Brilliant Hurricanes look ready to run the All Blacks after Super Rugby clinic

Monday, 22 June 2026

ANALYSIS: Now that Hurricanes coach Clark Laidlaw has secured a Super Rugby title it is safe to recount a conversation last year without giving any of his secrets away.

After the Hurricanes beat the Highlanders in Dunedin, Laidlaw had a chat about the Six Nations, and specifically France’s 42-27 demolition of Ireland in Dublin.

Laidlaw loves the French way of playing rugby, particularly their refusal to adhere to the shapes and structures that have dominated modern rugby.

In fact, Laidlaw revealed - and this is where it gets interesting - that one of the things that frustrated him about coaching New Zealand players was that they had become conditioned to defaulting to certain shapes and structures regardless of the game circumstances.

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Part of his work as a coach was effectively trying to deconstruct what had been drilled into players and asking them to just play rugby.

And he was prepared to live with the errors that came with that. In fact, the intercept try that Highlanders winger Caleb Tagitau scored against the Hurricanes in Dunedin last year came from the sort of instinctive ball movement that Laidlaw was trying to encourage.

See the space, and get the ball to that space.

Fast forward 15 months and the Hurricanes’ 60-5 Super Rugby final triumph against the Chiefs was full of rugby that Laidlaw had in mind.

His players looked liberated. They looked like they were eight years old and had rediscovered the joy of playing with their friends, especially the way they kept setting up prop Xavier Numia in the midfield to use his footwork to get to the outside.

Is it not the Kiwi way of playing? Yes, but with a bit of Scottish and French thrown in, and anyone who has watched test rugby over the past few years (or Toulouse) knows that those countries have moved past New Zealand in some ways.

But the bigger point is that it is also winning rugby again, and Dave Rennie’s All Blacks can’t ignore that.

They have indicated they won’t. “Optimistic rugby” is the new language coming from from Rennie and his senior assistant Neil Barnes, and that messaging is important because now is not the time for the All Blacks to go into their shells.

Now is the time to take a hard look at that 9-10-12 combination of Cam Roigard-Ruben Love-Jordie Barrett and wonder if it is not time to commit to it, or at least give it a decent chance to succeed for the All Blacks.

That also goes for a number of players. Numia, Asafo Aumua, Pasilio Tosi, Tyrel Lomax, Du’Plessis Kirifi, Peter Lakai, Billy Proctor and Fehi Fineanganofo all have claims to be in the All Blacks’ 23.

New Zealand Rugby chair David Kirk will announce the All Blacks squad at noon on Monday, and the Hurricanes deserve to dominate it.