarly for the men’s senior team, their success radically shifted with the introduction of Fabien Galthié as senior head coach in 2019. When solely looking at a factor like individual talent, we cannot properly interpret how talented squads like the 2016 France U20s finished 9th (their win percentage propped up by a good performance in the U20 Six Nations and three wins against Japan (2x) and Georgia at the World Cup), while less talented but better coached teams, like the 2019 U20s went on to win the competition. The ability of the French Rugby Federation to organize a better development pathway at junior level as well as bring together a solid coaching ticket at senior level, is what makes both teams operate at a similar range of success from 2019 onwards.
Summary: why seeing the full picture matters
The ability of an organization to operate successfully corresponds largely to the benefit of looking at the past in a meticulous manner: it allows one to bring the whole picture into view. The advantage of such pictures are easy to understand: it makes it possible to see genuine weaknesses and strengths, trends and aberrations, where they exist, and to subsequently make the necessary adjustments to remove any weaknesses and to reinforce one’s strengths.
An added advantage of the more holistic approach to historical perspectives is that it makes it possible to evaluate narratives as either myths or as accurate accounts. Is NZ age grade rugby ‘in the doldrums’, as is regularly pronounced in recent years? While NZ Rugby certainly isn’t living through any of its golden years, a look at the longer-term results of the NZ U19 and NZ U21 teams shows that its current struggles certainly aren’t unprecedented. The key, for NZ Rugby, is to find the sources of its success in the past and accommodate these past sources to the present-day context.
This is, of course, far easier said than done. And yet the country still produces all the ingredients necessary – talented young players with high athletic upside, solid and productive coaching pathways, relatively well-functioning high-performance academies and franchises – to make such a renewed success at age grade and senior level possible. What is crucial, though, is an organization at the core which is able to coordinate these different ingredients in an efficient yet harmonious manner. Whether NZ Rugby is able to fulfil this role, after its many issues with both its professional players and the grassroots game, remains to be seen. What we do know, is that there is nothing fatalistic or already-determined about the current NZ age grade performances. They’ve been there before. And there’s no reason why another golden period cannot be reached.
