Loose Pass: Familiar Foster, red cards and the Lions

Colin Newboult

This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with the new All Blacks coach, crazy red cards, and the future of the Lions…

Why was this appointment made?

It didn’t take long. After a process more protracted than the tightest TMO call in its early days, New Zealand named their new coach on Wednesday. One glance at the headlines of the New Zealand Herald shortly after told you all you needed to know about the feeling the appointment created.

‘The Blatant Lie in NZ Rugby’s Ian Foster Announcement’ read one. ‘Why Scott Robertson is all but lost to the All Blacks’ was another. ‘Rival Teams will be Relieved’ read another.

That last one was a reference to the overseas’ media apparent reaction, which swiftly boiled down to one newspaper’s take in Australia. But that it was chosen as a headline revealed the general opinion as framed by the editorial agenda: this is not the most popular decision.

This column wrote a few weeks ago that the decision might not necessarily boil down to who was the best coach per se, but rather a choice over who would best be able to steer the ship on the field while the NZRU itself went through a period of disruptive change at the top. Scott Robertson would have been change on the pitch, Ian Foster represented more of the same (to a greater extent).

Which, although we reckon Robertson might have been a better candidate in pure coaching terms, is why we think Foster’s appointment is a shrewd idea from the NZRU’s point of view. And we also think the fact that Foster has been given only two years when most people get four is a nod to this.

Foster will bring more of the same. He’s been in the set-up for seven years, integral to a model which has brought sustained success – the recent World Cup notwithstanding. While the NZRU re-aligns, those on the pitch will at least know what they are getting.

In two years’ time, we’ll all know what we’re getting off the pitch as well. In the bigger picture, rugby globally is becoming more and more disrupted, and there are more and more headlines concerning the future of Super Rugby, the Rugby Championship, and other tournaments in which the NZRU is a stakeholder. The NZRU needs to deal with change off the pitch before it can initiate change on it. But in two years’ time, they’ll be ready to do that if need be.

Upon which, Foster will have to re-apply. And he’ll have some form of track record as international head coach behind him, from which we’ll all know if the AB model, which for so long has brought sustained success, is at last showing its age. Or we’ll know if Foster has managed to freshen it up. Or we’ll know if Robertson can continue taking the Crusaders to the top every year even without some old heads. But that appointment in two years’ time will be far more important than now.

For those dissenting: see this as a stop-gap, a turn to experience in a time of disruption. The process of naming the AB coach for the next World Cup isn’t over yet.

Evans above

It was named in our ‘not hot’ section at the start of this week, to a reasonable outcry of dissent from some. But we still don’t know what Dan Evans was doing.

The only mitigation is that he is mildly off-balance. But even experimentally telling players at my local club to jump and then pushing them mildly off-balance this week not once yielded a kung-fu studs-first stiff leg like Evans’.

Players jumping for high balls have frequently been told to jump at the ball side-on (to prevent knock-ons), and hard body parts up – so knee up and elbow forward. Anybody jumping with is thus going to have an unpleasant collision. But both of these actions are more or less a part of the natural jumping action anyway.

Not a natural part of a jumping action is jamming your leg out stock-straight in front of you so that anybody within a metre of the ball gets a load of studs.

There is no mitigation for this one. Evans has rightly got a few weeks.

What future the Lions now?

Another of rugby’s finest traditions is shunted uncomfortably around the equity-stuffed calendar, another piece of the good old game is squeezed out.

The Lions schedule raised excitement for the Tests, but for those among us who also enjoyed the concept of dirt-trackers and trial matches, it was depressing reading – with the intransigence of the Premiership final date an insult to add to the injury.

Fact is, barring miracles and unfortunate injury, the Lions Test team will be pretty much nailed on from the first tour game onwards, with the midweek games little more than second-team matches to keep the reserves in shape. Modern rugby so rarely allows a player to survive two top-class matches in five days.

It’ll be a spectacle, but for those who end up outside the Test side at the start, it has the potential to be a chastening experience. Hopefully the romance can be maintained this time, but as the tentacles of equity funds close around the global game, the John Bentleys of this world will be squeezed out from Lions tours forever.

Loose Pass compiled by Lawrence Nolan

British and Irish Lions