All Blacks 2025
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@antipodean said in All Blacks 2025:
@mariner4life said in All Blacks 2025:
@taniwharugby said in All Blacks 2025:
@mariner4life Article on PR today, Ardie reckons ABs are in a better place in 2025 than 2024 and heading in right direction...
well, ok. i feel better.
How can you not after that sterling defensive display in Wellington. Much better than 2024.
as long as the boys are happy you know? it is, after all, only a game.
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@mariner4life well, it is meant to be fun, and it didnt look like they were having fun!!
Winning is infinitely more fun than losing, but if you gonna lose, at least look like you still want to win!
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@frugby said in All Blacks 2025:
@ShaquilleOatmeal said in All Blacks 2025:
@frugby said in All Blacks 2025:
Suggesting Scott Robertson is some Ted Lasso, David Brent character just ain’t it. The guy has won basically every season of his career until now.
He has underwhelmed in black no doubt, but he isn’t an idiot.
With stacked teams, full of professionals who knew how to prepare, train and execute regardless of the coach or who responded to the motivational mumbo jumbo and didn't need anything else to perform to their best. How well would Robertson have done with the Highlanders, going up against teams with better players? His appointment was absolutely justified by his success at lower levels but he's now looking like a myth.
So why wasn't Blackadder successful? Why haven't Canterbury won the NPC since 2018? It's the players when it goes well, but the coaches when it goes bad?
We've done this before.
Some here-ish.
Some here.
Some of those old threads are fun reading, now that we see the results with Razor.
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@frugby said in All Blacks 2025:
Suggesting Scott Robertson is some Ted Lasso, David Brent character just ain’t it. The guy has won basically every season of his career until now.
He has underwhelmed in black no doubt, but he isn’t an idiot.
I dunno man, taking one of your most senior players who is clearly a smart guy and showing him pictures of farm animals and asking him to bark at his team mates like a dog seems pretty idiotic to me. I am a bit taken aback by that haha.
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@No-Quarter I read 'bark' to be a metaphor for him driving his team, rather than literally barking like a dog?
Still an odd way to deliver the message.
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@taniwharugby said in All Blacks 2025:
@No-Quarter I read 'bark' to be a metaphor for him driving his team, rather than literally barking like a dog?
Two years ago I'd have gone with the former, now not so much...
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Our current defensive structure is still my main concern - why not employ the highly regarded Cory Jane to oversee our defence (who is already on NZR's payroll as D-coach for both Hurricanes and ABs XV) and move Ellison back to his original role of breakdown & contact skills coach?
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Cory one of our own bomb refusal experts, if he can pass that on, I’m in
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@bayimports said in All Blacks 2025:
Cory one of our own bomb refusal experts, if he can pass that on, I’m in
Hmm, I thought bomb refusal was what our team was doing so well currently...
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@No-Quarter said in All Blacks 2025:
@frugby said in All Blacks 2025:
Suggesting Scott Robertson is some Ted Lasso, David Brent character just ain’t it. The guy has won basically every season of his career until now.
He has underwhelmed in black no doubt, but he isn’t an idiot.
I dunno man, taking one of your most senior players who is clearly a smart guy and showing him pictures of farm animals and asking him to bark at his team mates like a dog seems pretty idiotic to me. I am a bit taken aback by that haha.
If you read the entire book our most-capped and one of our most revered All Blacks talks about how that message resonated with him. He credits the interaction with taking his leadership to a new and necessary level.
I'm willing to bet said All Black is a better judge of what makes a good rugby coach than any of us tapping our little brains out on a message board.
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I don’t mind the analogy, but if that is Razor’s core skill, it doesn’t seem like he is suited to truly high performance at the top of the tree coaching of a rep team.
That sounds like a strategy for a coach who is there to bring together younger and senior players in an ongoing season to season role.
To be the AB coach, it sounds like a very different skill set and thus far it doesn’t seem that the strategic clarity is there, even if he is a visionary.
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@ShaquilleOatmeal said in All Blacks 2025:
I just think he's had the privilege of coaching teams with historically more talented lineups and we don't know if he would have had the same success without that advantage. He didn't want to test himself coaching overseas, away from Canterbury and the Crusaders.
His foray into the NZ U20's wasn't great either.
He was clearly NZR's poster boy and there's the nagging suspicion he was a "face fits" hire more than anything else. NZR have to support him and the players to get thru this mess - though not naming Holland's successor when he resigned shows a disturbing lack of nous.
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@taniwharugby said in All Blacks 2025:
@mariner4life Article on PR today, Ardie reckons ABs are in a better place in 2025 than 2024 and heading in right direction...
The question for me is why it has taken nearly 2 seasons to start heading in the right direction?
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When is the team named?
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@taniwharugby said in All Blacks 2025:
@bayimports said in All Blacks 2025:
Cory one of our own bomb refusal experts, if he can pass that on, I’m in
Hmm, I thought bomb refusal was what our team was doing so well currently...
I don’t think so in my opinion, now not based on stats but I would suggest that our diffusal of contestable kicks is probably down on what it once was, which irritates me even more when we continue to box kick,
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@Victor-Meldrew said in All Blacks 2025:
His foray into the NZ U20's wasn't great either.
He was clearly NZR's poster boy and there's the nagging suspicion he was a "face fits" hire more than anything else. NZR have to support him and the players to get thru this mess - though not naming Holland's successor when he resigned shows a disturbing lack of nous.
Alright, the revisionism is getting out of hand now. His foray into U20s wasn’t great? He has, by some distance, the best record from the post-2011 era (I’ve already discussed in another post how the 2008-’11 years in NZ age grade rugby were a statistical outlier so I’m not going to get into that again).
Robertson lost two games: one against Australia at the Oceania Championship and one against Ireland at the U20s World Cup. That was an Irish team that would go on to make the final and contained players like James Ryan, Andrew Porter, Jacob Stockdale, Jimmy O’Brien, Will Connors, Shane Daly, Max Deegan and Hugo Keenan. These are all regulars in the Irish professional game and includes multiple British and Irish Lions. The other 13 games at U20 level he won, including the 2015 U20 World Cup final against what was a very good English U20 team.
I’m not defending Robertson’s current performances – which, in my view, is a firm argument for prior international coaching experience – but to argue that he was this kind of ‘poster child’ who was picked on anything but his coaching record is just plainly false. Two things can be true at the same time: (1) Robertson’s tenure is a disappointment with little evidence of it moving in the right direction, and (2) his coaching record before the All Blacks has little to no precedent in terms of overall success and win rate. He made a lot of sense as a coaching candidate for the top job.
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@bayimports said in All Blacks 2025:
@taniwharugby said in All Blacks 2025:
@bayimports said in All Blacks 2025:
Cory one of our own bomb refusal experts, if he can pass that on, I’m in
Hmm, I thought bomb refusal was what our team was doing so well currently...
I don’t think so in my opinion, now not based on stats but I would suggest that our diffusal of contestable kicks is probably down on what it once was, which irritates me even more when we continue to box kick,
I think you may have missed the point...
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Fair point, Based my comment on Robertson's U20 side coming 5th in the 2016 Championship. IIRC that's the worst-ever performance by a NZ team.
I agree Robertson's non-Test coaching record needed to be taken seriously, but it's abundantly clear he was NZR's man no matter what - his face fitted and important stuff like Test experience clearly didn't matter.
That's not Robertson's problem though and as I said, NZR need to support hom.
