Task One completed to start the Dave Rennie era

There will be some serious relief around the halls of New Zealand Rugby now as it takes some serious cojones to step in and relieve an All Blacks coach of his duties mid contract. Especially with no guarantee of immediate improvement in the national side hanging over your head.

It is another step again to back the chosen successor in his choice of a foreign attack coach, a first ever for New Zealand, especially when you really don’t want to. So, on that point, congrats to David Kirk and his management team for taking some very real ownership and making those difficult calls.

The first three Tests of the new Dave Rennie era have been successfully negotiated with the sold-out signs going up rapidly all over the country. And I can tell you that for the Christchurch match, the demand was enormous. Favours and relationships from many years past were tested in the search ways into the new stadium for its ever first All Blacks Test.

The new era started with a level of public engagement which had not been evident since the 2019 Rugby World Cup. As Kirk and Co. made the hard calls in the board room, Rennie and his new coaching panel set about making the calls out on the park which had been screaming out execution for at least a couple of years.

In order to embed change rapidly, you have to be seen to be tangibly changing course from all that has gone before. This was the great failure of Scott Robertson, but Dave Rennie began to walk the walk immediately.

Reiko Ioane was omitted from his opening squad with little compelling form, Noah Hotham was overlooked for his deputy, and despite a great Super Rugby Pacific season, Du Plessis Kirifi was a selection casualty. Beauden Barrett couldn’t find his way into the grass in the opening three Tests, and New Zealand’s ever critical rugby public began to recognise something was different now.

While the game plan was always going to be to play with pace, there was enough use of words like brutality, basics and execution to know that a corner had been turned, and we awaited the evidence on the park.

Three Tests against three separate sides is a short window to get a game plan over to a group of players, who are on their third senior national coach in rapid succession. Old ideas need to be discarded quickly, and the new installed in stages, and that I think is what we saw in this Nations Championship, with the Ireland showing a real step up from the first two matches, but still one that promises genuine upside.

I want to make a quick comment on Luke Jacobson, who I will say was very lucky to return to the field against Ireland.

In the offending ruck at Eden Park, Jacobson arrived all guns blazing but has to dive over the ruck for the clean out because James Ryan was lying east-west on the Kiwi side not moving, knowing Nic Berry will not penalise him without warning. That in itself is becoming another discussion for another day.

I love the new brutality the All Blacks are bringing to the cleanout, but that discipline balance required will come with better execution than we saw here. Ireland were shot to bits and 21-0 looked the likely outcome before the offensive penalty, so this was a real howler from Jacobson.

There were a couple of real coaching gems in this game for mine. The selection of Quinn Tupaea indicated a definite intent, given he had wobbled a bit defensively in his prior two Tests. For this game, his task was to carry hard at the Irish inside backs and at Sam Prendergast in particular, and Tupaea was spectacularly successful with the Irish 9-10-12 combo missing 15 tackles between them.

Second was a change in approach from Damien McKenzie. His timing into the backline was exquisite, he was a line breaker, not trying to be a second play maker, and when he did make those breaks or half breaks it was his then decision making that impressed.

He recognised that his job was done with that first break, no miracle passes needed, no low probability offload, just go to contact and get to ground quickly near support and make a nice long placement back so possession can be quickly recycled. Job done, and he looked great doing it.

The execution from this group is already light years ahead of what we saw during Robertson’s time.

This is good defensive Irish side. They are physical, they stick to their task, play hard and fast with ruck and offside laws, and while in this game they defended manfully, they rarely turned the All Blacks away.

They held them up and slowed them down on occasion, but they simple could not keep them out as the 4.4 points on average from each of their nine 22 entrances showed. That is quality and patient finishing.

I cannot finish an article without reference to the loose forward make-up, and how they found balance, not only with Ardie Savea at no.8, but also with some tweaks to the Ardie game.

Who would have thought having a big man at blindside and a high-volume hitman at openside would be the mix that would best fit around the captain?

Well, everyone actually, except a whole bunch of All Black coaches and New Zealand’s rugby media, so it was nice to get there early in the Rennie reign.

The plaudits on Ardie Savea for this match were well earned. It was good to see him running off the back of the scrum, and it was great to see his carry and tackle numbers right up where they need to be. His dominant carrying and turnover work was amongst the best through the opening three rounds of the Nations Championship.

That whole loose forward combination felt like an extremely big step forward, not only for the side, but for the captain as well.

It’s fair to say some pretty handy building blocks have been put in place now, with the exciting but difficult tour of the Republic now in touching distance, with Rennie naming a squad that on the whole, just makes a lot of sense.