Five Deadly Sins

By Benji Crossley

The last two years have been difficult for me. On the one hand, the All Black coach has been a Mount Maunganui surfer who played 7 for my beloved Steamers. On the other hand, the All Black coach has been a Crusaders stalwart who had rebuilt the evil empire into a new and improved death star.

But it’s done now, the two years over. In hindsight, lots of it is a bit odd. And it’s with hindsight I write this piece. Anyone who knows me and has listened to me waffle on the last few years knows I have had my doubts about some of the bigger decisions that have been made, I didn’t think they were this bad, but I was pretty certain they weren’t smart.

So below I am going to go through what I consider to be the underlying sins and the big decisions that I think Razor got wrong.

The Original Sin

With hindsight launching a public campaign against a coach who was incredibly popular with his players in a way that the coach at the time felt would undermine that year’s campaign wasn’t particularly smart. Rugby World Cups only come round once every four years, some players may not hit them in their peak years but a number of key All Blacks headed to that 2023 World Cup in their peak years. If you felt, rightly or wrongly, that there was someone out there publicly undermining your attempt to win a World Cup you might not feel great about that individual. Then imagine that six months later you’re having to play for him. You’d be reasonable to resent him. Potentially, that resentment was never resolved or if it was, it reappeared once other things started to go wrong.

Not a team of rivals

When the original coaching team was announced the sceptics amongst us raised our eyebrows. Robertson had appointed his men. His team. Fine, you want a group of people around you who you trust, who understand the way you work and you understand they work. However, it’s a very fine line between that and a group of yes men. It’s telling to me that the two assistants that left were the ones who had most recently come out of different environments. MacDonald, while a Crusader to the core had come from the Blues and Holland had come from the Hurricanes. They hadn’t spent the immediate years preceding drinking the cool-aid. Then when MacDonald left, instead of finding another outside voice they appointed Tamati Ellison, fresh off a season with the Crusaders. If there were dissenting voices in that group, they were dissenting from within a very limited Crusader heavy world view.

Institutional Memory

When Razor cleaned house throughout the whole management environment most people welcomed it. This was the first proper reset of the All Black environment since 2003. The old group had grown stale and had built their own little empire where they considered themselves an empire of their own. The relationship with NZR, who they were all employed by, was essentially non-existent. So a new manager, new coaches, new commercial people, new mental skills people were welcomed as a fresh start.

There was one thing that wasn’t changing though, the players. The senior players weren’t changing, sure some were moving on but you had a strong core who were sticking around. The All Black environment had been for a long time a famously player lead environment.

So you’ve got these two forces moving towards each other, one a whole new management group with new ideas and a playing group who thought they had an environment that worked. Reporting has made clear in the last two days that the extent to which the players controlled the environment was one of the major issues. Would keeping on a Gilbert Enoka or a Darren Shand, even in a consultancy role for a couple of years helped smooth things out and try to find a middle ground? Maybe. But some knowledge of how international rugby worked and how the dynamics of an international camp worked clearly would have been of benefit to a very green management team.

Did anyone talk to anyone else?

The bit I will never understand is how someone (and a wider group) can be so wildly successful with one group of players and then fail so spectacularly with another group of players when those groups have significant overlap.

Between 2019 and 2023 did not a single player from outside the Crusaders environment ask any of the Crusaders boys what helped make them so successful? Did none of them think they had anything to learn? When the All Blacks were struggling in 2021 and 2022 did none of the senior Crusaders stand up in All Black meetings and say that x,y,z is what works for us, maybe we could try it here?  How was the way this coaching group worked such a shock to the non-Crusaders in the squad to the point that they couldn’t play for them?

Equally, and it plays into my point above, did none of the senior Crusaders take Razor to one side in early 2024 and tell him that some of the stuff that worked with the Crusaders won’t work in the All Black environment. We’re more player lead etc. Dylan Cleaver in his newsletter yesterday quoted Sam Whitelock from his book talking about Razor being a bit odd. Did Codie Taylor, Will Jordan, Scott Barrett or even Whitelock himself sit down with Razor and say to him that you may need to adapt?

Fundamentally, why was the way that Razor and his coaching team worked such a shock to the non-Crusader players and why was the way international rugby was different such a shock to Razor and his coaching team.

Leader of who?

The biggest decision that had alarm bells ringing for me was the appointment of Scott Barrett as captain. Barrett of 2023 was a world class player and had been a hugely successful domestic captain. However, he was not the leader of the All Blacks. The players loved Sam Cane. They followed him. They played for him. I think with hindsight you can make a decent case that keeping him as captain might have helped smooth the path and keep some of that institutional memory in place in terms of management.

But keeping Cane as captain created its own issues, because of Ardie Savea. Savea is the team’s best player and it appeared to anyone who watched the All Blacks for the last two years without a red and black (or amber and black) eyepatch on that Savea is the leader of this group of players. They follow him. They play for him. He puts the team on his back and carries a mediocre group to higher levels.

Barrett was given the job because he had a relationship with Razor. Both of them acknowledged that. They spoke each other’s language. Management appoint people they trust in business all the time. Given Barrett and his immediate family often made up 20% of the starting team he should have been a decent conduit between management and senior players. But it doesn’t seem like that happened.

There were obviously lots of key moments along the way but I think the structural things I’ve laid out about laid the groundwork for what would unfold. And I’m also incredibly conscious that a lot of this comes from my underlying dislike of the Crusaders but surely its clear to everyone that trying to turn the All Blacks into the Crusaders (for the second time in history) was never going to work and was just a recipe for disaster? Any team is at its best when it takes bits and pieces from everywhere, it just doesn’t seem like this team tried to do that.