Long read and behind a paywall. I’ve copied it here: It would be revisionist for me to say I always knew the Scott Robertson era was doomed to end long before the conclusion of its contracted tenure. In the sports-media business, it’s mad to prejudge or hold preconceived ideas – partly because you will inevitably be wrong, but mostly because it’s unfair to those you write about because your agenda will be set by your need to be right rather than by their performance. In my 22 years at the Herald, I have taken every All Blacks’ coach as I have found them – judged them only on the evidence of their team’s performances, You get to know them – or as much as they want you to know – and so of course that gives deeper context and understanding of specific challenges they may be facing and how they are attempting to overcome them. Having a front-row seat gives an appreciation of how hard the job is: an insight into its enormity and confirmation that it has long-ceased to be a tracksuit and whistle affair, as it entails managing players, coaches, support staff, executives, directors, sponsors, broadcasters, media and fans, all with an expectation the All Blacks win every game they play. And having been around for more than two decades, you start to see what it takes to succeed as an All Blacks coach and what qualities the various holders of the post have relied on. Graham Henry, who led the team between 2004 and 2011, was a brilliant tactician and as a former school principal, he knew how to manage a diverse and vast range of stakeholders. He was also the first head coach of the modern era to see the value in a coaching team and was secure enough in his own position to appoint two former international head coaches (Steve Hansen and Wayne Smith) to work with him. Hansen, who replaced him from 2012-2019, had off-the-scale emotional intelligence. He had an incredible insight into the mental state of his players and staff and a magical touch in knowing when to use the stick and when to wrap an arm around people He was also across the detail of every facet of the organisation, knew how and when to empower his staff and communicated with such clarity and simplicity no one was ever unsure about what he said. Ian Foster – who was in the role from 2020-2023 – had a depth of intelligence built from a university education. The former, long-serving mental skills coach Gilbert Enoka (2004-2023) rated Foster the best communicator of any coach he’d worked with. Foster also possesses a decidedly brilliant ability to strategise – a mindset he applied to everything but was arguably best illustrated by the way he outsmarted Ireland’s Andy Farrell in the 2023 World Cup quarter-final. So when Robertson began as head coach in 2024, I was looking to understand what qualities he was bringing and what had enabled him to lead the Crusaders to seven successive Super Rugby titles. There had to be something special and definitive there. Seven titles in seven years is incredible and then there was the determination shown by New Zealand Rugby to get Robertson into the job. The high-performance boffins had surely looked under the Robertson hood and seen something they liked? But as hard as I looked, I couldn’t find his superpower. If there was hidden depth to him, it was brilliantly hidden. Pixel by pixel, a picture started to form for me from the earliest days of his appointment that he lacked the emotional intelligence and maturity to manage the complex requirements of the job, and that these shortcomings were also preventing him from understanding the sheer scope of the head coaching role. Interestingly, he was the first All Blacks coach to have come into the role having only ever worked in professional rugby. Henry had been an educator, Hansen a policeman and Foster a commercial director, Robertson had only ever played rugby and coached rugby. I say “only” because it limited his frame of reference for problem-solving, for contextualising and understanding the privilege of working in the non-serious world of sport. Ultimately it meant he didn’t have the worldliness or breadth of life experience to flit effortlessly between telling a young Polynesian player he’d been dropped to speaking at a function hosted by a mega-corporation sponsor the way the job demands. Ultimately, though, what I came to believe is that his greatest weakness was the sense of self he carried into the role and the ambiguity that created for me in trying to determine whether he sometimes made decisions that were best for him rather than best for the team. First encounter I can’t say I came away from his first encounter with the media in early 2024 thinking the All Blacks were in trouble, but I was surprised at how informal he’d been, albeit at an informal meet and greet. In March that year, another red flag popped up when he became overly involved in trying to edit in real time a Herald story about discussions NZR had to bring Sam Whitelock out of international retirement from France. Come July, before the first test of the year against England, the media pack wanted to focus exclusively on him: his emotions leading up to his first team selection, whether the week had been how he’d imagined, how he was feeling. It all should have been dismissed – shut down with a curt “it’s not about me”, but instead he indulged the story – gave it the legs it needed to make headlines. In late July, the Herald broke the story that Damian McKenzie had missed the team bus from San Diego to Los Angeles Airport after the test against Fiji. The Herald was reliably informed that several players were upset McKenzie was not more punitively disciplined than having to apologise to the team. There was a failure to set standards and players were concerned the regime would not hold them and itself accountable to the behaviours and values of their predecessors. In August, the All Blacks lost to Argentina in Wellington and stories filtered through that the coaching staff had overtrained the players during the week, and there had been a lack of clarity over the match day comms – something most keenly felt when there was confusion between the players and coaching staff over what play had been called at an attacking lineout late in the game that was badly botched. A week later and assistant coach Leon MacDonald resigned – the reasons for his departure having never been explained but they added to the general sense of something being well off. In September, while in Sydney, Robertson told media he’d been surfing with former NRL legend Andrew Johns. Unprompted, Robertson said: “He [Johns] knows all the pivots, you know ‘When are you getting Richie [Mo’unga] back [from Japan]?’, geez, it’s gone global. It was entertaining.” It was a comment that lacked the emotional intelligence to understand how unsettling that would have been for the incumbent No 10s McKenzie and Beauden Barrett. The Herald has been told that Mo’unga – one of the game’s most genuine and likeable characters – independently rang McKenzie and Barrett to assure them he was not agitating for either an early release from his Toshiba contract or a change in eligibility laws, and he was uncomfortable he was some kind of shadow narrative to the All Blacks’ season. In the final week of the 2024 season, there was the most telling indicator of all that Robertson was out of his depth – not across his portfolio the way he needed to be. The retiring TJ Perenara managed to hijack the All Blacks’ haka before the Turin test against Italy, and when the Herald produced granular detail of how that saga unfolded, I believe Robertson could and should have intervened to prevent the politicisation of an important cultural ritual. Possibly worse, and what is believed to have eroded trust in his leadership among the senior playing group, was the way Robertson threw captain Scott Barrett under the bus in Turin, leaving the skipper to answer all the media’s questions about the haka. His last act of the year was to publicly campaign for a change in the All Blacks’ eligibility laws, without specifying precisely what he wanted to see amended. His lack of clarity effectively made it seem he was specifically campaigning to get Mo’unga back under the umbrella of more general change – and the net outcome was he looked desperate and naive for thinking he could use the media to pressure the board. Same again Potentially 2024 could have been written off as a steep learning curve for a coach with no international experience who had come into the role having virtually cleaned out every member of the previous management regime. But nothing changed. Robertson’s press conferences descended into code-cracking exercises – 10-minute engagements where he served indigestible word salads. Selection became confused and confusing with the coaching panel lamenting the team’s ability to catch high balls while continuing to pick two wings – Rieko Ioane and Sevu Reece – who have never been aerial players. There was a second-half meltdown in Buenos Aires, and an even bigger one a few weeks later in Wellington when the All Blacks suffered a record defeat to South Africa. Midway through the year, Mo’unga agreed to come home in June this year, but tellingly he wouldn’t commit to a three-year deal, only 18 months. In October, another assistant Jason Holland announced he was leaving at the end of the year with – at that time – no job to go, and then in November there was another second-half meltdown at Twickenham, made more memorable by the epic confusion that came when the All Blacks won a penalty while they didn’t have a hooker on the field (Codie Taylor had been yellow carded). In the aftermath of that debacle, it felt as if Robertson and the coaching staff had avoided blame. Responsibility had fallen on the players for the decision to tap, run two phases and then kick the ball away – but it was the coaches’ call to not replace Taylor and their call to keep the injured Beauden Barrett on the field, which meant there was no recognised goal-kicker (Barrett couldn’t swing his leg). Intriguingly, the Herald’s stats guru Cam McMillan had picked up on how vulnerable the All Blacks had become after halftime in 2025 – crunching the numbers before that test against England to show their points differential in the third quarter is minus 50. They had scored 28 points in total between minutes 41-60, but conceded 78 – figures that marry, apparently, with player feedback in the season review where they say communication from the coaching staff at halftime was confusing. Culture club And so to the question of when did I know Robertson wasn’t right for the All Blacks? My answer would be at the end of 2024, but my suspicions had been raised on day one. He wasn’t a shrewd political operator, or a clever strategist or inspiring communicator. He didn’t have a sense of the commercial forces that were squeezing the All Blacks, the emerging trend of players being invested in their own brands, and he wasn’t equipped to hold court in front of the world’s media and make them think he was the titanic figure they imagine the legacy naturally demands. Personally, I liked him, but I felt he was painfully naive at times and caught up in his somewhat crank vision that he was the culture coach, while his assistant Scott Hansen operated as what most observers would recognise as the head coach. If the question is amended to: When did I know that he was going to find that he did not fit the All Blacks environament? The answer is about an hour after the final game of the 2025 season in Cardiff. On the Friday before the game, I was told by the All Blacks media manager that Robertson was fuming about a piece I’d written, suggesting that it felt like the public had been mis-sold the truth about the All Blacks coaching set-up and the specific nature of Robertson and Hansen’s day-to-day functions. I had written: “There was huge public support for Robertson to be promoted to the All Blacks in 2023 because he’d earned the promotion through his success with the Crusaders. “But it feels now like the people voted for a President who has handed the keys of office to the unelected Vice-President, without a mandate to do so. “The situation – given results, performances and the division of labour – seems entirely unsustainable.” I told the media manager that if Robertson was upset, he should speak with me himself, which he did after the All Blacks had beaten Wales 52-26. We were in a dimly lit corridor deep within the bowels of the Principality Stadium and I would characterise Robertson as angry, animated, bouncy and twitchy – eager to say his piece. I respected that he needed to get things off his chest, and that often, when people are under pressure, it is best to just let them vent. So, I stayed quiet and tried to follow what I felt was an incoherent rant – the gist of which was that he said it was wholly inaccurate for me to have suggested Hansen operates in a way that most would perceive as the head coach. The problem I had with this accusation of inaccuracy was that six days earlier, Robertson had sat around a table with me and NZME colleagues Liam Napier and Elliot Smith and had said Hansen “does everything”, listing among other things, the weekly strategy/gameplan and overseeing the implementation of that at training. Robertson had previously told me – and many others in the rugby fraternity – he operated as the culture coach, something I’d written several times before that week in Cardiff. But on the previous occasions I had written that, it was packaged as part of a high-performance rejig that Robertson had sold to the All Blacks appointment committee when he interviewed for the job in early-2023. And here was the thing – when I’d presented the Robertson coaching set-up as innovative and new age, no one within the All Blacks had said anything. When I suggested it was becoming a source of frustration for the public and that they were maybe feeling duped – I was told by an upset Robertson I had misrepresented the set-up. That I was wrong. I left Cardiff with two distinct thoughts. That the All Blacks environment was riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions. Robertson forcefully told me that as head coach he selected the team, but I was aware that players who had been dropped had asked him why, only to be told they needed to take it up with Hansen or forwards coach Jason Ryan. And secondly, I was sure the problems within the team were so deep and fundamental they would be exposed with devastating impact when the season was reviewed.   submitted by   /u/GiJoint [link]   [comments]