Rugby, Racing and Beer

(A New Zealand song that includes the lines, “Down under they’re mad over their rugby, racing and beer.”)

By David

In New Zealand, rugby is everything. It has the sporting importance that football, basketball and baseball combined have in the United States. On the 20^th June 1987 New Zealand’s national team, the All Blacks, beat France to win the first rugby World Championship. Since then they have played 267 matches and won 224. They’ve lost 38 and drawn 5. That’s a win record of 84%, by any standards a dominating performance.

The All Blacks have been to four World Championships since 1987; they are held every four years. In every one New Zealand has failed to win. A 100% loss record, by any standards a devastating performance. The next World Championships are this year in France. New Zealand will be beaten again.

New Zealand has produced some fearsome competitors. Men and women who it seems have used their home’s smallness to construct an invincible hardness. Sir Edmund Hillary has it. So does Russell Coutts, Brian Lahore, Peter Snell, John Walker, Susan Devoy and quite a few tough and proud others. I hope like hell Dean Barker, the captain of the New Zealand’s America’s Cup challenge being sailed off the coast of Spain just now, has it too.

Graham Henry, Wayne Smith and Steve Hansen the current coaching staff of the All Black team do not. Neither, incidentally does New Zealand’s national swimming coach, Jan Cameron. They fall into a group who are also affected by their nation’s size. A group who when the chips are down, when the rest of the world is stacked against them, choke because they are too small to win.

How do I know this? Two reasons; because they’ve always lost before and they make the classic error of weak people, they change their preparation before the big event.

I read a very good article recently by John Leonard, the boss of the American Swim Coaches Association. In it he argued that in a new situation a coach’s success or failure is likely to take three years to emerge. The first year is a honeymoon period where everyone loves everyone, the second year sorts out who wants to be there and who doesn’t and by year three everyone should have a pretty good idea of what the new coach is all about.

That’s how it worked in All Blacks’ Head Coach; Graham Henry’s only other international coaching job. He arrived in Wales billed as the savior, the Great Redeemer of Welsh rugby and took the team on a 10-match winning streak. He left three and a half years later, ultimately a failure.

And now he’s been the All Blacks coach for three years and cracks are beginning to appear. There are good players leaving to play for foreign clubs. Assistant Coach Wayne Smith thought the problem serious enough to say, “"It's a major issue that we need to address as a country. It's not just the Rugby Union who can come up with the answers - the whole country, including the Government, needs to be part of the solution." What on earth has the Government got to do with playing rugby? I can’t imagine the Cowboys asking George Bush to take Terrell Owens for catching practice.

But worst of all Henry decided to change the preparation of his players. In his first two successful years they played a full part in a competition called the Super 14. This year he rested them through most of the Super 14 in preparation for the World Championships. It may work but it’s not good coaching; something that new and untried before the Championships. Henry should know better, but clearly doesn’t.

As the World Championships get nearer these coaching errors will magnify. Eventually they will be fatal. In the semi-finals or maybe the finals, South Africa, England or, God-save-us, Australia will exploit the indecision and roll past the world’s best rugby team.

A good coach like Lydiard would not make Henry’s errors. He wouldn’t ask the Government to select his team. He’d pick the best players wherever in the world they played and if his team were beating everyone in sight he sure as hell would not invent some new program for them just before the World Championships. He would not let the occasion get the better of him.

How do I know?

Because he spent a valuable afternoon telling me what an idiot I’d been changing Toni Jeffs preparation just before the Barcelona Games. I managed to snatch failure out of the jaws of success. My guess is Henry will soon share that not so wonderful experience. What is a mystery is why Henry is repeating the errors he made in Wales. It appears he does not understand the logic of Einstein, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” But he soon will understand.