All Blacks v Wales: Scott Robertson faces moment of truth as All Blacks doubts deepen – Gregor Paul

THE FACTS

By Gregor Paul in Cardiff

If there is a silver lining to the All Blacks being on the verge of their second major coaching confidence crisis in three years, it is that half of the playing squad know the drill on how best to navigate their way through it.

There are growing parallels between the high dramas of mid-2022, which saw two All Blacks assistants let go and head coach Ian Foster almost kicked out with them, and the situation now, which has seen the public mood darken on the incumbent coaching group after an insipid loss to England that killed the Grand Slam attempt and has left Scott Robertson without a major campaign victory in his two seasons to date.

What’s been clear in the days since the loss to England is that the All Blacks – coaches, players and management – want to put off any process of review and self-assessment until they have played Wales in their final game of the season.

They have an obligation to respect the fixture – give it the attention it deserves and therefore they don’t want to get caught up making judgments about 2025 when they haven’t yet crossed the finish line.

But everyone else has already moved into reflective mode, having deduced that Wales, ranked No 12 in the world and in the depths of an existential crisis about how many professional teams they can fund, offer the All Blacks no redemptive value.

Beating Wales, even should it be by an enormous margin, will do nothing to change the overall complexion of the All Blacks’ 2025 season, or persuade anyone to question whether they are right to hold doubts about the current coaching set-up and its ability to build a team that can surpass the Springboks, France, England and the vastly improved Argentina.

Judgment day for Robertson and his assistants is not coming, it has arrived, and there is nothing they can do – other than lose to Wales – to change the fact that they will come home next week to begin a review process that will, given the recidivist nature of the team’s failings, inevitably end with a recommendation that change of some kind is necessary.

The loss to England has tipped the balance of evidence against believing that this team are on a slow but positive progression that will see them make incremental improvements through to the 2027 World Cup.

The narrative from the coaches has remained upbeat all season, the inferences strong that they believe the team are learning, showing signs of growth and development, with Jason Holland following the company line after the All Blacks had trained at the St Peters Rugby Club in Cardiff.

“I think we definitely have the understanding, it is just about making sure that under pressure, we are nice and clear,” the assistant coach said.

“We have to go to the plays, or the parts of the field to kick – or whatever it may be – on our terms.

“We are going to keep working hard to help the boys perform under pressure and understand exactly what that looks like.

“It is a collective. A lot of the time in the public and the media, we are quick to jump on nines and 10s and obviously they are a big part of it.

“But you need lots of eyes to feed in the information and to help others make decisions. We see it as a collective from us as coaches all the way through to nine, 10, midfielders, wings and fullback feeding in information.”

Despite the projection of calm and positivity, the storm is coming because the public learned in 2022 that the view from within the All Blacks looks a lot different to the one from outside.

Coaches aren’t so much natural optimists as incurable gamblers, believing that if they keep backing themselves, they will eventually hit the jackpot – and so just as there was in 2022, there now needs to be some kind of staged intervention to ensure that the All Blacks come into 2026 with the coaching structure and personnel they need and not necessarily simply rubber-stamp the one that the incumbent crew want.

Goodwill hasn’t run out, but there is not enough of it left to take it on trust that an inexperienced coaching group will, left in their current set-up, fix the growing list of problems for which they haven’t yet been able to find solutions.

For the players, there is at least the reassurance of knowing how they should best navigate what is about to become turbulent airspace.

“That all the answers were in the circle,” was All Blacks wing Caleb Clarke’s definite answer about what he and his teammates learned in 2022.

“When you look around in that team, we had the likes of Aaron Smith, Sam Whitelock was in there, Brodie Retallick. We learned there that the answers were in that circle and even with this team, the answers are there as well.

“It is about trusting our leaders, trusting our coaches and making sure we get out there and do our role.”

Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He has won multiple awards for journalism and written several books about sport.