How Scott Robertson stacks up to previous All Blacks bosses after 14 Tests
All Blacks coaches Scott Robertson, Sir Steve Hansen and Ian Foster.
Former winger Jeff Wilson has reacted to Scott Robertson’s first year as All Blacks head coach and has compared him to his predecessors in the professional era.
For the first time since Argentina joined the Tri Nations to form the Rugby Championship, New Zealand failed to win the Southern Hemisphere tournament, losing back-to-back Test matches to the Springboks.
Robertson’s charges also fell to a defeat at the hands of Argentina before losing to France this November as well.
Scott Robertson’s record v ex-All Blacks bosses
This means that Robertson won 11 of his first 14 Tests in charge, a record that sees him boast the worst winning record of an All Blacks boss after 14 games in charge.
His 71% win rate is worse than that of Wayne Smith, Ian Foster and John Mitchell who posted 79% success rates after their first 14 Tests while Sir Graham Henry and Sir Steve Hansen both won 86% of their matches.
However, none compare to John Hart who coached the All Blacks between 1996 and 1999 as he won all but one of his first 14 games in charge for a win rate of 93%.
The coaches’ win rates were compared on Sky Sport’s Breakdown show where Wilson said that Robertson will have learnt a lot from his first year in international rugby after a successful start to his coaching career with Canterbury and the Crusaders.
All Blacks coaches’ win percentages after 14 games (Stats via Sky Sports’ Breakdown).
“He’s admitted himself it’s been a massive learning experience the things that he’s realised through the course of the season that things weren’t the way he thought they would be,” Wilson said.
“He’s had to make some really tough decisions one of those was very early on in his tenure when he had to part ways with a coach, so all of a sudden he’s had to almost regroup mid-season and then he’s had to find a way to regroup from a couple of losses in South Africa and he’s made some steps forward. Today though was disappointing, the performance against Italy it wasn’t the finish he would have been looking for.
“When you look at his percentages, ultimately as a coach of the All Blacks that’s what you’ll get judged on, when he goes into next year I’m not sure if he has another season at 71% that is going to be acceptable.”
Not good enough
Co-pundits Angus Taʻavao and Aaron Cruden agreed with Wilson that the 71% needed to improve in 2025 but the former added that international rugby is more competitive nowadays.
To which Wilson added: “Shouldn’t he be held to the same standard as all these other coaches though when they got their first year in charge?
“We’re talking about the All Blacks here, I know the landscape is incredibly competitive right now there are four or five teams that have set themselves apart and we’ve played a few of them this year and those have been games that we haven’t come out on top. But if I look at some of the other games where they weren’t convincing, those three Test matches against England this season, they were not convincing so there isn’t enough in terms of consistent performance and some of the errors and mistakes and ill-discipline that we showed throughout the course of the year I think was frustrating because it was almost like we are slow learning.
“We are not making adjustments and we started to finally finish games better than we had earlier on in the year but that wasn’t good enough for me when it came up against the real top teams.”
