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Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9781775542650

Dedication

To Steve Kilgallon, the person who has helped me the most. He asked the right questions of me, to take me back in time through my life, to identify the stories that he thought would be interesting for readers.

Contents

Note to Readers

Dedication

Foreword: Sir Steve Hansen

Introduction: A lucky man

1: Chucking spuds off a garage roof: a Christchurch childhood

2: The police . . . and how to command a room

3: Canada, Canterbury and Cardiff

4: Joining the ABs

5: The scrum doctor

6: The 2007 World Cup . . . and that forward pass

7: Outside the box: learning in unusual places

8: Becoming World Champions, 2008–2011

9: The All Blacks philosophy

10: Chasing greatness, 2011–2015

11: Keeping it simple: or the pitfalls of the modern coach

12: One last All Blacks hurrah, 2017–2019

13: Life as an All Blacks coach

14: Working remotely

15: A very short runway: the Black Ferns, 2022

16: Helping a mate out of the excrement: the Wallabies, 2023–2024

17: Life after the All Blacks . . . and a few thoughts on coaching

Mike Cron’s dream All Blacks pack

Afterword: Sir Wayne Smith

Acknowledgements

About the writer

Photo Section

Copyright

Foreword Sir STEVE HANSEN

I’D DEFINE A ‘RUGBY man’ or a ‘rugby woman’ as a person who cares about the game beyond just their own immediate focus. They are passionate about everything to do with the sport, and how they can contribute to making it better. They understand and know the game, and they will serve it in any way they possibly can. And that’s exactly how I would describe Michael ‘Mike’ Cron, or ‘Crono’.

I first met Mike in Christchurch in 1978 when he was a senior player with the Suburbs club, and I was in my first year of senior rugby with Marist. I was at the bottom of a ruck, and I felt a pair of boots raking up and down my back – the now-banned practice of rucking. As the ruck broke up, and play moved on, I had the chance to look up and see who was the owner of the said boots. Looking down at me was a big burly gentleman with a mop of brick-red hair and a huge smile on his face who uttered the words, ‘Welcome to senior footy, sonny.’ It was Mike Cron, at his best, just gently letting me know I wasn’t playing schoolboy footy any longer.

As is Crono’s way, he was the first to come up after the game and shout me a beer and have a yarn, asking me how I was enjoying my rugby and what I’d learned so far in my short time as a senior player. Soon after that incident, Crono changed clubs to the Christchurch Football Club, and over the next few years our respective teams had many battles, but our relationship didn’t really develop past that stage.

I did know, however, that he was living just around the corner from my parents’ home in Halswell, in what was one of the few A-framed houses in the city. It should have warned me that he wasn’t afraid of doing things differently. A-framed houses were not the norm, and neither was Crono, as I was to learn over the years. While Crono was a good player, it wasn’t in this area of the sport that he would stand out from the crowd, but rather his passion for wanting to help others become better. He was happy to share his knowledge with anyone who asked for help.

It was when he was coming to the end of his playing career that he and my father, Des, began to tour around the club scene together delivering coaching clinics and helping out both coaches and players. It’s work he’s still doing to this day. My father would often tell me what a wonderful job Crono was doing, particularly in the specialist area of scrum coaching. So, it was only natural that when I was asked, in 1997, to change from being Canterbury backs coach to Canterbury forwards coach, that I would turn to Crono for help.

This was the beginning of a wonderful relationship that has lasted to this day. It included Crono coming to Wales to help me coach their national team, and going to our first Rugby World Cup together in 2003. Then Crono came on board with the All Blacks with me in 2004 when I talked Graham ‘Ted’ Henry into the idea of recruiting a specialist scrum coach. It progressed into his appointment as forwards coach in 2012, and continues to this day with his work alongside me at the Toyota club in Japan. It’s been a relationship that’s seen us both grow – however, I feel I’ve been the one who has benefited most, because I’ve had the privilege to share a coaching journey and many moments in life with a man who has both changed the way we play the game but also the way we coach it.

Crono has had a profound impact on the way we explore new ideas. I’ll never forget the day he told me he was off to visit a ballet teacher. When I asked why, he looked at me as if the answer should be obvious, and then explained that ballet dancers were taught how to lift each other, and he wanted to understand how they did it to see if it would help our lifters in the lineout. Crono has never been afraid to go outside the norm and look at things differently. He always wanted players to know the why and how. He would invent training aids to help them feel the right way to do things. He was the first to really understand the power of immediate feedback on-field through the use of film. All these things are seen as normal now in coaching circles, but he was a pioneer.

There’s also the caring side of Crono that many on the outside wouldn’t know about or appreciate. The front row were his babies, and they got the special treatment – and without fail, he had the knack of turning an average scrummager into a world-class one. He did it in his own way: helping the players understand the right way to do it, how it should feel, letting them see themselves do it, and what changes were required to make it better. He always gave the player confidence. You couldn’t ask for more from a coach.

The sport of rugby creates lifelong friendships. Mike Cron, because of the man he is, has many friends both inside and outside the game. I consider myself very lucky to be one of them. Crono would be the first to tell you he has benefited immensely from the great game of rugby. However, rugby has also benefited in so many positive ways through the involvement of Michael Cron. He is a true ‘rugby man’.

Sir Steve Hansen

All Blacks coach, 2004–2019

Introduction A LUCKY MAN

WHEN RICHIE MCCAW LIFTED the Rugby World Cup in front of his home fans at Eden Park in 2011, I was sitting sideline in the All Blacks’ dugout. Only ten years before that, I was a detective with the New Zealand Police and I’d never earned a cent from coaching rugby. I was lucky enough to go on to be a part of one of the greatest sporting teams ever – the All Blacks side which lost just 15 games of the 103 it played between 2004 and 2011. A team which won two successive World Cups in 2011 and 2015, and which set a new world record in any sport for the time ranked number one. A team which included such legends of the sport as McCaw, Dan Carter and Kieran Read.

As a coach – whether in rugby, in another sport, in business, or in life – I think there’s great benefits to be had from looking around you and wondering whether there might be a road less travelled that you could choose.

I was even luckier because it was my perfect job. The casual rugby fan probably didn’t even know who I was – and that suited me just fine. I ended up spending 16 years as assistant coach to one of the world’s greatest-ever sporting teams. I’ve had a long and fulfilling career coaching rugby. I’ve always had a thirst for knowledge, a desire that’s driven me throughout my coaching journey, and still does, all these years later.

When I first got into coaching, I knew that I didn’t know enough. I probably still don’t, but even now I’m out there trying to learn more. It’s a pursuit that’s taken me all over the world, and from ballet to Sumo wrestling, trying to find those lessons that might help make my players that little bit better and coaching techniques that would make them understand something that little bit better. I believe I’ve treated club players who were learning the game just the same as I did an international player who was at the pinnacle of their career: every player deserves their coach’s attention and their absolute best. While working with the All Blacks was humbling, and an absolute privilege, I’m still completely happy pulling on the boots and coaching a kids’ team on a park pitch.

Sometimes people said I coached differently, or coached simply. Initially, I thought that was meant as a criticism, but I later worked out that it was praise for my coaching style. When I began coaching, there was one way of doing things. As a coach – whether in rugby, in another sport, in business, or in life – I think there’s great benefits to be had from looking around you and wondering whether there might be a road less travelled that you could choose. I hope in this book there will be something to take away and think about for anyone who has been involved in a training session – whether on the paddock or in the boardroom. This is my story – and the philosophy that’s driven my career.

Mike Cron

Christchurch

Chapter 1 CHUCKING SPUDS OFF A GARAGE ROOF: A CHRISTCHURCH CHILDHOOD

I WAS STAYING AT the Scenic Hotel in Christchurch once with the All Blacks, and there came a tap on the door. It was the cleaning lady, and she asked if I was Mike Cron. She told me she was a cousin of mine from the West Coast. I invited her in for a cup of tea, and as we talked, she asked if I knew there was a painting of my great-grandfather’s homestead on the wall downstairs. I found the picture, and the staff told me it was one of a series of landscapes that they’d had an Australian artist paint for each of the Scenic group’s hotels around New Zealand.

Then the Christchurch earthquakes hit. A few years later, once the hotel had reopened, we went back in there, and my wife said, ‘I wonder if that painting survived?’ So, I went down to the ground floor and began walking the corridors looking for it. It was back in the same spot. At my wife’s suggestion I took a photograph of it. A week later, we played a Test match in Auckland and the boss of Scenic Hotel Group was there, and again at my wife’s suggestion, I said to him that if he was ever to sell the painting, to let us know first. It took about nine months, but we got it, and my wife framed it for my 60th birthday.

The painting shows the homestead, in the West Coast town of Haast, and the land in front, which was used as the airstrip, because it was the best bit of flat land in town. A single-seater plane would fly in and pick up kerosene tins full of whitebait and fly them back out. That land is now officially the Haast airstrip. I keep meaning to write all that down and stick it to the back of the frame, so the grandchildren will understand the significance of it when I’m gone. There’s a plaque at the local visitor information centre pointing to where the Cron homestead once lay, but the buildings themselves are long gone.

My family is half-Irish, half-Scottish. The first immigrants came over on a package that got you some land in return for three days a week working on the Haast Pass across the Southern Alps, the mountain range that runs down the centre of the South Island. They were given land at Jackson Bay, at the end of the road on SH6 on the West Coast, which gets five metres of rain a year, so you can’t grow anything down there. Inevitably, after several years those immigrants began moving northward. My forebears didn’t go far, and settled in Haast.

My great-grandfather had ten children, the youngest of which was my grandfather, who I never met; he was dead before I was born. His family moved a little further north, to Kokatahi-Kowhitirangi, about 15 kilometres inland from the town of Hokitika. There’s a bridge across the Kokatahi River – one side is Kokatahi and the other side’s Kowhitirangi. Mum came from the Spence family of Kowhitirangi, Dad was from Kokatahi, and they got a farm on Mum’s side of the bridge. The farm was right next door to Stan Graham’s, who in 1941 became New Zealand’s worst serial killer, after a dispute with his neighbour ended in him shooting dead seven people, including four police officers; Graham, in turn, was shot after a police manhunt.

Mum and Dad had a dairy farm, and that’s where my three oldest brothers were born. My brother Stewart, who was an All Black in 1976, fell off a roof on the farm, injured his arm and needed a lot of treatment at Christchurch Hospital, so eventually they decided to relocate across the Southern Alps to Christchurch to make the medical visits easier. Stu was never able to regain full movement in his arm, and he couldn’t hold a ball with it, but he was still good enough to play rugby for his country.

My brothers were eight, ten and twelve years older than me – I suspect I was a mistake. I was born in 1954 in what later became Christchurch’s abortion clinic but back then was called the Lyndhurst nursery, an overflow maternity ward from the main hospital. My oldest brother Gary, who’s now 80, was a tough bloke. I ended up playing senior rugby against Gary when he was 30 and I was 18. A schoolteacher, he played rugby for Canterbury B, then went to Australia and played league for the Illawarra district team. He now lives at North Loburn, near Rangiora. My next brother Phil, a builder, died at 48 of the same cancer that eventually got my father. Stu was the next brother, another schoolteacher. He had five boys in seven years, although sadly one died at 18 of a brain tumour.

We all grew up together in the inner-western suburb of Riccarton, and all attended the local primary school, Wharenui. Mum stayed home and raised the kids, which was a hard gig with four boys, and dad was a cab driver. Mum died young, at 55, when I was 22 years old. (She smoked a hundred a day, so she had every right to leave early.) When you’re the youngest, with such a big age gap, you learn to fight, and you learn to run. I’d stash some of Dad’s spuds on the garage roof, and when my brothers tried to catch me to rip my head off, I’d scarper onto the roof and keep them at bay, at least for a while, with some well-aimed potatoes.

We all swam for the Wharenui club, and played every sport going – most of all, rugby. Three of us would end up playing in the same senior team. The traditional club for newcomers to Christchurch from the West Coast was Linwood, so that’s where Gary went. But Phil and Stu went to Suburbs, so I followed them there. The three of us played a lot of rugby against Gary. After about five years playing seniors at Suburbs, there was a row between the players and management and I was among a group of players to depart. I ended up at the Christchurch Football Club, which is where I stayed and did most of my subsequent club coaching.

Gary went to Cashmere High, Phil and Stu to Hagley College, but I went with my mates to Hillmorton High, cycling the eight kilometres there and back each day. You’d describe it as a school where you saw a good cross-section of the community. I had my head flushed down the toilet on my third day. I repaid the perpetrator a few years later. They’d say at Hillmorton that you’re either going to become a cop or a robber. Well, I ended up becoming a cop, and a few of my classmates became my clients.

I wasn’t an academic kid, but I played cricket for the First XI and rugby for the First XV. Being good at sport helped: the principal, Peter Murdoch, was a sports fanatic; the First XV coach was a former All Black hooker, Dennis Young; and the cricket coach was Vic Pollard, a dual international in both cricket and soccer. I was pretty lucky. It’s not a fashionable school, but it did well for me, and both my two children went there, and now my daughter’s boys are going there too – the current principal, Ann Brokenshire, is doing a bloody good job, and they’ll come out well-rounded for life.

In my day, there wasn’t much to do as a kid apart from play sport. You’d swim at the Wharenui pool, or walk three kilometres to the park to kick around a rugby ball or play cricket. We cycled everywhere. We had a car, but that was used by Dad for his work as a taxi driver. We didn’t have a fridge (just an ice safe), or washing machine (just an old agitator), or dryer. For many years, we had no phone, and the nearest telephone box was a kilometre’s walk away. There was no Sunday trading back then, and on Saturdays only the shops at New Brighton Beach opened. The pubs closed at six (so when I got my driver’s licence, I could drop Dad and his mate down to the pub at ten past five and bring them home at ten past six). It was a simple life: there wasn’t much choice. You definitely had to make your own fun.

I can still remember the first time I saw a television. The neighbours got one, and I was allowed to go over to the Mitchells to see it. On a Friday night, my mates and I would cycle down to the Farmers department store on Riccarton Road, where they would leave the TV turned on in the display window and we would watch Laramie, an American Western serial. Occasionally, they’d even leave the sound turned on. Otherwise, we’d sit there on our bikes, peering through the glass, and watch an hour of a cowboy show with no sound. We eventually got a television when I was ten years old, when Dad rented one for the 1964 Olympic Games in Japan. It’s not that long ago, really, but it sounds like a different world, doesn’t it?

Every Sunday, we would go over to Grandma and Grandad’s house for lunch. Mum was from a big family, so all the cousins would be there. Grandad also eventually got a TV. We had one channel back then, and when the shows finished, they would play ‘God Save the Queen’, and he’d stand up and salute for the whole thing, while chewing on his pipe like Alf Garnett from the British sitcom Till Death Us Do Part.

I spent a lot of my childhood racing to catch up with my brothers – literally and figuratively. They’d go to the beach to do pre-season fitness training, and I’d tag along. I can remember the day, when I was nine, that they decided not to take me with them, so I hopped on my bike and rode an hour to New Brighton Beach, trying to remember the right way to go. They let me join in once I got there. If they went running around Hagley Park in the city centre, I wasn’t allowed to go – until I’d proven to them that I could cope by running enough laps around our block. I wasn’t allowed to go swimming with them until I could swim a mile. I was about nine years old when I managed it, and I was off school with exhaustion and muscle soreness for about three days afterwards.

There was no such thing as black bootlaces back then. We only had white. To get them clean, you had to boil them and then scrub them. If I cleaned all my brothers’ bootlaces, and their boots, then on a Sunday, when all their rugby mates came over to play euchre all day and have a few beers, and I rode my bike down to pick up their fish-and-chips order, then they might take me to the double-feature movie with them that night. That was how it worked with my brothers. To be allowed to do something, you had to earn it. In hindsight, that was a great preparation for life.

That was how it worked with my brothers. To be allowed to do something, you had to earn it. In hindsight, that was a great preparation for life.

When I was in my early teens, my brothers built me a wooden bench press and squat rack and bought me some second-hand weights, so at 13, I began weightlifting. At 15, they were willing to take me along on a Monday night to Frank King and Art Pickering’s gym, where a lot of the best athletes in Christchurch – cyclists, league players, and the Olympic and Commonwealth Games wrestler John da Silva – all trained, alongside this little 15-year-old kid. But I’d had a couple of years’ lifting and learning the etiquette and I was quick to pick up the rules.

One day, I got into a scrap with one of my older brothers, and we broke a wooden panel in one of the doors. I can remember an auntie from the Coast coming to visit. ‘How did that get broken?’ she asked. ‘Oh, my brother threw me and my head hit it,’ I said. ‘What?!’ she asked. ‘Oh, I was being a prick,’ I replied. It was a consequence. You could go so far, and if you went too far, you copped it. The biggest one would come home and beat up the next two, until one day they decided to join forces and beat him up. They were all into wrestling, and they were all into sport, and we were all strong-minded, bad-tempered pricks. But it’s important to say that we’ve never had an argument in our adult lives. All those scraps were just about establishing the pecking order.

When I was 15 years old, my mate Wayne Hegarty, who was the First XV captain and would later end up principal of Marlborough Boys’ College, got a job working for a roading contractor called Morrie Burke. Wayne managed to get me a job too. On our first day, a short little guy called Artie drove us over to a new subdivision and we ran along behind the truck, throwing in metal and bricks and other rubbish. Every so often, Artie would increase the speed a little and shout, ‘Go on, you young pricks, keep up.’ That was my first day of work. I worked every school holidays; during term time, I’d borrow money from Dad and then pay him back in the breaks.

When I left school, I didn’t have any idea what I was going to do, so I ended up working full-time for Morrie. I was there for about 18 months, until one morning I was working down a manhole with a jackhammer, and came back out into the freezing-cold wind and thought to myself, ‘There’s got to be a better life than this!’ A week earlier, a good mate named Kevin Burrowes, who would go on to be a detective inspector, told me he’d joined the police force, and suggested that I should do the same. So, at morning tea, I told the boss I was driving down to the shop. There was a telephone box there and I rang the recruiting sergeant to make an appointment.

I had the interview, did the written exam and took the medical, but didn’t hear anything back, until one Thursday morning I was at work and a Holden Belmont pulled up, the window was wound down, and an envelope was thrown out at me. A voice intoned, ‘It’s for you.’ I still have no idea who the driver was. Inside the envelope was a ticket for the ferry from Lyttelton to Wellington on the following Monday morning, in time to start training with the next intake at police college. That’s how I found out I’d been accepted. That night, I quit my job.

I imagine police college now is very different to what it was then. Until 1981, when it moved to new premises in Porirua, the college was at the Trentham military camp north of Wellington. We were accommodated in old World War Two barracks and the food was atrocious; we all suffered regular food poisoning. Plenty quit, or were kicked out. But the discipline was good for me, because I had been a bit wild as a teenager and they really knocked the edges off me, and I enjoyed the camaraderie.

I came out of police college on my 19th birthday, on 14 December 1973, and joined the police in Christchurch, where we would line up each morning in the central police station and the sergeant would check your baton, handcuffs and notebook, and then assign you to your beat. On my second morning, I was told, ‘Constable Cron, you’re OC Buns.’ OC means Officer in Charge, and I thought, ‘Shit, on my second day, I’m already in charge of something!’ I asked one of the older ones, ‘What is it that I’m in charge of?’ Turned out I had to pop into the bakery every morning to get a dozen buns for morning tea . . . If I was on night shift, I’d park my car somewhere on my beat, with a pillow and Thermos flask inside, and in the middle of the night when it was quiet and cold, I’d go and have a lie-down in the car. Night shifts could be long, and boring. Our radios only had about a 2-kilometre radius, and after that you would have to find a telephone box if you needed to report back in.

Violence was quite a big part of life back in the 1970s. The pubs were tough. I can remember one police officer going in to check a pub, and for no reason, she was set upon and kicked with steel-capped boots. It probably helped, in that regard, that I continued playing rugby throughout my police career. They would give me time off for matches and training, and in return, if they needed a volunteer for something, I’d always put my hand up. I’d played hooker through intermediate school, and then when the weights turned me from a skinny runt to a big bugger, I moved to prop at high school. Weightlifting was quite a niche activity back then, with many people having the incorrect notion that bulking up would cost you your athleticism, but I enjoyed it and got pretty strong. The gym had a chart on the wall, and if you could bench 200 pounds (about 90 kg), they put your name up. Every All Black, backs included, would be able to lift well over that now and most could probably double it. The goal my brothers set me was to bench 300 pounds (136 kg) and squat 500 (227 kg), and I got there. It was a bit unheard of in those days. With running and cycling everywhere, I weighed 120 kg and I was reasonably fit.

But a lot of the uniform work was tantamount to dealing with overdue library books. CIB, the Criminal Investigation Branch, was the real thing. And I wanted to be involved with the real thing. The CIB guys worked hard, solved big crimes, and went to an after-hours bar and had a few beers. They were funny buggers, and they had a good camaraderie. I was in uniform for only three years when I was very fortunate to be accepted into the CIB, with the proviso of passing a 30-month training programme. It involved around 100 short exams, one every ten days, with every seventh exam a more substantial one which summarised the previous six. After 40, there was a major exam, and if you failed that, you were out. Then you took another 40, on the same terms. Then they sent you back to Trentham for a month, and you took a final set of papers. Fail those, and you were out. And you got only one attempt at all this. It set a very high standard. They wanted you to be as good as, if not better than, the defence lawyers you were up against. The first thing I realised on starting the detective course was how little I knew as a regular policeman – it made me wonder quite how I’d got away with it until then.

At 22, I was probably the youngest on the squad. All newcomers would be allocated a mentor to work with, and I was fortunate to have some really good guys looking after me. You’d be allocated to a specialist squad, perhaps working on burglaries or car theft, and try to become expert in that area. Technology was severely limited: we were still sending messages around the police station with a Lamson pneumatic tube. There were a few computers, but they were clunky and quite basic, so almost everything was on paper, and liaising with overseas police was extremely difficult. There was certainly no DNA testing or much in the way of forensic evidence work.

When there was a homicide, they would name the boss and then he would pick his squad. I was lucky enough to get picked for virtually every homicide. On two of those, I was ‘OC Body’, which means taking charge of everything to do with the person who has been killed. You deal with the coroner’s report, and the bereaved family, and you attend the post-mortem, take notes and take charge of any evidence the pathologist produces, like a bullet from the corpse or fingernail samples. It’s not fun. I dry-wretch putting out cat food, so I’m not brave. But when it’s your job, and you know you have to be there, you seem to be able to do it. There’s a distinctive smell that comes with it too. I could be 50 metres away from another detective on my return to the station, and they would be able to tell that I had been to the morgue. You end up taking everything to the dry cleaners. Unless a doctor can confirm the reason that somebody died, then you’ll have a post-mortem. It’s just something none of us usually think about. Years later, I found they were using one of my OC Body reports as a teaching document for the younger officers, which made me proud that I must have got something right.

There weren’t many whodunnits, but when you came across one, you worked hard, and it was a huge feeling of satisfaction when they were solved. I remember one particular case where we found the corpse of a gang member which had been left on a beach. It was an interesting crime scene, given we only had so long to work with it before the tide came in. We brought in an expert on boot prints, and another with expertise in sand formation, who were both called to give evidence at trial. A murder inquiry might have up to 40 staff assigned, with most of those being the foot soldiers who go out and do the hard yards – that was me. You get really close and it’s a really good team effort to try to solve something that needs solving. A murder inquiry meant long hours. There were no staff welfare concerns in those days. When the balloon goes up, you’re working until you get the job done. Generally, you’d work on that murder for as long as it took – but usually around three to six months – and if it remained unsolved, they might keep on a skeleton staff and the rest of the squad would be dispersed back to their regular role.

I can recall only a couple of cases I lost in my whole time there. You’ve got to have built a pretty convincing case before you’re willing to put it before a jury. As a cop, you felt the wheels of justice turned bloody slowly, and the jury system itself was quite cumbersome, but it is the fairest system of justice to be judged by your peers. In a perfect world, I think a panel of three judges would be more efficient – but it would be hard to see how we could afford to run such a system.

New Zealand is a relatively safe place. We didn’t get a lot of homicides, and generally, we knew who’d done it within the first 24 hours, and it was a job of piecing the jigsaw together. Likewise, we don’t get a lot of bombings, but I got to work on one in 1989. I’d just begun dating my now wife, April, so the previous night I had rung my offsider, whom I was scheduled to be on duty with in the crime car, to tell him I was staying over at my girlfriend’s place. I asked him to pick up the car in the morning, sign out the pistols, and then come and collect me. The crime car was armed with pistols because we were the first responders to anything that was a bit dangerous as well as the more mundane crimes like burglaries.

So, the next morning I was lying in bed with my girlfriend and I heard this Holden Belmont hammering through the gears coming down the road and tooting the horn wildly. I lifted the blinds, wrapped in a towel, and there he was outside yelling up to me that there had been a bombing. I had a quick shower and shave and raced outside. When we arrived, the uniform boys had already sealed off the scene. It was at a skip-bin yard. The driver had turned on the engine of his truck and it had triggered a bomb underneath the seat. It had been a huge explosion. A bomb expert came from the Ministry of Defence to advise us on what evidence to keep. There were four of us, including Graham Scott, the officer in charge of the scene, searching the yard, with rubbish flying around everywhere as we spent nine hot days trying to locate all the evidence. We bought volleyball knee pads and big floppy cricket hats. Over the fence was a brickmaker’s, so Graham borrowed some bricks and laid them out as markers, used spray cans and gridded the entire yard out using ropes. But even outside our grid, we found ourselves picking up papers from the truck several paddocks away.

We figured out that the offender had climbed the roof, scaled out onto a wall and reached down and cut the security light so it wouldn’t turn on. I hired a cherry picker, climbed up, and using sellotape and a roller, managed to get some hair samples and clothing fibres from the roofline. Turned out the perpetrator was an ex-husband, taking revenge on the driver for having a relationship with his former partner. He had a job where he had access to explosives. He was a suspect very early on, and we later got a tip-off that pointed us in the right direction.

When the 1981 Springbok tour came around, I was a detective, working nights on the crime car. But about eight of us volunteered to go back into uniform on weekends; the uniform had changed by now, so they had to find us new ones. I was sent to the game in Invercargill, the game in Auckland, and the Test matches in Wellington and then Auckland, the third and final Test of the series in September, known now as the ‘flour bomb’ Test, where a plane flew over the stadium dropping bags of flour. I was in the stands, with my little white helmet on, impersonating a turtle, my neck sinking into my body, every time the plane buzzed over.

The police and army were sharing a huge tent outside the stadium. It was like M*A*S*H. There were cops there with battery acid on their uniforms. There were some sitting there who’d had human excrement thrown on them, and even though they’d been hosed down they still stank, so they were down one end. I didn’t get hurt. The worst that happened was I lost a brand-new three-piece suit. On the night of the Christchurch Test match, I was working the night shift in the crime car. Because of the tour, we were working 12-hour shifts. Knowing how much trouble it would cause them, no hotel would take the Springboks in. Instead, they were forced to sleep on the floor of two squash courts at the Linwood Rugby Club, with some rolled-out carpet and camp stretchers, which they were all too tall for so they ended up kipping on the floor. There were two-bar heaters around the walls, as well as wooden lockers, and each of them had a piece of wooden dowel to hang their shirts on.

At about 2 am I popped in to check on how they were getting on. There were only about three of the Springboks there; the rest were still out partying after the Test match. Then the protesters turned up down the far end of Kearneys Road. I was only a detective: I wasn’t trained in crowd control. The Red Squad and the Blue Squad who did handle that sort of trouble were all in bed, so those of us on duty tried to get everyone on shift at the central police station to come down to help. We rustled up a handful of cops and one police dog. The boss told us to form a line. We didn’t have enough officers to block the road, and so we had to spread out. The protesters began marching towards us, whistling and banging their pots and pans. They didn’t know we had only one dog; we’d positioned it behind us with his handler urging him to bark. Poor bugger was hoarse by the end. The protesters began hurling paint bombs. One of them hit my mate and dropped him, with paint splattering over me, but somehow we held the line. But that was the end of that three-piece suit.

As a police officer, I could feel the violence brewing. The Springbok tour provided the fuel, and then it exploded. We grew up as a country after that. We should never go down that road again.

As a police officer, I could feel the violence brewing. The Springbok tour provided the fuel, and then it exploded. We grew up as a country after that. We should never go down that road again. During the tour, it didn’t feel to me that it was really about the politics of the Springboks’ visit, but about law and order. We weren’t dealing with mums and dads waving a banner. We were dealing with a mob who, for example, might be set on destroying a school. What the tour did was attract a very small violent minority who used it as a vehicle to express their anger at society – and that, unfortunately, made it tough for the normal New Zealander who was opposed to apartheid to attend a protest rally, which was their right, in safety. I don’t know how we didn’t lose someone to the violence. It was brutal. I can remember watching with sadness and anger as the grandstand at Rugby Park, Christchurch, burned to the ground. That’s not New Zealand.

Chapter 2 THE POLICE . . . AND HOW TO COMMAND A ROOM

MY LATE BOSS IN the Canterbury Police, John Lyall, once told me he wanted to send me on a course to teach me how to be an effective public speaker. ‘What the f— are you doing that for?’ I said. ‘I’m a detective.’ He told me it would be good for my rugby coaching. It turned out to be the best course I’ve ever been on.

The guy delivering the course was an American teacher from Pittsburgh who talked about his experiences during the 1968 riots triggered by the murder of Martin Luther King Jr; he had stories about meetings to bring about peace and how the set-up of the room contributed so much to creating the right atmosphere. We were taught about preparation, planning, body language and how to set up the room most effectively – with little details like never positioning obstacles between yourself and the audience, and never allowing people to sit where they want to, but instead placing them where you choose them to go. It proved endlessly helpful in my rugby career. Funny, isn’t it? You’d think it would have had no use at all.

In my opinion, the best set-up now for an effective sports team meeting is to have the players in a half-circle around you. Many coaches stand on a rostrum to speak, or to show their team video clips. I generally don’t: I make sure I am at their body height, so my eyeline isn’t higher than theirs. I don’t want to talk down to people – I want to establish a conversation in which we are equal partners. Some may be lucky enough to have an auditorium or a makeshift grandstand set up for their review sessions, but for the most part, coaches generally just get a room with some chairs in it.

My son Daniel worked as a bouncer before he went into rugby full-time. Before he began working the doors, he asked me if I had any advice. I told him that if he wanted a scrap, he could have a fight every night. There would always be someone there keen to take him on, especially late at night. If he wanted to avoid that, he should never put a bloke in a corner, push him in the chest and give him no exit. Don’t stand over people, close their space and deny them a way out – you’re guaranteeing they will have a go. Always give them a way out. There’s something similar at work in establishing a comfortable atmosphere when you’re talking to a sports team.

A lot of people who deliver a lecture spend their time talking to their screen. You should never do that. And don’t write War and Peace. Just give them bullet points. If you simply read out what you’ve written down, then you’re not just patronising your audience, you’re demonstrating that you don’t understand the concept of the ‘critical few’. Pare it right down to the critical points of your message; then you can elaborate on them if you need to, or your audience asks you to. Explain it, but don’t make me read it.

I remember one day on the course we were surprised to be left waiting in the classroom for our lecturer. Eventually he came in late, dressed scruffily, his tie askew, rushing to the desk with an untidy pile of papers. He dropped his notes; he couldn’t get the overhead projector to function. Then he walked back out of the room, came back in and did the exact opposite of everything he had done the first time. It was such a simple but effective way to communicate his message about the difference between being prepared and not.

I still get asked to go watch top-level coaches deliver team meetings for their players. I’ll stand at the back and watch, and afterwards when I offer them some advice, I still return to the same principles that lecturer taught me:

•set up the room properly;

•master your body language;

•don’t talk to a screen or be hidden behind a desk;

•don’t give them too much information; and

•pay attention to your audience and know when you’re losing them.

It’s usually not the coach’s fault if they’re not doing it this way – they’ve never had the good fortune, as I did all those years ago, to be taught how to effectively deliver that meeting. And remember, I’m not saying the way I am doing it is right. I never do. I’m just sharing what I’ve learned that has worked for me. The absolute key lesson I’ve always tried to pass on is that if you’re going to talk about something, make sure it’s worthwhile – and keep it brief.

In my younger days, I’d do what I suspect a lot of coaches do, and I’d come up with 15 clips from the match I wanted to show my players. Then I would stand up and talk about those 15 clips. But then I came to thinking that they probably already knew what they’d done right or wrong in those clips, because they were smart boys and girls. They had to be, to be picked for the All Blacks or the Black Ferns, so I didn’t treat them like idiots. Now what I do is sit down with them and introduce the topic. So, if I’m asking them about our lineout, I throw it open and ask, ‘What did we do well?’ They may rattle through the good bits – and I can agree, yes, our communication was really good, or, yes, our movements were quick. Then I ask what they think we need to work on this week, and they come up with some topics. I might have six clips ready to show them on the subject, but instead I stand up and say I’ve got just one clip to show you to confirm all that – I’ve already mentally deleted the other five because they’ve covered it. If you constantly rearrange your information and delete anything that proves unnecessary, then your meetings become shorter, more to the point, and everyone involved walks away with a clear understanding.

The absolute key lesson I’ve always tried to pass on is that if you’re going to talk about something, make sure it’s worthwhile – and keep it brief.

One thing that policing taught me was how to deal with the ‘what ifs’, because you spend your whole career knowing that when you walk through a door, you’re never certain what will be on the other side. Policing also helped me develop the ability to prioritise. If I have six things to do, I put them in order of importance. That sounds dreadfully simple but a lot of people find it difficult to prioritise correctly. Imagine the half-time talk during a Test match. Now, for the first three minutes of that ten-minute break, you’re letting the players recover, go to the toilet, have a rest. There’s absolutely no point in gibbering in their ear right away. If you’re talking then, you’re trying to impart instructions at a time when they are not capable of taking that information in. You’re only talking for your own benefit.

Instead, once everyone’s heart rates have come down, we form a circle, and I say to my key leaders something like, ‘How are we going on this?’ And they begin the conversation. If they cover off what I wanted to say about that first half, then I say nothing. As they talk, I am deleting in my brain. Right at the end, I might just say, ‘There’s one thing I think we need to cover off’, quickly run them through it, and then we’re finished. That was how it worked with the All Blacks. Then, when I was with the Black Ferns, at first they needed a little more direction, but by the end we were in the same place. To be playing the game at that level, they have to already be able to understand the game.

As a player, I’ve certainly been in sheds at half-time where we were being told by coaching staff what useless pricks we were. I don’t know many players who respond well to that. We take the opposite approach these days. Steve Hansen had a great saying. He’d tell his players, ‘We love you at 7.30 pm when you go out on the paddock, and we love you at 9 pm when you come back in, no matter what.’ And I think it’s a great line for coaches to remember. It’s important for the players to know that I’m not going to be nice and happy and kind to them only when they win. They’ve gone out there, given their all, and I really appreciate it. If today it didn’t work out, that’s life. We will get on with that on Monday. Until then, let’s get you patched up, let’s ensure your recovery is done properly, let’s have a quiet beer or orange juice, let’s have dinner with our families and relax. I’m not going to talk to you about what happened during the game. The players are attuned just like kids who pick up if Mum and Dad are having an argument. The coaching group needs to be aware of that and be on the same page. A couple of the boys said to me one day, ‘You’re the same whether we win or whether we lose.’ I said to them, ‘Isn’t everyone?’ I guess they’re not.

Steve Hansen had a great saying. He’d tell his players, ‘We love you at 7.30 pm when you go out on the paddock, and we love you at 9 pm when you come back in, no matter what.’

The public-speaking course that John Lyall sent me on proved to be incredibly formative for my coaching career, but in fact, my entire time in the police taught me so much that would help me as a coach. Part of that, I think, is that when I look back over my 23-year career, I got into areas which probably only two or three per cent of officers would ever have got involved in. So it was never boring.

I had a spell acting as an undercover operator, managing undercover police officers. Then I became involved in setting up Canterbury Police’s first witness protection squad. And when New Zealand’s first casino opened up in Christchurch, they needed a police liaison officer, so I volunteered for that. I also helped to set up the Criminal Investigation Branch’s intelligence cell. Whenever they needed someone to have a go at something new, I generally put my hand up. Just as in my rugby coaching, I was always interested in something new and testing myself out.

When we set up the witness protection scheme, there was a national scheme based in Wellington, which I studied, but nothing locally, and we needed a system to protect witnesses in major trials, sometimes for up to two years. The NRL (National Rugby League) referee Bill Harrigan was, at the time, second-in-command of the Sydney police witness protection scheme, so I spent a week over there. They had an underground police station, so it couldn’t be bombed, and they would keep families there when they were preparing to relocate them.

The scheme was something like what you would see on television: safe houses, protected identities, and so on. But people would assume that you could just fly the witnesses off to another country and hide them there. That wasn’t the case – if they’ve got previous convictions, then they don’t want them overseas. New Zealand is not a big country, so sometimes we had to be creative. Once the court case was over, they would have a new identity and new life, and after that, it was up to them. We didn’t need to use it very often, but we needed to set it up properly and lawfully.

The undercover work was, I think, pretty close to being a rugby coach. You’re the mentor and the manager for your undercover officers and you look out for them. I worked in that area around the time of the ‘Mr Asia’ heroin ring; at one of the resulting trials in Australia, the judge was critical that officers had worked in the criminal intelligence system – similar to the one I was working in over in New Zealand – for too long and that had led to corruption, and therefore time limits needed to be introduced. I would expect that how the undercover field operated has changed very significantly since then.

But when I was an undercover operator, I basically worked alone with my agent. We would form a great relationship and a true bond. They had to check in with you every day so that you knew they were safe. You would look after their welfare and any evidence gathered, and ensure the operation stuck to the letter of the law. To ensure their identity was protected, almost nobody knew what you were up to, and that work was your number one priority: at times, it was difficult, as you couldn’t tell other officers what work you were involved in, so they probably thought you were a lazy prick! I was involved on and off for several years in this field. You would consult your boss on when it was time to take the agent out or terminate the operation. Those operations would send tremors through the criminal community because they wouldn’t be sure what was coming next and it would get us on the front foot for a while. But a lot of the time, once the operation was terminated and offenders arrested, there was often no real animosity between the criminals and the undercover officer, which would surprise me.

When the 4000-square-metre Christchurch Casino opened on Victoria Street in 1994 there was plenty of opposition and the spotlight on it meant everything had to be done correctly. I forged a good relationship with the boss, Arthur Pitcher, who was a great man and ran a good ship. It was very well run, but we helped screen the original staff, and would keep an eye out for anyone coming in from overseas with a bad reputation, or any hint of money-laundering issues.

When it came to setting up the intelligence branch, we knew we had all this important information, but we didn’t really know how to collate it and get that information out to the troops on the front line. There were times when you’d find out what was going on from the newspaper. This was before computers became commonplace, and everything was kept on cards in filing cabinets. We had a team of three, and we would collate all the relevant information, and before each uniform shift began we would go down and address them about what had been happening and what to look out for. We would make a videotape each morning as well and that would be sent out to the outlying stations in the district for them to watch. It was the most efficient system we could manage in those days.

I also served two years in the child sexual abuse team, and those were the toughest two years of my career. My own children were quite young at the time, and it really affected the way I related to them. I know it shouldn’t have, but it did. In those days, you didn’t get any psychological support, you just got on with it. You didn’t have any choice back then – after two years, I was just rotated on to the next squad. Eventually, that meant that I worked on everything except the fraud and drug squads.

While I had spells as an acting sergeant, I never wanted to move up the ranks; once you get up to detective inspector, you’ve moved away from the work that you joined the force to do. I always enjoyed being on the streets, so I stayed there. I got on well with most of the criminals and could have a beer with them. I knew they had done wrong, but I always tried to treat them, I hope, with respect. I was aware that they usually had a wife and kids at home suffering because of what they had done. You had a job to do, but you didn’t need to be a prick about it.

I completed 20 years with CIB and retired in early 1996. I had finished a witness protection operation and my wife and I were invited to Wellington to receive a commendation for my work and to have dinner with the Police Commissioner, Richard Macdonald, at the Trentham army base along with about 14 other officers who were being honoured. It was great that April also received a commendation from the commissioner for her support during the operation. That night, I went back to the hotel room with her and broke the news: ‘I’m out. I’m finished.’ I hadn’t even discussed it with her at that point.

I went to see my boss on the following Monday morning to tell him my decision, and he said, ‘Oh jeez, can you give me three months?’ So, I stayed on to train up my successor and then left. It was a good time to get out. I’d done some good work in some quite interesting areas of the job and it felt like it was time. I didn’t want to reach the stage where I was locking up the sons of the men I’d put away two decades earlier.

It does take a little while to tune out of being a cop. We would go to a party and my wife could tell that I was analysing the other guests. Unfortunately, you do become quite judgemental, and that’s not always a positive, because when you’re dealing for years with bad people you can forget that 99.9 per cent of the population are decent humans. But after a while, you learn to look at people differently and stop assessing everyone you meet.

What I loved most about the job was the camaraderie. It was really close-knit and you trusted your colleagues immensely. That makes it a battle when you first leave the job. It took me a long time to feel comfortable going back into the station for a beer or a coffee. Since then, I’ve been invited in to talk about my life after policing – something I enjoy doing, because I think a lot of police don’t realise that they are actually trained in a lot of transferable skills such as prioritising, problem-solving, dealing with those ‘what ifs’ – things that a good cop just intrinsically knows how to do, but are skills a lot of people out in the real world need to learn. As I’ve said, I certainly think it really helped me in my coaching career.

I still think policing is a bloody good job. I was chatting to a couple of the Wallabies players recently and I told them they would make really good cops after they retire. I’d certainly have no hesitation in recommending it as a career to anybody. A lot of the players now study professional development courses in business management, or sports administration, or psychology – and all of those would be helpful preparation for a rewarding career in the police.

Chapter 3 CANADA, CANTERBURY AND CARDIFF

I’VE NEVER ACTUALLY BEEN interviewed for a coaching position in my life.

It all began when I was 19. For some reason, I was always given some responsibility in the teams I played in. Then, in 1973, I was named captain of the New Zealand Colts team, under the coaching of Jack Gleeson, to play a series of games against North Island provincial teams. I was actually a year younger than most of the team, so it was surprising that they chose me as skipper. There was no manager, no physio, no trainer – Jack was the entire management team, so he said to me that he would coach the backs, I could take the forwards. So, there I was, 19 years old, coaching a forward pack of the best youngsters in New Zealand. The following year, I was again named captain, Jack was once more the coach, and this time they had added a manager. So, once again, Jack asked me to handle the forwards. I’d never been on any coaching courses, but perhaps, because of my upbringing, I was a little bit more mature than the average teenager.

As a coach, I think it’s a waste of time being critical of referees if you’re not going to help them.

Somehow, on most of the teams I played on, I would end up helping run the forwards, or having some influence as a leader, long before the concept of a leadership group was ever invented. Then I began going out to help the referees, doing coaching sessions around the set piece, lineout, scrums and set moves. Once I began coaching, I would take my forward pack to referees’ coaching clinics to be used as guinea pigs. As a coach, I think it’s a waste of time being critical of referees if you’re not going to help them.

At 28, I developed compartment syndrome, a condition where the muscle becomes too big for its sheath, and you suffer stress fractures – in my case, down the shinbone. It’s a genetic condition and several members of my family have suffered from it. I was sent to a surgeon in Hamilton, who had also operated on the Olympic runners John Walker and Dick Quax, and he cut the sheath to release the muscle. While it allowed me to run again, I was never the same player.

I’d been doing a bit of coaching anyway, but, in 1983, my brother-in-law phoned up asking if I would become the forwards coach of the St Andrew’s College First XV. Here’s an example of how old I’m getting: the second five-eighth in that team was Lou Vieceli; he’s since had three daughters. One married Owen Franks, one married Richie Mo’unga, and the third lives with the Crusaders player Quinten Strange. Looking back, I was probably a three out of ten as a coach then. I wasted a lot of time, because I was learning myself; and because it was a school team, time wasn’t really a factor. I’ve learned a lot since then about time management. In fact, I learned a hell of a lot from that gig. I learned a lot about their history and rituals. The staff were great and so were the kids. After two years, I took a lot of those boys to my club, Christchurch, to play in the under-19 grade. After a couple of seasons, I moved on to coaching the Senior Bs.

And then, in 1988, I got a phone call offering me the chance to coach a team based on Vancouver Island, in Victoria, the state capital of British Columbia, Canada, where they had just formed a new senior team. Velox Valhallians was an amalgamation of two teams, one of which was regular working-class guys and the other a university-based side – they were looking for someone independent who would help them knit together as one club. My nephew, who was playing over there on his OE, suggested me as a candidate. The club fronted my airfares, and I paid for my wife’s, and they put us up for a couple of weeks while we found a flat. Rugby was still amateur then, so there was no money involved, but it was a valuable experience.

I also ended up coaching the provincial under-23 team and helping out two of the local high schools. April couldn’t take up her usual operating-theatre work, so she worked in the bar where the rugby players drank, and we lived off the tips. Every night, she’d come home, we’d tot up the tip money and work out what we could afford to eat. The only money I got came from running some coaching clinics for a private school. They called it an honorarium. I had no idea what that was, but it turned out to be $300, so it felt like winning Lotto. So, while I didn’t get rich from the experience, I did make some lifelong friends. We were there for ten months, and I’ve been back to visit five times.

One of the players on that team was a guy called Kevin Wirachowski, or ‘Lunk’ to his mates. I converted Lunk from a flanker to a prop forward and he went on to a long international career, earning 18 caps for Canada between 1992 and 2003. Lunk died an untimely death in 2023 at the age of just 59. By trade, he was an engineer, and through his business ScrumMaster, he got involved in making scrum machines – those padded sleds that packs of forwards practise their scrummaging against. Lunk designed a single-sled prototype machine for individual forwards to practise on, which I purchased and had sent to New Zealand, and introduced the All Blacks to. A friend of mine, another engineer named Chris Deighton, who ran a rugby supply company called Powa Products in the Manawatū town of Feilding, took the idea on a stage and developed a smaller, lighter version which was portable and could be used indoors or outdoors, that I was happy to endorse. It’s still in use around the world today.

My Canadian experience was a tremendous springboard for my coaching career, because I was coaching every day, sometimes two teams in a day, and so it gave me plenty of experience and the chance to make a lot of mistakes and then learn from them without a whole lot of pressure attached.

The police had given me leave without pay to allow me to go to Canada, but did give me two weeks’ wages so I could spend some time with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The Mounties drove me past the gang leaders’ residences, we went to a gang-owned hotel for lunch, and they showed me their ‘bugs’ (interception equipment) and let me sit in on a lot of planning meetings. We were also considering introducing mounted police in Christchurch but didn’t really know how to do it – so part of my assignment was to bring back information on what sort of horseshoes they would need, how many hours they could patrol for, what welfare issues were involved, even how to stop the horses from defecating on the pavements. I met two officers and spent a day with them as they rode their horses around Beacon Hill Park in downtown Vancouver. Later on, we did begin horseback patrols of Hagley Park in the centre of Christchurch.

On my return from Canada, I began to get invitations to coach representative teams, and progressed from Canterbury’s under-17 team to the under-18s and then to the under-21s, and also coached the Christchurch club’s senior side in 1990. In the late 1990s, my old police colleague and friend Steve Hansen was appointed to coach the senior Canterbury representative team. He’d never worked specifically with the forwards, so he got hold of me. He came round to my place in the coastal suburb of Governors Bay with a 24-pack and asked me everything about the dark arts of forward play. We even packed down some scrums a few times. (He told me years later that he had physio sessions for his neck for about three months after that!) So, I started going down to help him with the Canterbury side, and then with the Crusaders franchise in the Super Rugby competition, where Hansen was assisting the head coach Wayne Smith. I’d been an assistant coach and a head coach, but that conversation with Steve was the start of being a specialist forwards coach.

I think one of my biggest breaks came in 2000. Wayne Smith was appointed head coach of the All Blacks with Tony Gilbert as his assistant. They too wanted some help with the front-rowers, so I suggested a day-and-a-half camp at Christchurch Park, and they flew in all the front-rowers from around New Zealand they were looking at, just before the All Blacks went into camp. I’d never run a camp such as this, so I was flying by the seat of my pants a bit. It was a tough session to take because that sort of set-up doesn’t allow you to coach so much as be a drillmaster – and as you read on in this book, you’ll understand that I was never particularly comfortable just running drills because I believed players needed coaching.

While I’d worked with the All Blacks front-rowers who played for the Crusaders, it was the first time I’d met the others from around the country. Some were absolute legends in my mind, so I definitely felt a bit of imposter syndrome. It was quite humbling and daunting. Not once had it ever crossed my mind that I might become an All Blacks coach, so to have that opportunity was unbelievable. For Wayne and Tony to organise that and invite me to be involved was incredibly bold, because it very much was not the norm back then; and then to let me have the run of that day without any interference was even bolder. For me, it was a chance to peer through the looking glass at how things worked at the next level up. After that camp, Wayne and Tony began to invite me into the odd All Blacks training session to do some scrum work.

While I had left the police in 1996, it would be another eight years before I would actually be paid for my coaching work in New Zealand. So, along with three other former cops, I set up a gourmet pie company, Quentin’s of Canterbury. We took the police chef along with us and set him up in a kitchen in Christchurch. He even won a healthy food award for his pies. The company ran for a few years until the building was sold off and the chef moved to Australia, and I finally shifted into full-time coaching.

Now, while I’ve never interviewed for a coaching job, I did actually apply for one once. In 2002, there was a job going as the assistant coach for Canterbury, helping head coach Brian ‘Aussie’ McLean. Because I’d never been through a formal process before, I had to get my first-ever CV made up, so I went along to a company which would type it up for you. I went for an initial interview, but then I got a letter saying I had been unsuccessful and wouldn’t be progressing to the final interview stage. I’d been holding off making a decision on a formal offer to coach in Japan, so when I got that note, I rang the Japanese and said there was nothing stopping me from signing a contract with them.

Then Canterbury chief executive Hamish Riach’s personal assistant got hold of me to ask if I was okay to come in for my final interview the next day. I explained about the letter I’d received and she said I’d better come and see Hamish, who told me that it had been a cock-up and actually I was down to the last two with Ian Mallard. I’d signed with the Japanese by then, so I had to decline. Consequently, my only experience of applying for a coaching job wasn’t great. But I think it may have been a fortuitous clerical error – who knows what path my career would have taken otherwise?

Missing out on the Canterbury job meant the start of a long relationship with Japanese rugby. My good mate Murray Henderson, another Cantabrian, was in Japan coaching the team at Kanto Gakuin University (KGU). He had brought them over to Christchurch on tour and I had assisted with their visit here. Then I began flying over there to do some coaching with them. Murray was with the university for about six years, and that team probably made four or five grand finals and won a few of them.

The university would have about 150 players keen to be involved in the squad, and around 50,000 spectators would turn up if we reached a grand final. The Japanese are very proud of their universities – within a few minutes of meeting them, they will tell you which one they attended, so they would turn up and watch their alma mater play, especially in the finals. There was a professor at the university, Haraguchi San, who ran the rugby programme and spoke excellent English and would take us to see tourist spots around Kyoto city, including the Imperial Palace – the Japanese were always gracious and attentive hosts who looked after me well.

Then Murray was invited to coach the Sanyo professional team (later known as Panasonic, and now as the Saitama Wild Knights). It was mid-season and they were battling to stay in division one when he took over and he asked me to come and help him out – that was the job I accepted when there was that administrative cock-up with Canterbury. Sanyo were always fighting to avoid relegation from the top division of the Japanese professional competition, but under Murray’s guidance they slowly began to improve.

After a few years, Murray gave way to the former All Black Tony Brown, who came in as player-coach, and then Robbie Deans served eleven years as head coach. That Panasonic team is now the Japanese equivalent of the Crusaders Super Rugby franchise: a big reputation, and in the finals every year for over a decade. One year, I totted it up and I was in Japan for 168 days. But for the last few years I have usually gone over twice a season, for a week at a time, and then in between worked remotely, reviewing training and match-day footage.

Rugby is structured differently in Japan, with the big teams all run by major corporations. The Japanese consider that you need a lot of heart to play rugby, and if their team shows heart and resilience, they derive a lot of pride from it. At Sanyo, they would provide buses and complimentary bento boxes on a Saturday, and their staff and families would go to the rugby as a family day out. After the game, both teams would always line up and bow to each grandstand to thank the crowd for turning up to watch them play. Win, lose or draw, that was the procedure – I really liked that. I doubt any of the corporations recoup the money that they pour into their clubs, but I think they see the profit in the intangibles: television exposure, positive public relations, and the impact on their staff’s morale. (However, I think the Kiwi coaches didn’t always meet the corporate expectation that more is better. On a production line, the longer you work, the more product you deliver, but in sport the converse is often true: overtraining reduces performance over time.)

With that came an important duty: to not bring shame on the company. In Japan, not losing face is a very important part of the culture. They would rather lose the game than push the rules. A very high standard of behaviour was always expected. When I was with the Sanyo team, there was a disciplinary incident among the students at KGU, and even though it had nothing to do with the Sanyo rugby team, because there was an association between the two, we still shut down operations for three days out of shame. How you represent yourself, who you associate with, how you act on and off the field, is very important.

I think the Kiwi coaches didn’t always meet the corporate expectation that more is better. On a production line, the longer you work, the more product you deliver, but in sport the converse is often true: overtraining reduces performance over time.

That means the players tend to be extremely polite and respectful. Coming in as an elder and in a position of power, you don’t earn respect, it is given automatically. That makes it difficult, at first, to persuade the players to be honest with you and give you real feedback – but once they trusted me, I was fine. Yet I knew they would never question any decision I took. There’s always a barrier, however small, between coach and player. I’ve got enough Japanese to scrape through a coaching session, but the Japanese players are excellent, and all have conversational-level English. In the early days, the Japanese players had a choice whether to be professionals or amateurs: this was not a straightforward decision as the amateurs were guaranteed a day job with the corporation and then a job for life after retirement. They’re typically a smaller build and as a result they play a fast, nimble, open style of rugby which the crowd enjoys.

The team would be mostly comprised of locals with a few big-name imports. When I started with Sanyo, it was well before the era in which all the big names began to have their Japanese sabbaticals. But there was still a sprinkling of quality New Zealand players in the Japanese league. We had the former All Black centre Walter Little in our team; and Alama Ieremia, Tabai Matson and Scott ‘Stormie’ McLeod were all playing for other clubs. It’s been a pleasure to be involved back there and see how much the quality of the competition has improved. I kept going back, first of all, because I was asked. Second, because Robbie Deans and I had played senior rugby together in Christchurch, so when he took over, it was an easy decision to stay on. And because it wasn’t a major role, that made it easier to come and go.

After 21 years, I decided it was probably time to move on, because the coaches I was now mentoring were guys I’d coached as players when I first started. It was time they had something new. So, I told Panasonic I wouldn’t renew my contract for 2024–25. But then Steve Hansen told me he was taking on the Toyota Verblitz team, owned by the car manufacturer, and wondered if I would mentor two of their younger coaches. One of them was Nathan White, whom I’d nominated to them three years earlier as their forwards coach, when my nephew Simon Cron was the head coach and asked me for a recommendation. Now Steve has taken over from Simon, and brought along Ian Foster and the former All Blacks mental skills coach Gilbert Enoka, so it’s like getting Led Zeppelin back together for one last tour. We just need to work out who’s Robert Plant! It was an offer hard to resist. So, in October 2024 and January 2025, I flew over for a week at a time to observe and do some coaching before helping from afar.

That initial work in Japan was my toe in the water of the professional game, but my first full-time gig came courtesy, once again, of Steve Hansen.

After fellow Kiwi Graham Henry resigned from the role of head coach of the Welsh national team in February 2002, Steve was promoted from his job as forwards coach to replace him. Hansen rang me up and said, ‘I need you over here, we’re in the shit.’ I wanted to help him: my association with Steve went back a long way. His father, Des, was a huge influence on my coaching career.

Des Hansen coached locally in Christchurch, particularly as a specialist backs coach, and he was one of the first coaches who wasn’t a yeller and screamer, but who would let the players talk. Des was coaching Marist while I was playing for Christchurch, but he would invite me down to coach Marist, so I was in effect coaching our opposition. That’s how I first got to know Steve, and then he later joined the police, so I worked alongside him.

Thus, when Steve rang and asked me to come, I did. I would go over and stay with him at his house in Lisvane, north of Cardiff, for stints of five weeks at a time. The Welsh Rugby Union (WRU) was broke. They’d just built the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff and were paying out a lot of money to their regional franchises. I don’t even know if I was officially over there as part of their staff: I’ve never worked in a way in which I demanded formal contracts. But I worked with Steve full-time, and for the pre-World Cup Test matches at home I was a water boy on the sidelines.

We were preparing the team for the 2003 Rugby World Cup in Australia. I paid my own airfares to go over there, and bought my own suit which looked roughly like the team-issue suit, but the WRU did cover my accommodation and meal costs. About 18 months after the World Cup, my wife told me the WRU had actually paid some money into my account, so it was nice that they remembered me.

We trained mainly at the Australian Institute of Sport facilities used by the Canberra Raiders NRL team and stayed in two-storey units in the suburb of Kingston, about four kilometres from the centre of Canberra. We had to do our own cooking at night, so we’d get the next-door unit in for dinner and the six of us would sit around together. There was a great camaraderie between the team and the coaching staff, which included Scott Johnson as the backs coach, who was a real character. After the tournament, Steve gave me a framed, signed team jersey which is still on the wall of my home gym. And Steve and I both helped Robin McBryde, who was our hooker at the World Cup, get into coaching when he retired from playing in 2005, and he went on to be forwards coach and caretaker head coach of Wales.

On coming in as coach, Steve had sacked a lot of the older players and developed some new young talents. As the World Cup tournament went on, those youngsters got better – a lot better. Wales’ final group fixture against the All Blacks (after wins against Tonga, Canada and Italy) was probably the best game of the tournament: the All Blacks were 18 points ahead early on, but Wales really rallied, even took the lead, and played their part in a 53–37 final score. Wales then ran England close in a thrilling 28–17 quarter-final in Brisbane.

The development we saw in those players, from where that squad began the World Cup to where they finished it, was amazing. Steve had done a really good job with them. And there were players in that team, such as Adam Jones and Gethin Jenkins, who would go on to play close to 100 Tests for Wales and also play for the British & Irish Lions. Steve had already announced he was coming back to New Zealand after the World Cup, but he had set them up with some really good young players, and in 2005 they won the Six Nations, the annual tournament between England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France and Italy. That was my first World Cup and I’ve been very fortunate to go to every one since in some capacity.

My first full-time job in New Zealand rugby came that same year, when the New Zealand Rugby Union’s high performance manager Mike Chu hired me as a resource coach. He would fly me and Mick Byrne, a specialist kicking coach, around to deliver coaching sessions at provincial teams and even to high schools. I was still coaching the Crusaders’ scrum and then I began to fly up and work with the other teams too. So, I might coach the Crusaders on Tuesday, and then go north to Hamilton to work with the Chiefs on Wednesday, and they could be playing against each other on Saturday. Some coaches couldn’t quite get their heads around that, but once you gained people’s trust it was okay. I’d never go into a team meeting at another franchise unless I was asked.

Chapter 4 JOINING THE ABS

I FIRST RAN INTO Graham ‘Ted’ Henry when he was the coach of the New Zealand Secondary Schools team. He was still the headmaster of Kelston Boys’ High School in Auckland at the time, yet to make the leap into full-time coaching, and he asked me to write him a thesis about something to do with scrummaging for a Secondary Schools team he was taking to play in England and France.

I didn’t do it. Then he rang me and asked if I’d done it. ‘Yeah, I’m halfway through it.’ So, I got to work, and posted off to him about seven pages of my thoughts on what he could expect when he played England and France, and their different styles of play. Later in life when I mentioned it to him, he couldn’t remember it.

It was years later when I next ran into him. When Steve Hansen left Wales, he came back to New Zealand to reunite with Henry. After the All Blacks lost the 2003 World Cup semi-final to Australia, the New Zealand Rugby Union (NZRU) hired Henry to replace John Mitchell as the national coach. In turn, Henry recruited Wayne Smith as attack coach, had a role in the arrival of Sir Brian Lochore as a selector, and chose Hansen as his forwards coach. And Steve, in turn, persuaded Henry to get me involved in the All Blacks coaching group for the first time.

Graham offered me the job, and I accepted. Then he told me he was coming down to a Crusaders game, and could I pick him up from the airport. And that he’d been told he should go and meet Des Hansen, and could I arrange that. So, I collected him, duly took him to see Des, and then we went and watched the Crusaders play. Graham’s a smart man. He likes to give you little tests of your rugby knowledge. He warned me he’d have some questions at half-time; things like: ‘What are you seeing from that player?’

I made a few notes through the first half of the game, and offered some observations at half-time: chiefly around the intricate one-percenters of forward play. I can remember pointing out one Crusaders player who, when he was lifting players in the lineout, was stepping out of formation. Graham just sat there and nodded as I spoke, so I didn’t really know if I’d passed the test or not. But I already knew he didn’t suffer fools gladly, was a learned man and studied the game immensely. Knowing him as I do now – as a good mate and not just as a boss – I think what he was doing that day was pretty smart; he’d hired me on Steve’s recommendation and he wanted to check out just exactly who he had employed. I think I must have passed. We certainly got on really well thereafter.

The two head coaches I’ve worked under, Graham and Steve, are complete opposites. One – Graham – is a workaholic who analyses and studies everything. The other – Steve – is really instinctive and has a great eye for the game. They were such different coaches that they really complemented each other. They are both outstanding coaches, they both get there in the end, they just get there in a different way. It just shows there’s no right or wrong.

Steve had the common touch and a sense of empathy, the players loved him, and he was more relaxed about certain things – he allowed players to lead and develop leadership skills and think for themselves. The boys loved Steve no matter what, because he cared so much about them. Now I’m not saying Graham didn’t do all of that, but at the time having a leadership group wasn’t the commonplace strategy that it is now and I think Steve was in the vanguard of that shift. I’m probably more towards Henry’s end of the spectrum. I’ve got a bit of instinct, but for my own peace of mind, I need to know that I’ve covered everything. I can sift that down to bugger-all when I talk about it, but I need to do the work to know what bugger-all means.

Henry comes across as a wee bit stern to outsiders, but he’s actually a very kind, caring guy with a wickedly dry sense of humour. As I said, he doesn’t suffer fools, which I liked, and if he needs to tell you something, he will, and without any sugarcoating, and I liked that too. He was extremely smart and he worked bloody hard. You had to earn his trust, but once he trusted you, he was great to deal with. I suspect if you weren’t up to the mark, the old headmaster would come out. We never had an argument and we’re still great friends.

The two head coaches I’ve worked under, Graham and Steve, are complete opposites. One – Graham – is a workaholic who analyses and studies everything. The other – Steve – is really instinctive and has a great eye for the game. They were such different coaches that they really complemented each other.

I still remember how before the last game of the 2004 tour against France, Henry came to me after a training session and invited me along to the selection meeting for the first time. When I got there, he asked me who I’d pick as my front row. ‘Hayman, Oliver, Woodcock,’ I told him. ‘Woodcock!’ he said, ‘he’s my f—ing fifth prop!’ I sat there like a scolded schoolboy. ‘Reasons?’ he barked. I told him my reasons. ‘Accepted. Leave,’ he said. Ted would test you like that.

I had absolute confidence in Tony Woodcock, and I remember my answer to Graham distinctly because I wanted to convince him to have the same faith in a 23-year-old who had only played a handful of Test matches, having missed a whole season through injury. I ran through all the technical stuff about Tony’s game and how well he was scrummaging, and then I added, ‘You might not be quite understanding this: I’ve just scrummaged against him, and I can tell you that this kid is ready.’ I’d put my old carcass up against his, and I could feel his power, his technique and his force, and I knew everything was there to allow him to compete at Test level. Put it this way – I didn’t want to do it again!

But packing down against him gave me the confidence to back him. I still do that every so often, even though I’m 70 years old now, because sometimes you need to feel what’s going on. It’s like the final box to tick off when you’re assessing a player. The boys are always very good about it – I know they could smash me if they wanted to, but then again, that probably wouldn’t elongate their careers.

Anyway, Tony Woodcock killed his opposite number and had a magnificent game. Afterwards, Henry comes over. ‘Good selection, that.’ So, I beckoned him over to a corner of the dressing room, and said, ‘I’ll give you the tip, Ted. This kid will be the best prop in the world by the end of 2005.’

That year we played a series against the British & Irish Lions, and in the second Test in Wellington, Woodcock produced an outstanding performance – in my opinion, he was the best forward on the park that night. After the game, we were all enjoying a beer in the shed, and Henry came over and told me Woodcock was the best loosehead in the world. To which I said: ‘He’s tracking a bit ahead of time, Ted . . . remember our conversation in France last year?’ Woodcock went on to play 118 Test matches for the All Blacks.

I was involved in most of the selection meetings from then on, particularly with the forwards, and even more so when Steve Hansen became coach. I’d offer up my choice of forwards, but it was more as a starting document – the head coach gets what he wants, and that’s completely understandable. My job is that whoever gets picked, I have to get them ready, whether I agree or not. And you stand united behind that decision.

My job is that whoever gets picked, I have to get them ready, whether I agree or not. And you stand united behind that decision.

I watched my first Test as an All Blacks coach in June 2004 not from Carisbrook in Dunedin, where the team defeated England by 36 points to 3, but from home, back in Governors Bay. The NZRU had decided that they didn’t want the public seeing how many coaches were now attached to the team, so they wanted to downplay the involvement of myself and Mick Byrne, the specialist kicking coach. Their previous experiment with specialist coaches hadn’t ended well and they were worried about perceptions. Of course, nowadays there’s some 23 support staff involved with the All Blacks, about double the amount involved two decades ago.

There was even talk of putting Mick and I up in a separate hotel away from the team, although the administrators didn’t follow through on that suggestion. I’ll be honest: I was shitting myself. No different to players called up to a representative team for the first time, or someone newly promoted into a senior role, I had that self-doubt, the nagging question: ‘Am I good enough?’ It was with me for about six years. It took me that long to walk onto a field after a Test match. Until then, the players were on that side of the line, and I stayed on the other.

I think those nerves were probably a result of the brutal internal pressure that comes with being involved with the All Blacks. It’s far tougher than the scrutiny we get from the public and the media: there’s a constant pressure to strive for excellence. Every year, you had to be better than the previous year. I had that thirst for knowledge anyway, but I think it was the All Blacks that helped drive my constant search for innovation.

When you join an elite group like the All Blacks, you know that you have to earn your acceptance. Players at that level are smart. They know if you’re bullshitting, or if you’re not up to it. There’s no place for lightweights in international rugby. They became a really good team, and the group we took to the 2007 World Cup was probably one of the best I’ve ever been involved with. We were close to unbeatable in those years. It was a pretty special group of players who played some really good footy.

On the 2005 end-of-season tour we played Wales in the first week, and beat them, and the second week we made 15 changes to the starting team to play Ireland, and beat them as well, which was a brave decision from Graham Henry to develop our squad that very few coaches would have had the balls to take. He was accused of devaluing the jersey but he explained that what he wanted to achieve was to have two players in every position who were proven at Test level.

Not once, though, did we ever feel we were certainties to win a Test match. Not once would you have that confidence against a Tier 1 country. But the All Blacks usually found a way to win. I can distinctly remember my first-ever session with the forwards. There were about 18 of them in camp, and I asked them to gather around me in a circle. I knew some of that initial group thanks to that clinic I had run for Wayne Smith and Tony Gilbert, and around half of them came from the Crusaders, so I knew them a little better – but still, looking back, I chose a bizarre and quite brave way to introduce myself to them.

When you join an elite group like the All Blacks, you know that you have to earn your acceptance. Players at that level are smart. They know if you’re bullshitting, or if you’re not up to it. There’s no place for lightweights in international rugby.

I began by asking the veteran lock Norm Maxwell, who was in his last year as an All Black, who his favourite band was. He named some group I’d never heard of, but I pressed on, and asked him what he would do if he’d just seen them perform, they had left the stage, but he wanted to hear more. He gave me the obvious answer: he’d clap for an encore. I asked him to show me. So, Maxy began clapping away by himself, drawing the attention of the backs on the other side of the field who were probably wondering why the forwards were being allowed to have fun. Then, one after another, I got the other forwards to join in with the applause before I called a halt and asked Maxy how loud he had been clapping at the beginning, and to demonstrate with his hands. He set his hands wide apart. Then I asked him how hard he had been clapping at the end, and he narrowed the gap. The hooker, Anton Oliver, who was a very bright man, piped up. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Max Ringelmann – social loafing.’

Max Ringelmann was a French professor of agricultural engineering who wrote a 1913 study of ‘social loafing’ – the theory that the bigger the group, the more individual members reduced their contribution to a task. Ringelmann used as his example a tug-of-war rope, showing that there was a huge decrease in the expected output of a group pulling a rope compared to their individual efforts. Later studies suggested that while group members believed they were contributing maximum effort, they were subconsciously actually reducing their workload. Put simply, the more people in the pot, the more likely one of them will go and have a cup of tea.

I told the boys that you can’t control what your mate does, but you can control what you do, and encouraged them all to say: ‘That won’t be me.’ The forwards do a lot of hard work, and come to a scrum or a lineout, they would be prime candidates to stop and have a cup of tea. I wanted them to be aware that it was human nature, and so they would be aware of it and make a decision: ‘That’s not going to be me’. Looking back now, it was not the norm for coaches to talk like that in 2004.

The team had suffered a poor year in 2003 (losing the World Cup semi-final to Australia, with the Australian halfback George Gregan famously taunting them: ‘Four more years, boys, four more years!’), and it was an entirely new coaching staff, so I think our primary goal was to rebuild their confidence. I remember one day saying to the players that if we want to be the best forward pack in the world, we had to start today, and we were going to strive to get there, and we would get there. I think it was about giving them a bit of technique and confidence, which go hand in hand. They became an outstanding forward unit.

The English had a loosehead prop called Andy Sheridan, a behemoth of a man who stood 6 feet 5 inches tall, weighed 125 kg and was near world-class as a powerlifter. His opposite in the All Blacks was Carl Hayman, who was a touch smaller, but probably the best scrummager in the world at the time. Carl and I both avoided the media like the plague, but when we faced England at Twickenham in 2005, the media focus all week was on the impending clash of these two big men.

I remember being at training that week and having a huddle at the end and saying, ‘That’s it, boys, we’re all done.’ Then Graham Henry poked his head in and said, ‘You’ve got to be f—ing joking, are you telling me that’s it?’ I said, ‘Yes, yes, I am Graham.’ He pointed a finger at me and said, ‘You guarantee that they’ll be right on Saturday?’ I assured him they would, and he said, ‘Fine,’ and reversed out of the circle.

We played the game. We had a good day at the office, and Hayman did too. As the Herald on Sunday put it: ‘It was scrummaging at its finest – two great exponents of the art challenging each other technically and physically. There was no knockout winner. It came down to a points decision and Hayman probably just took it. There were a few scrums in the second half where Sheridan was bending. Not buckling, just bending a bit from the superior technique of his opponent.’ Hayman beat Sheridan, and the All Blacks beat England, winning a tense tussle 23–19.

After the match, we got into our suits and Hayman and Tony Woodcock, the other prop forward, came over and invited me for a walk down the tunnel and onto the hallowed Twickenham turf. Carl opened his suit jacket and got out a can for each of us, and we stood in the centre of the field and began talking about the game. Hayman and Woodcock were both naturally quite shy lads, but it was just the three of us, and we were deep in conversation when the media manager ran out and told Carl the press wanted to talk to him inside. Carl looked down, nodded to the ground, and said, ‘I’ve done all the f—ing talking I’m going to do tonight’ – and fortunately the media guy took that as a no, and left us to it. It was a special moment, just the three of us, nobody watching, to have a chat and a beer and then walk quietly back into the sheds.

Andrew Hore, a Central Otago sheep farmer who played 83 Tests as hooker between 2002 and 2013, was another whom I learned a lot from. One night in England we were walking back from a dinner and we passed a bar, and decided to drop in for a drink – Hore, Woodcock, Hayman and myself. Hore, who had been playing mostly off the bench behind Anton Oliver, said to me, ‘I need to ask you a question, old man. Why can’t I get a start for the All Blacks?’ I told him I didn’t think it was the time or the place to talk about that, but he pressed me for an answer, so I told him I didn’t think he was technically good enough yet to scrummage at the top level. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong,’ he said, ‘but are you, or are you not, the All Blacks scrum coach?’ I agreed. ‘How long have you known this about me?’ he asked. I said I’d known for a while. Then he said, ‘So when the f— were you going to tell me?’

I put my hands up and said, ‘I’ve let you down. By not wanting to confront our friendship, or deal with a tough situation head on . . .’ He said to forget that, and asked what I was going to do about it. I told him I thought it was an issue with his hips, and so we sat down the next day with the physio and the strength and conditioning coach and worked out a plan. Three weeks later, he was starting for the All Blacks.

It was a great example of both the student teaching the teacher, and of how the players felt comfortable enough to have a conversation like that. In a safe environment, they can challenge you. I thought it was wonderful and I learned a lot from that incident and I’ve had no issues with being honest with people since that moment. Because players deserve honesty, whether it’s good or bad, and if you’re honest, you can help them. In that situation, I had taken the easy way, and I was wrong, and he deserved better than that. Andrew ended up as a bloody good All Black and a good friend. Sometimes you just have to be brutally honest – but if you care about someone, then it’s easy.

I expect that in the business world, people do the same. They sugarcoat their annual reviews with their staff when they could really do with being a bit more honest. I certainly found from that day on that when I was having a one-on-one meeting with a player, I was able to tell them that I was being honest with them because I cared about them enough to tell them the truth. You can still deliver those tough messages in a pleasant fashion.

Never train mediocrity: you’re better not to train at all than train poor technique in anything. It’s about repeating good habits.

Chapter 5 THE SCRUM DOCTOR

IT TAKES FOUR YEARS’ worth of work to produce a top rugby prop forward. That theory popularised by The New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell about needing 10,000 hours to excel at a skill was never really proven, but I do know that regularly repeating good technique embeds good practice. Never train mediocrity: you’re better not to train at all than train poor technique in anything. It’s about repeating good habits. If you want a front-rower to be at their very best, and understand how their body works under pressure, then I believe four years is how long you need with them to get them to world-class standard.

I think if I’ve achieved anything in rugby, it’s been around scrum safety. In the age when I played, quite a few players suffered broken necks in scrums gone wrong. We don’t see anything like that injury toll these days. In 2015, I was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for my work in that field. I’ve served on World Rugby committees which have studied law changes to make scrums safer, and I spent two and a half years on a working group which looked at the power generated in scrums, and was involved in the work on producing the vocabulary the referee uses to control the way the two scrums come together, along with the process for the players.

When World Rugby did a study into scrummaging, they found international teams generated 12,000 newtons of power – that’s similar to being hit by a car driving at 50 kilometres an hour – at the moment where the two scrums packed in together. It was too much. The committee I was part of examined that and changed the law to include the ‘pre-bind’ – the moment where the two packs’ props, after crouching, would bind onto their opponent before engaging, making gentle contact before the referee tells them to fully engage. That delivered a lot more stability and reduced the impact force of engagement – I reckon it’s taken away about 70 per cent of the power of that initial contact. When that change was made, there was a bit of resistance, but looking back, it was an excellent move for player safety. They have control of their own movement now. I can tell you that the players, especially the front-rowers, loved it.

I also developed a 30-minute video on behalf of New Zealand Rugby (NZR) on scrum drills and safety which was sent around all the provincial rugby unions. I was also involved in NZR’s RugbySmart programme which showed coaches how to correct poor scrum technique. Each season, every coach in New Zealand has to watch the RugbySmart video to be allowed to coach. I firmly believe that the safest technique for scrummaging is also the strongest.

The talented biomechanist and sports coach Doug McClymont helped me understand what the strongest position was, biomechanically, for a player entering the scrum. If you want to visualise that perfect position, imagine going to the gym and manoeuvring into a squat rack and preparing to lift the weighted bar on your shoulders. You push your pelvis backwards, your chest proud forwards, then drop down into a squatting position, then when you come back up and stop at the point where you know you can power upwards to complete the lift, you will find yourself in a position where you have an approximately 120-degree bend at the knee. That same position from which you then power upwards to lift the bar is also the best position to generate power in a scrum. If you tilt your pelvis too far forward, your hips jam up and you can’t get your body into an effective position to generate enough forward power. This position allows a fuller range of hip movement. Once, I even coached a rugby league scrum – notorious for being merely a set piece to get the ball back into play – for half an hour, and that was the lesson I taught them.

The former Kiwis forward David Kidwell went to my old school, Hillmorton High, and was taught there by Gilbert Enoka. Kidwell was assistant coach at the Melbourne Storm NRL team when I went there to visit with Wayne Smith. When Kidwell asked if I’d take a scrum session, I thought at first he was taking the piss. Then I asked him what he wanted to achieve. ‘Minute to go. Grand final. Their ball. We’ve got to push them off it to score.’ He gave me 30 minutes, so I asked them to set up how they normally would. I didn’t change their set-up, but I explained to them on that one occasion where they wanted to generate power, how they could go about doing it. It was a really enjoyable session.

No two scrums are the same. There are variables in every single one. You have to teach your athletes to stay strong within those unpredictable movements, so that they don’t fall over, and to regain the strongest position as quickly as possible. At the point of engagement, quite often a player will over-extend or under-extend in that initial contact, but you then need to immediately adjust to get back into that ideal body position. I want to prepare players to get to that position unhesitatingly. Too many players aren’t taught properly to find that spot. They get themselves off balance, and end up in a weak position from which they try to dominate their opponent prior to the scrums engaging, and they end up with a messy, unstable scrum which inevitably collapses. The method is to repeat good technique over and over so that it feels like paint by numbers.

It starts with lining up their feet. I place a couple of pieces of insulation tape on the floor of the gym to mark the perfect foot positions at the start of a scrum (bearing in mind that everyone’s best position is slightly different). Whenever a player is in the gym for a weights session, they can come over and line their toes up on those two bits of tape. Then they set up with their chest and pelvis in the right position, crouch, and stop. Look at themselves in the mirror. Adjust their position so it’s perfect. Then they must stand up and do it again – three sets of ten every time they set foot in the gym. I want them to be able to come in and know to within an eighth of an inch their perfect set-up position. Scrummaging is a power exercise, so you need precision.

I’m aware that there are a lot of players who won’t go to that level of detail – but I want my players to do that amount of homework. Similarly, when we are on the field, I’ll pop a few golf tees in the ground to mark where the players’ feet should start and finish. The feet should come back roughly square, because if you start getting on an angle, your spine will be crooked too.

I consider myself like a golf coach. A golf coach teaches you how to hold the club properly and address the ball correctly – if you can’t do those initial steps properly, the odds of hitting the ball where you want it to go are slim. But if you can hold the club properly, and address the ball correctly, then we can start looking at your swing. When we get your swing going right and everything’s going hunky-dory, then we’ll look at how to draw or fade. It’s a series of modules. When we complete module one, we’ll move to module two, then three, then four, and put them all together. And just like a golfer, who will continually try to perfect their swing until the day they retire, you’ll keep working on making it better.

For someone to change something they’ve been doing for a long time, they have to believe the new way is better for them. As a coach, just telling them it will be better isn’t enough. They have to believe it, otherwise they’ll revert.

With a scrum, first of all we want you standing properly in the set-up position. Then you can progress to the crouching position with your feet correctly positioned. Once you can stand there and look at yourself and know you’re in the right position, then we will take you to a scrum machine, where you’ll practise binding, and where to put your legs. Back to the golf analogy. If you set up with one foot slightly in front of the other, the ball will angle in that direction when you hit it. If you’re a scrummager, if you don’t set up square, you will also find yourself on an angle.

Now many of these players may have arrived having been taught something quite different, or they’ve been allowed to slip unconsciously into bad habits. For someone to change something they’ve been doing for a long time, they have to believe the new way is better for them. As a coach, just telling them it will be better isn’t enough. They have to believe it, otherwise they’ll revert. ‘Old way, new way’ is a good technique. You take them through the new way of doing something until you think they’ve nailed it. Then suggest they go back to the old way. If they’re a lineout jumper, and they were sinking too low to jump high enough off the ground, then let them try it that way again. Generally, I do it four times with them: old, new, old, new. Then we have a discussion and I’ll ask them how they’re feeling, and what they think. And if it’s a drill where someone else is involved, I’ll ask for their input. If it’s the lineout jumper, I’ll ask the players lifting him whether he felt heavier the old way or the new way. Then during a game, if he reverts to his old style, all they have to do is tell him he’s getting heavy again, and he’ll immediately change back. I’ve found, as a system, it generally works.

Now when it comes to scrummaging, a scrum machine offers the closest possible alternative to a ‘live’ scrum. You can put weight on the back of it to simulate an opposing pack, and adjust that weight accordingly to make it harder or easier for your team. It will never be the same as live scrummaging, because of all the variables of the real thing, but it’s great for teaching basic scrum skills and practising your timing, and great for teams who don’t have enough players available to run ‘live’ drills in training – it requires only eight players, instead of sixteen. Yet its strength is also its weakness: while it’s a very stable platform for practising on, that stability means it can’t reproduce the shifting forces of a live scrum. They have their limitations, but they have become more sophisticated over time: the French rugby federation spent about 240,000 euro to develop a scrum machine designed by a man who had worked on Boeing aircraft simulators. It can do everything bar make toast but it can still never imitate the real thing.

But at one point, I worked with some scientists at Christchurch Polytechnic – from memory, using my connection with Doug McClymont – to develop pads which you could attach to a scrum machine to measure the power generated by the forwards. The pads allowed us to measure the output of the entire pack, or just the three front-row players. We could then switch individual players out of the pack, measure the changes in force generated, and calculate their individual contribution. Then I could place a small TV screen on the ground in front of a player so they could actually see what their body was doing at the same time. One year, one of my lock forwards doubled his power within one session just from using that visual feedback to improve his numbers.

Power is generated by a combination of strength and technique; the strength comes from work in the gym, but the technique component can be refined quite quickly. I liked the idea of players being able to see themselves on a screen in real time, allowing for immediate adjustments, and the ability to repeat those movements several times quite quickly. It meant they were effectively coaching themselves, and that’s a much more effective technique than me observing them and making those adjustments on their behalf. I might improve their power on the day by doing that, but the question I would pose is whether they would be able to repeat that improvement the next day. I’d argue perhaps not, because they wouldn’t have developed the deep understanding necessary to be able to repeat that particular set of movements in the heat of battle to the required standard. But by observing themselves in the act, it would be imprinted much more deeply in their brains.

As an aside, another way of having information imprint itself on a player is by touch. I was advising one coach who was talking about the body height of her players when they were in a maul situation. Every team gets told at some stage: ‘You’re too high, get lower.’ Those are just words. How do you turn them into actions, and actions that will be repeated in a game situation? In that situation, I advised that during training, she should call out ‘freeze’ and ask all her players to hold their horizontal position. Then they should drop an arm down until their fingers touched the grass – effectively using their arm as a ruler. So now they knew exactly how high they were above the turf. Now repeat the drill, ask them to freeze again, and again use their arm to measure. They had dropped six inches in height because they knew exactly where their body position was after they’d been given a guide they could actually feel. Sure, touching the ground with their fingers is too low a position to maul from, but it gave them an understanding of how high off the ground they were when mauling.

Mike Chu was the NZRU’s long-serving high performance manager. We had no systems at all for coaching scrummaging before he arrived in the job, and he wanted my recommendations about what to do. I suggested that we run a two-day camp in Christchurch for any coach who wanted to come. About 48 coaches turned up, from all levels of the game, including Warren Gatland, who later coached Wales and the British & Irish Lions.

I brought in a lot of outside experts to deliver seminars. Don Tricker, who became head of high performance for the New Zealand Academy of Sport (part of what’s now Sport New Zealand) but back then was head coach of the national softball team, was one of those guest speakers. His brief was to demonstrate different ways of coaching. Tricker asked a volunteer to sit down and gave them a hacky-sack. Then he positioned a rubbish tin behind the volunteer’s back and asked him to throw the hacky-sack over his shoulder, unsighted, into the bin. The guy was initially throwing the hacky-sack aimlessly, but Tricker began going through different methods of coaching. He had the volunteer feeling the weight of the hacky-sack, then began giving him feedback on how close he was. After that, the hacky-sack went into the bin.

Then came sports psychologist and mental skills coach Dave Hadfield, who asked for someone who was bad at spelling to come up and volunteer to write on the board. He asked them to write the word psychology. They wrote S-I-C-O-LO-G-Y. Hadfield then wrote it the right way. Then asked the guy to try again. And on about the fourth go, he got it right – and when he was asked to write the word with his original, incorrect spelling, he couldn’t remember it. It was a technique developed by a teacher in Australia working with students who had difficulty reading.

If you’ve taken them far enough with their new routine that it’s embedded, they will actively resist going back to their old methods, even in the heat of battle.

From that, I was encouraged to develop the ‘old way, new way’ technique I’ve already mentioned. About the fourth time through that routine, a player will usually say, ‘I’ll never go back there, I hate it.’ And by then, it should be imprinted that when the pressure comes on in the game, they won’t revert to type – a real issue, because if they’ve survived on poor technique, it’s natural to fall back on it. If you’ve taken them far enough with their new routine that it’s embedded, they will actively resist going back to their old methods, even in the heat of battle.

For the All Blacks, the measure of a good scrum was quality ball. We approached it differently to a lot of other teams, who used it to try to get penalties. The theory Graham Henry had was that the scrum was there to provide really good ball to give the team try-scoring opportunities. Good ball equals quick ball, so you can really allow the backs to play, or your No. 8 can pick and run. We scored a hell of a lot of tries from our set piece and that came from having a stable, steady scrum. The scrum is an ideal scoring situation: it takes 16 players and corrals them in one part of the field, allowing the remaining seven on each side a fair bit of space to produce something explosive.

I’m not interested in coaching players to exploit the scrum to earn penalties or trick the referee. We don’t want to take the game into the gutter. We want to maintain our personal ethics and standards. The game is hard enough as it is for the referee: I don’t think you need someone like me cooking up some skulduggery. You need to have ethics, and one of mine is to set a high standard as a coach and to maintain it. You’ll get 50-50 calls, and that’s understandable. For me, it’s about a high work ethic, detailed skills coaching and a high standard of teaching.

They change the scrum laws every two or three years to catch the cheats or to speed up the game, and as soon as the law changes, people are looking for ways around it. I think that approach, eventually, could threaten the role of the scrum itself in our game. There’s a risk that eventually World Rugby will say it is easier and safer to reformat the game without the scrum at all or in a much-reduced format. I believe, as coaches, we have a responsibility to protect this aspect of the game. Rugby is meant to be a sport for all shapes and sizes. If you take away the scrum, that would change that brief – there would no longer be a part in the game for the big, powerful guy.

Chapter 6 THE 2007 WORLD CUP . . . AND THAT FORWARD PASS

I’D LIKE TO RETURN to that phrase of Hansen’s about how we love the players at 7.30 pm when they go out onto the paddock, and we love them just as much when they come back into the dressing room at 9 pm – regardless of what has happened out on the field.

I’ve often told people that I was very lucky to have been one of only 50 people to be in the dressing room at the Millennium Stadium, Cardiff, at about 10 pm on 6 October 2007 – just after the All Blacks had lost the World Cup quarter-final to France. It was the game that you’ll remember for the infamous ‘forward pass decision’ from referee Wayne Barnes. The easiest way to describe the feeling of being in that shed was that it was like the death of a close family member. Next to the day I lost my mother, it was the second-hardest day of my life. It made me a lot more durable going forward; I felt I could handle anything.

But after that game, I saw Graham Henry stand up magnificently. He was outstanding in how he conducted himself. The way he represented himself and the team really made a big impression on those men. I wish I had taped the speech he gave to the players. He spoke movingly about how far the team had come in four years and how proud he was of them; he wasn’t blaming anyone, including the referee. How lucky was I to be one of the few to witness that occasion. On that day, more than any other, the rule about loving them just the same at the final whistle was true.

As an All Black, it is vitally important that you represent yourself and the team really well when you win – but you absolutely have to make sure of it when you lose. And it is the coaching group that has to set that tone – by the way we behave towards them, regardless of the result. Whether you’re comfortable with the idea of rugby players being role models or not, it’s an unavoidable fact for the players that they are representing their country. We talk to them a lot about the legacy they are leaving, but also about how they are representing those who have gone before them. We have a standard of behaviour to maintain, and rightly so.

It’s like being in a small propeller plane which hits a patch of bad turbulence. Everyone looks to the flight attendants to see how they react. They sit down, put on their seatbelts, and smile and begin chatting calmly to the people in the front seats, because they know everyone is watching and taking their cues from them. In that respect, I’d say the players are the same – they walk back into the sheds and like kids coming home from school who pick up on their parents arguing, they quickly read the mood of the room. So, I worked equally hard, win or lose, to treat them exactly the same – to thank them for their effort. They’ve gone out and worked bloody hard. Sometimes it’s good enough, sometimes it isn’t, but they deserve the same respect and the same attitude regardless. The only interruption after that defeat was a knock on the door which revealed the giant French forward Sébastien Chabal, standing there in just his shorts, his jersey in hand – he’d come to swap shirts with his counterpart. Again, how we behave in these situations is important, so I politely guided him through a sombre dressing room to complete the exchange.

Of course, the biggest memory of that game is referee Wayne Barnes’ failure to spot a forward pass in the build-up to France’s winning try. He faced huge criticism for that miss, and, I thought, rightly so. Barnes was only in his fifth or sixth year of refereeing and my view was that he had been placed into a situation, through no fault of his own, that he wasn’t capable of handling. Wayne himself has readily admitted that he froze in the spotlight. We’ve made the same mistake as coaches – we might have a golden boy we promote who is physically ready, but may prove to not yet be mentally prepared for the big occasion. And the other factor I felt that didn’t help was that Wayne did not get the support he needed from his assistant referees, or touch judges – in those days, the assistants were other referees, who were striving to get out into the middle to referee games, whereas nowadays specialist sideline officials are rightly selected for major tournaments. But ultimately, none of this matters. If we had played to our ability, we would have won that game – it’s that simple. Because that squad was the best I have ever been involved with.

We had decided that year to change things a little in the way we handled our campaign. To have the players perfectly prepared for the World Cup, we took them out of the regular Super Rugby competition for rest breaks, and to get more time in the gym and to train. Our plan was to bring them back and give them a fixed amount of football before the World Cup began. However, what we discovered when we got them back into action was that they were so highly trained that as soon as they got back into contact and playing rugby, a lot of them picked up minor injuries. As a result, while they looked a million dollars, some of them were a little underdone. Looking back, I think the lesson was that you don’t change anything in a World Cup year.

Looking back, I think the lesson was that you don’t change anything in a World Cup year.

We played Italy in our first group fixture in Marseilles, and they were not a bad side: but we still hammered them 76–14. We were playing some very good rugby and we had a pretty good side. We put 100 points on Portugal, 85 on Romania, and ‘nilled’ Scotland. Whether or not that success meant we took our eye off the ball slightly, and allowed an element of complacency to creep in, I can’t say – sometimes it’s subconscious.

After we lost that quarter-final, we all went back to the team hotel together. A lot of French-based All Blacks and Welsh fans were outside the hotel to support the boys, so a number of the guys got their kit and boots out and put it in a pile for them to take some souvenirs. We also learned a lot from the next few days about how to get our team back home from a major tournament. Nowadays, your flights are booked, then cancelled, then rebooked as you progress through a World Cup, so you always have your trip home organised, regardless of the result. But in 2007, it was an absolute shambles as the organisers scrambled to find plane tickets.

A few players left the first day, a group of about 20 departed the day after, and then another 15 the day after that. Winger Doug Howlett got himself in a bit of trouble when he drunkenly jumped on two cars outside the Hilton Hotel at Heathrow Airport. I’m not sure that would have happened if we had remained together as a group. Win, lose or draw, ever since then we have travelled as a team.

What the 2007 tournament did was set us up for the 2015 World Cup, eight years later. We went back to play France at that same stadium where we’d lost in 2007 and we ripped them apart. I was certain the genesis of that had come eight years earlier and a determination that it would not happen again. However, after we came home, the whole coaching group had no idea if we still had jobs. Our contracts were expiring, and we didn’t know if the New Zealand Rugby Union would keep Graham on as head coach. If history repeated itself, then he was probably gone, and if he was gone, so were Wayne, Steve and I, because the new coach would want his own staff. You accept that as part of the life of a professional coach.

But the NZRU made a brave, bold and ultimately correct decision by retaining Graham. It meant all the staff were retained. We had some world-class staff members there, but if they had gone weak at the knees and chopped Graham, the new group would have had to restart. Instead, I would be fortunate enough to go on to be involved in over 150 more All Blacks Test matches.

Chapter 7 OUTSIDE THE BOX: LEARNING IN UNUSUAL PLACES

IN 2024, I WAS invited to speak to a property management company. ‘We all say we want to be better next year than this year, right? So, what does that look like?’ I asked. I find people answer that question by saying something like, ‘Oh, we will plan better.’ Well, everyone does planning and preparation. That’s a given. So, what can you do that the other team isn’t doing that makes you get better?

Now, I would imagine a property management agency would need some people skills, because there would be some negotiations, and some discussions with angry tenants or difficult landlords. So, if I was them, I’d be thinking about who could help me. I’d find a debating champion, and ask them about their ability to listen and then respond quickly. Or ask a golfer and their caddy, or a rally driver and his codriver, about their listening and communication skills. You’re all in industries where you need to be capable of listening, communicating and giving feedback. Now, you might not pick up anything that proves to be of use. But you won’t know until you talk to them.

And that’s the approach I take as I search for every possible edge to make me a better coach and, in turn, better able to pass on every possible advantage to the players I coach. It’s taken me around the world, to visit everyone from Sumo wrestlers to gymnasts, to see what lessons they can offer me which I can adapt to the world of rugby. I’ve always looked at things just a wee bit differently to most.

This approach wasn’t quite a conscious decision. It was more a realisation that I knew I didn’t know enough. I’d played most of my career in the front row, so that gave me some grounding, but not enough. I had a thirst for knowledge – I still do. But I rarely went to rugby coaching clinics. I found they left me a bit flat. Instead, I started going to other sports, studying them, and then converting what I’d learned into rugby. I was always driven by the belief that I didn’t know enough. I was always searching for more knowledge to pass on to my athletes. I wanted to come up with ideas and as much information as possible for my athlete to use his body better than the bloke on the other team. I’d show new ideas to the players, and it was up to them if they used them or not – but they would know I was out there searching for that information on their behalf.

I search for every possible edge to make me a better coach and, in turn, better able to pass on every possible advantage to the players I coach. It’s taken me around the world, to visit everyone from Sumo wrestlers to gymnasts, to see what lessons they can offer me which I can adapt to the world of rugby.

The start of this ideological journey came when I attended a two-day camp in Christchurch for coaches from all sports. On the Saturday morning, they brought in an unshaven bloke who looked like he’d just come off the farm, and probably had. He spoke to us for an hour on biomechanics. It was fascinating. His name was Doug McClymont, and we remained very good friends until his recent passing.

At the time, I was part of an academy programme led by Andrew Hore, who is now the chief executive of the Blues but was then the Crusaders Academy manager. All the top young players in the region would turn up once a month, and specialist coaches for each position would work with these elite youngsters. My role was to work with the front-row forwards. One day, Andrew invited me into his office and explained he was planning for the next year’s programme. He wanted to know if there was anything that I required for my part of it. I explained to him that I had just encountered Doug McClymont at a coaching clinic, how impressed I was with him, and that I would appreciate it if he could buy me some time with Doug. He’d never heard of him, but he put it into his budget.

I got properly introduced to Doug. What had immediately struck me about him was that he was able to talk about a complex scientific subject, but put it into simplistic, practical language which meant I was immediately able to understand the concepts he was explaining. We formed a strong relationship at our first meeting and he would become a major influence on my journey to understanding how the body functions. He was really at the forefront of that work – and when you think about it, how simple is the premise of trying to find out the best possible way to use your body efficiently?

Doug was a former rugby player, a schoolteacher who had taught track and field and gymnastics and then, later in life, turned to biomechanics. He taught at the Christchurch College of Education and I’d go out there regularly to listen to his ideas. One day, he told me that every year as part of his lecturing work, he had to do a three-month practical study with his students, and asked me for ideas. That’s how, one year, they did a study on throwing a lineout ball and how best to lift players to catch it, so I could get more information for the lineout.

In 2000, Doug suggested that we write and deliver a paper to the World Sports and Science Conference in, from memory, Portugal, on scrummaging; it was later published in The Journal of Educational Research. We called it the ‘Total Impact Method’ and talked about the biomechanical principles involved in successful scrummaging, and how correct technique would reduce the risk of neck injuries. Because we understood how the body worked, we could then deduce how to create more power in the scrum.

Here’s an example of one insight I gained from Doug. I was working with the New Zealand under-20 team at the time, and he told me that he had noticed that our lineout jumpers did not know how to fully extend their bodies in the way his gymnasts did. His suggestion was to get a small rugby ball and put a Velcro patch on it. Then I should take my lineout players into an indoor sports hall, get them to lift the jumper, and mark on the wall the apogee of his jump. Then I would stick the rugby ball an inch higher than that mark, and tell them to do it again and take the ball. Each time they grabbed the ball, I should move it an inch higher up the wall. That exercise got them jumping the length of their hand higher. In this way, we had extended their maximum jump because they learned how to stretch their body fully.

So, the process there was that I had talked to a coach from another sport – who had an insight because he wanted his athletes to be tall, and stretch their frames to their fullest – and then I had asked them how they would turn that insight into a coachable moment.

Later in life, I visited Doug in retirement in the North Island, and happened to see a book on biomechanics in his office with the name Enoka on the spine. I’d worked with Gilbert Enoka, the All Blacks psychologist, for years. But it turned out the author was his brother Roger. Gilbert had never told me that Roger was a world-renowned biomechanist at the University of Colorado in Boulder. So, of course, I was straight off to Gilbert for an introduction to his brother. He became my next major influence.

I’d come up with questions such as: ‘What’s the fastest way for a human being to jump off the ground?’ If I am coaching the lineout, then I reckon that’s quite important. And yet I’d talk to other coaches and find they had never asked that question. But I could fire these questions over to Roger, and he would work through them with his class.

I wanted to know what the strongest position for a human being in a horizontal position would be to generate the most force. He explained to me the biarticular line (biarticular muscles cross two joints) – the idea that you could draw a line from the front of your shoulder, through the knee, to your toes. That’s your strongest position. That was gold for me: I knew I could coach that.

So, I brought in harness-racing equipment, because I figured if you wanted a player to put his body in a specific position, you could put an overcheck – which runs from the bridle to the harness on a horse, and stops it dipping its head too low – on a player to guide him into the right place. Balance is essential. Try bending over, then standing up again, but imagine that you are stacking your vertebrae from the bottom to the top, and your head is the last thing to come into line. Now, if someone tries to lift up one of your legs from that position, it’s much harder for them to do so because your body is centred. The vertebrae exercise teaches you to be centred. Asking someone to think about something else, then repeating the exercise, automatically puts them back out of alignment and into a weaker, less stable stance.

It’s a lesson from the martial arts – staying centred gives you power, but rugby players tend to lunge and fall off balance. So, when a player comes into a scrum, I ask them to imagine a builder’s plumb line running through the middle of their bodies and centre themselves around it. If they get it right, I can jump on their backs or try to push them sideways and they won’t budge.

Here’s a drill you can try at home. Have someone push against your forehead with their hand, and then push back against it. You can’t. Now put your tongue to the roof of your mouth and keep it there. Try it again. Then try it with your back teeth just touching together. Then try again normally. You’ll find your capacity to resist has increased exponentially. What’s happened is you’ve ignited deep intrinsic muscles. Powerlifters do it. I’ve learned a lot from how they manage their bodies. All that’s happened is that you’ve learned to switch on extra muscles. Some experts think this is rubbish, but the athlete buys into it. For example, I’ve taught players how to use their neck. I’ve got video footage of the Black Ferns doing press-ups off their heads. Not one of them could do that when we started, but they’ve learned to shorten their neck and use techniques to trigger those muscles.

On another occasion, Mick Byrne came back from overseas with the observation that the US Air Force American football team weren’t using traditional weightlifting equipment, but water weights, because they had a physically smaller team and they were looking for functional strength. I went to Plumbing World and got a 2-metre-long piece of drainpipe, filled it about three-quarters with water, and had players doing various exercises with it. It was the sort of functional strength that requires balance and coordination rather than straight-line pushing, that the older generation of players, who often had physical day jobs, already had – if you spent a day hay-baling, you already knew how to use your back and how to lift properly.

The search for knowledge took me to some unusual places. On one occasion, I spent a week in Japan watching Sumo wrestling. Every morning, I’d turn up to their gym in Tokyo and sit there by myself and just watch them train. At seven o’clock the junior boys would do their bit for an hour. Then the intermediate boys for an hour. Then the senior boys for an hour. Then they’d all leave. And then I’d get up and leave and go back to my hotel room. I never spoke a word to any of them. I did that every day for a week. On the last day, the coach – a Sumo grand master who spoke excellent English – who ran it all turned up: ‘Any questions?’ Of course, I had lots!

After every bout, they would all rush up and yell something and point at the winner. I asked him what they were saying. It turned out they’re all saying ‘pick me, pick me’, and then the winner selects who he fights next. The exception is that if we’ve just had a really good fight, I can challenge you to an immediate rematch. This self-seeding system continues; there’s a boss sitting there who mumbles something every so often, and a guy in the corner who chalks up the wins and losses, but no actual coaching as we would know it. Now the reason they are so eager is that the guy who tallies up the results will note down the fighter who has had the least bouts, and they will conclude he’s not keen enough, and he will receive some form of punishment.

I came back from Japan and didn’t yet know what I’d learned. Then, about three months later, I went back over the footage, and finally got it. It was the last thing they did before they lunged forward to commence the fight. They would curl their toes into the ground. If we hold the ground, get our power from the ground, like a bird hanging on to its perch, we are stronger. Then they would release their toes and lunge forward to attack their opponent.

On my next visit to Japan, I spent a week with Yasuhiro Yamashita, considered the world’s greatest-ever judoka, who won five gold medals in international competitions and recorded 203 consecutive victories – and never lost a bout against a non-Japanese opponent. Famously, he tore a calf in a preliminary bout at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, but still made it through to the final where his opponent, Mohamed Ali Rashwan of Egypt, refused to target the injury. Yamashita won the gold, and Rashwan won a fair play award – it’s still considered one of the finest acts of sporting behaviour in history. Yamashita went on to become a celebrated coach, and even filmed an instructional video with Russian president Vladimir Putin. He’s a fine man, and he spoke excellent English.

When I visited, he had about 140 athletes from all over the world with him. I particularly watched a former gold-medal athlete who was coming out of retirement and on a meticulous path to return to the Olympics. On day one, he did stage one; on day two, he did stage one and two, taking an hour on each small movement to ensure he had perfected it. In total, he completed five days of dedicated practice on these tiny details so that by the end of the week he was ready to perform a single specific throw. The lesson there that you could translate to rugby was that even at the elite level, you had to continue to pay attention to the very basic skills you first learned as a seven-year-old. I know in the All Blacks, if we stopped doing run-catch-pass drills in training, then our basic skills on the weekend wouldn’t be quite at their peak. Compare it to golf – you can’t say, ‘I had a great day putting today, so I won’t practise putting any more.’ You stop practising when you retire.

I’m fortunate to know Mark Ealey, who lived and played rugby in Japan from 1983 to 1994 before returning, with his wife Miyuki, to Christchurch where he lectured in Japanese and Japanese Modern History at Christchurch Polytechnic, and also translated seven books from Japanese to English. He’s managed to organise all my visits to Japan. In situations like that Japanese dojo, you sit there humbly, grateful that you’ve been allowed into such a special place. I do my homework to find out what the local protocol is – for example, I learned that at Sumo wrestling, you are meant to sit with your legs crossed, not out in front. It’s important not to offend anyone – you’ve been invited into their territory, so the least you can do is be respectful. Sometimes, I’ll take along a bit of kit to drop off, if that’s something that interests them. The beautiful thing is that I’ve never been charged anything. If you go in grateful and respectful and humble and don’t get in the way, generally they look after you and are generous with their time.

The lesson there that you could translate to rugby was that even at the elite level, you had to continue to pay attention to the very basic skills you first learned as a seven-year-old.

If a request comes back the other way, I never say no. I get lots of different coaches phoning me or organising Zoom chats – although I’ve never had a coach from a different sporting code wanting to do a Zoom session with me. People don’t see the crossover potential, but I certainly do. Nevertheless, we would get some quite impressive visitors into All Blacks camps. Multiple NRL-title-winning coach Craig Bellamy brought in his Melbourne Storm staff for a week. The former Manchester United midfielder Roy Keane was taking his coaching badges, and he needed to spend time with another international team, so he came in to spend a week with us before a Test with Ireland. It was fascinating listening to him, and he told us he’d been fined over $1 million for his on-field misdemeanours throughout his career. The international sprinter Maurice Greene came to see us once, as did a gold medallist in fencing, and we even had a visit from the great French footballer Zinedine Zidane, who came to see us when we were in Corsica for a pre-World Cup training camp in 2007. Adidas brought in Zidane for a kicking competition on the front lawn of the hotel with Dan Carter, and set up some floating goalposts out at sea, with little motorised dinghies to fetch the balls. Mick Byrne had Zidane kicking a rugby ball expertly within about 30 seconds.

There were some moments of real privilege that flowed from being associated with the All Blacks. On one trip to Italy – in November 2004, when we beat the Italians at the Stadio Flaminio in Rome – we were invited for an after-hours visit to the Vatican City, with a tour guide who showed us around the city itself, then led us into the Sistine Chapel, explained it to us, and then left us to take it all in. Whether you had religious beliefs or not, it was something quite special to experience. One of the young fellas began asking me about it. I told him I knew bugger-all but could give him an overview. This led to the incredulous question: ‘So you’re telling me the Pope’s Catholic?’ His follow-up was: ‘And how many popes are there?’ I told him he should stick with me for the rest of the tour.

Our trips to England brought several invitations to meet the British royal family and trips to Buckingham Palace for morning tea. On one occasion, it was with the late Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. We were briefed on how to address the Queen and suitable topics of conversation, and put into groups of four or five, and then she would walk around and have a little chat to each gathering. In 2015, one of the tournament sponsors built a giant 8.2-metre rugby ball which they floated down the River Thames. The Queen and the Prince were flown in by helicopter to have afternoon tea with us inside the ball.

Another trip to Buckingham Palace was hosted by Princess Anne, who was very straightforward to deal with, and we also met Lady Davina Windsor and her then husband Gary Lewis, a property developer and surfer from Gisborne, who was the first person of Māori descent to be part of the royal family (their children Senna and Tāne are 28th and 29th in line to the throne). Gary enjoyed meeting all the boys, and we had a good yarn with her too. I think it was on that visit that all the Kiwi staff who worked at the palace formed a guard of honour for the team as we walked in.

Closer to home, the Kiwi rock band Six60 have been great supporters – they’ve been to our after-match gathering at the team hotel and got a guitar out, and one time even invited us all into a room where they had set up their instruments and played some numbers from their next album. With the Black Ferns in 2022, they came to Eden Park to surprise the players and had their latest album playing in the background.

In 2003, when I was coaching Wales, our Australian attack coach Scott Johnson used his connections to bring in a series of Aussie sporting legends to talk to the team on Friday nights during the World Cup – league stars Mal Meninga, Wally Lewis and Andrew ‘Joey’ Johns, cricketer Glenn McGrath – and even retired army general Sir Peter Cosgrove. To be fair, the players didn’t know who they were, but we would show them a video before they came in to impress on them what stellar careers these men had enjoyed.

Among my other fact-finding missions was a revealing visit to the Royal New Zealand Ballet. They were performing in Christchurch, and High Performance Sport New Zealand had arranged for me to have lunch with their artistic director, an Italian guy who spoke excellent English. I took along the Crusaders forwards coach, Dave Hewett; Aussie McLean, who was the All Blacks defence coach; and Dale Stevenson, who was shot-putter Tom Walsh’s coach and whom I’d also been to watch.

We went to watch the dancers train, and were invited on stage to ask our questions. I was really interested in their response to a condition called turf toe or, to be fancy, metatarsophalangeal joint sprain, a condition affecting the big toe in athletes who sprint and jump, when their heel lifts and pressure is applied onto the toe. We had an issue with it and I knew it was a consistent problem with ballet dancers. I was interested in their prevention methods and they explained that when they jumped and landed, they made sure they did so off their second toe, and that reduced the incidence of turf toe among dancers. So, when we did mauling or scrummaging drills, I would remind the boys to put their weight onto their second toe.

The other question I had was around the way they lifted people above their heads, because I could see that would be helpful with kick-off receipts. The leading man and leading lady explained that when he lifted her, he locked his shoulders and pushed his guts out, as if he was filling up a balloon. That had the effect of locking his spine into position. I recognised his description from how powerlifters set their bodies and I was able to take it back to our players to use.

Api ‘The Piranha’ Hemara, a professional mixed martial arts (MMA) and ju-jitsu fighter from the Gold Coast, is the son of Bruce Hemara, a 1985 All Black from Manawatū and a good bloke. Bruce arranged an introduction, and so for a week, Api showed me around the MMA gyms and ju-jitsu studios of Queensland so I could ask my usual string of questions.

This time, I was interested in how an MMA fighter would get a rival fighter off their back when they are lying prone, and also how we could use other wrestling skills to ‘sack’ a jumper in the lineout, and what flexibility and agility drills they used, particularly for their hips, to help give them power. One of their drills in particular appealed to All Blacks defence coach Wayne Smith, which taught players how to spring up from lying supine (on their backs) and face the opposition. I also spent time with defence coach John Donehue, who was such an influence on the introduction of wrestling drills into rugby league in his work with the Melbourne Storm. John showed us a lot of body awareness drills, and again, we converted some of those to suit our needs in rugby.

One time I went to see the Canterbury Tactix netball franchise, thanks to their coach Marianne Delaney-Hoshek. I’d first met Marianne when she and her brother, rugby coach Glenn Delaney, were just toddlers. Her dad was a cop in the south Canterbury town of Temuka and two teenagers threw a Molotov cocktail through the window of their house; it was lucky the house didn’t burn down and everyone was safe. A few days later, I was sent down with another detective to investigate. It turned out the two kids with a grudge had got the wrong cop’s house – they had confused John Delaney with Alister ‘Joe’ Laney (the father of former Otago and Scotland fullback Brendan ‘Chainsaw’ Laney).

I had coached some netball in my younger days so I knew a wee bit about the sport, and I asked Marianne if I could come and watch her team train for a day. I explained that I was interested in peripheral vision: in a netball circle, you could simultaneously have to track an attacking player while looking up-court to see where the ball was coming from. I wanted to know whether she would advise her players to keep flicking their view between the two, or try to look at both simultaneously. She gave me a bit of gold that day: she said that players should be looking at that mid-spot between the two points. How simple is that! But from that insight, I could go back to the All Blacks and tell them about it, and it was Sam Whitelock who came up with a drill to help sharpen our peripheral vision. He would have a guy on the sideline, pretending to throw in a ball like a hooker at a lineout; each time he made that motion, Sam would indicate he had seen it, and then I stood next to Sam with a series of differently-coloured cones and kept switching them around, so he had to yell out the colour of the one in front of him. The only way to effectively complete the drill was to set your gaze in the midpoint between the two activities. I’ve since called on netball drills again to help some Wallabies players who I believed needed to develop faster footwork.

Further afield, I visited the Pittsburgh Penguins ice hockey franchise and the Pittsburgh University American football team in Pennsylvania. I also went to Tampa, Florida to visit a strength and conditioning coach who’d been given six athletes, all playing different positions, to prepare for the NFL (National Football League) Scouting Combine, a try-out event where scouts recruit players for the big league. He was working on explosive-power training with them, which included using medicine balls, and at the time I was running a lifting drill where we would hold the medicine ball above our heads. He explained that caused deceleration, whereas we wanted acceleration, so we should release the ball. So that was one of the lessons I learned from him.

A friend of mine, Mike Lane, who lives in Pittsburgh, is well connected in the American sporting scene. Last year, I had an idea about what information we could get from the quarterback in American football. It had piqued my interest when I saw on television that they had placed a chip in the ball which could measure elevation, rotation and the speed of the quarterback’s throw downfield. New Zealand Rugby had just hired former All Black hooker Corey Flynn to work with the hookers on their lineout throws. I met with Corey and we then arranged some Zoom meetings with an NFL coach and a retired quarterback. What we took away from that call was to have the hookers stand on horizontal-force plates so that we could measure how they transferred their weight when they were throwing the ball back into play.

Other initiatives have included talking to a top volleyball coach, a Zoom meeting with a world-champion trampolinist, and a trip to New York to see the Giants American football team, the Knicks basketball franchise and the Yankees baseball side, along with Graham Henry and Steve Hansen, all organised by a friend of Graham’s. The three of us travelled, with our wives, straight on from England after an end-of-year tour. All three teams were big operations and what struck me most – given how much I subscribed to the ‘we love you just as much at 9 pm’ dictum – was how, over there, the attitude was that players were hired to do a job, so they had to do it; and if they didn’t, there was a thousand others waiting to take their place. It was also at odds with our welfare-driven philosophy that they don’t actually do a lot of coaching – sure, they would have a spring camp, but in-season – and this applied particularly to the baseballers, who can play a hundred and sixty-six games a season. They are too busy just playing and so the coaching is really down to buying the best player available to do the job you want them to do. There isn’t that option in New Zealand – we don’t have a limitless player base and so we have to develop our players and I think, as a result, treat them more humanely. Every Super franchise now has at least one staff member devoted to player welfare and organising life after rugby, and we do try hard to transition players into their next careers on retirement. I’m not sure there’s much interest in that in the US.

I remember seeing a study years ago which looked at the huge sums earned by American athletes and then the surprisingly high number of them who were basically destitute within three years of retirement. When we were talking to the Yankees guy he sat at his desk, leaned over towards the three of us, and asked if we realised that the All Blacks had the best winning record in sport over a century, with a 74 per cent success rate. I actually didn’t know that at the time, so I was sitting there thinking how good that was. Then the American asked what percentage we were operating at right then, and Graham said in modern times it was about 86 per cent. He threw the papers covering his desk in the air, and declared, ‘F—ing impossible!’

The conversation moved on to other things, and then as we were walking out to the car, Graham and Steve, being the smart buggers that they are, remarked to each other: ‘If you were sitting in his chair, what do you think you’d ask after we told him we won 86 per cent of our games?’ Of course, you’d ask how we did it, wouldn’t you? But he wasn’t interested. A lot of people don’t see any correlation between their sport and any other sport – they are only interested in making comparisons within their own code. I’ve always looked outside the square.

While it was interesting to go to the States and look around and they were all gracious hosts, I’ve found over time that I’ve picked up a lot more lessons closer to home. There’s enough information and intellect in New Zealand and our neighbours in different sports and organisations that I’d advise any young coach on that same voyage of discovery I was on to stay close to home – you don’t have to go to the US to see those parallels and I don’t think I would go back to an American professional sports outfit to learn about coaching. To an extent, that work was a dead end, but until you travel down the road far enough, you won’t know that. In my line of work, when you’re pursuing these one per cent gains, you accept that there will be a certain amount of exploration that doesn’t produce anything you can use.

When I tell people I’m going to visit somewhere, they ask me: ‘What are you going to learn there?’ But the answer is that I never turn up with any preconceived ideas. I just go in and watch and listen with an open mind. I take a notebook, and tablet, and if they let me – and many places won’t – a camera to video the session. Most coaches are quite obliging, because I’m no threat to them; I’m not coming in to take their ideas to use against them.

In my line of work, when you’re pursuing these one per cent gains, you accept that there will be a certain amount of exploration that doesn’t produce anything you can use.

And I appreciate that some of the stuff I bring back might help, and some might not. You have to work it out – do we keep it, or do we delete it? I think that’s the key. You can’t be precious about it, because as the coach, you’re not there for yourself. You’re there to gather information to help the athlete to perform the best they can. Watching them get better is your reward.

Chapter 8 BECOMING WORLD CHAMPIONS, 2008–2011

IF YOU ACTUALLY SPOKE to Graham Henry at the time, he wouldn’t have been optimistic about retaining his position into 2008. We can look back now and agree that keeping him on as All Blacks coach was probably the biggest, boldest decision made by the New Zealand Rugby Union for a long time. People don’t always understand that if Graham hadn’t been recontracted, that meant all us other coaches would have gone too. So that’s Steve Hansen, Wayne Smith, myself and all the other staff – meaning someone like Nick Gill, who still remains as the All Blacks strength and conditioning coach and has become world-renowned, would have been lost to the national set-up. Instead, we kept together a world-class management team. The next man up would have been Robbie Deans. He would have brought his own staff, and we will never know how successful he could have been, but keeping Graham gave us continuity and that led to us being the best in the world for a very long time. The ripples of that retention decision were still being felt 12 years later.

Over the next four years, when it came to ranking our priorities, winning the 2011 World Cup after the disappointment of 2007 was a clear number one. The Bledisloe Cup, our annual challenge against the Australians, came second for us. And the Tri Nations, the three-cornered contest with Australia and South Africa, rated third.

The Bledisloe was so important for us because it was still fresh enough in our memories how hard we’d had to fight to win it back from the Australians in the early 2000s. The cry was always ‘Not on our watch!’, and since we regained it in 2003 with a 50–21 victory in Sydney and a 21–17 win in Auckland, the Australians have not held it since. There were a few occasions where they came close, but we had a faith and confidence in our own ability that, no matter what, we could claw our way out of bad situations and get in front by the final whistle. I think that ability must have created a subconscious feeling in some opposition teams, even when they were in front, that we would come back and get them. We played a really good style of rugby. We trusted our skills and we put some teams to the sword.

At that time, there was a tremendous pressure to win every single game we played and that posed something of a conflict of interest, because we also wanted to develop players and give people an opportunity. But Graham played a long game with his selections and developed a lot more depth in our squad. That meant we didn’t actually win the shortened Tri Nations of 2011 (the last year before it was reborn as the Rugby Championship with the inclusion of Argentina), losing their final game to Australia, but Graham was able to shuffle and experiment with his line-ups.

Leading into the 2007 World Cup tournament, we had experimented with that strategy in which our leading players would play less rugby that season so that they would, theoretically, come into it much fresher. As a result, we developed some wonderful physical specimens, but a lot of them got injured because they weren’t battle-hardened and they simply hadn’t played enough football going in. Heading into 2011, we developed the rule – which I think remains essentially the same today – that an All Black can only play five or six games in a row for their franchise, then take a week off, with the franchise coach given control of when they get that break. World Rugby ran a study showing that once you exceed a certain amount of playing time, your susceptibility to injury increases rapidly. There’s a balance to be struck between being battle-hardened for a body-contact sport, and staying mentally and physically sharp.

The captain of that 2011 team, Richie McCaw, was mentally the most driven man I’ve ever met. Academically, I believe he was in the top few per cent in New Zealand. How else could you qualify for helicopter and airplane pilot’s licences while also being an All Black? He was an extremely bright young man with a set of country values that never left him. McCaw was an extremely low-maintenance player who never gave you a problem. He was also extremely honest, which I rated highly, and if he didn’t agree with something, he would let you know – but it often led to some good conversations. He ended up being one of the crew at the Friday-night backgammon sessions, held before a Test match and attended by a few of the All Black forwards. He’d never played backgammon before, but he picked it up in a few minutes, and he was soon beating everyone.

McCaw’s desire to learn and improve was relentless. On the Thursday training session before his last-ever game as an All Black, in 2015, he still wanted to have a look on my tablet at the lineout drills we’d just completed to see what he could do better. It was the last training session of his life, but he was not clocking off. And nobody would beat him onto the training field. If we were on a bus to training, McCaw would turn up with his strapping on and boots at the ready, and while he usually sat down at the back of the bus, he’d be out on the field running extra laps before everyone else had barely got off. In contrast, another very experienced forward, Brad Thorn, was always the last off the training field – he always had some extras he wanted to do. The common characteristic between the two of them was that they were extremely driven, with a high level of self-motivation to be better today than they were yesterday.

The 2011 World Cup was at home, and that made it a little different to previous tournaments. The story of this World Cup, which even became a television movie, was how we churned through five-eighths and ended up with our fourth choice in the final, Stephen Donald, who was off whitebaiting when Graham Henry tracked him down to let him know he was in the squad. Our first choice in that crucial position, Dan Carter, was an outstanding player. Losing him to injury mid-tournament felt like losing a close family member. He was just practising simple goal kicks in front of the posts at training, and he suddenly went down with a horrific groin injury. I remember thinking, ‘That’s the end of us.’ I went out for dinner with a friend from America that night and we basically sat in miserable silence for the whole evening.

Still, we kept going. We played some of our best rugby early in that campaign, with big group-stage wins over Tonga, Japan and Canada. From that, we learned not to produce our best performances too early in a campaign. But our semi-final against Australia felt like our final, and it seemed to me that we had peaked a game too early. I remember leaning against a goalpost while the team warmed up before the final against France at Eden Park, and Graham Henry saying to me, ‘What are you seeing?’ and I said. ‘They’re f—ed, Graham.’ He said, ‘What do you mean?’ and I replied, ‘They’re dead.’ ‘Don’t f— tell me that,’ he said. But they were: they limped over the line, and just scraped an 8–7 victory.

We’d played France early in the tournament and had a really good win, and in the intervening few weeks their head coach Marc Lièvremont – dubbed a ‘lame duck’ by The Guardian – had basically faced a player revolt after losing to Tonga. But the division in the French ranks somehow galvanised Les Tricolores back into form, and the final itself proved a game that could have gone either way until Donald, who had come on for the injured Aaron Cruden, stepped up and slotted the winning goal.

I was sitting on the bench with the reserves – my role at the time on match day was to keep them calm and pass on the messages from the coaches’ box – as it all unfolded. It was quite an unusual feeling. The game ended, but it took a while to realise we had just won the Webb Ellis Cup. I now completely understand what people mean when they say some great event in their life took some time to really sink in. I can’t really remember that much from the dressing room afterwards – I have a memory of the prime minister, John Key, coming in for a beer – but it was probably only the next day, when I went to meet a cousin at the pub and took my winner’s medal with me, that it really dawned on me what we had just achieved.

We still had to do some victory parades over the next few days. That night we partied pretty hard and I can remember going down to the hotel restaurant the next morning to get some grease in my stomach to ready myself for the parade around Auckland. While I was there, Ben Franks came down in his gym gear and I had to ask him what he was up to. He’d been a reserve the day before and never made it onto the field. He explained he was walking to the nearby Les Mills gym to do a workout because he’d not done anything the day before, so he was a day behind on his fitness. It was an example of his dedication.

After Auckland, we had parades in Wellington and Christchurch; there was some talk of going further south and doing something in Dunedin but I don’t think we had another day left in us. It was an opportunity to enjoy each other’s company because we knew that same group wouldn’t ever be together again in the dressing room. We were actually meant to have a reunion of that team – until Covid came along and stopped it in its tracks. I hope it still happens because they were a special group of people.

So, then I resigned. Graham Henry was leaving, and Steve Hansen was taking over as head coach. Steve asked if I would take on an expanded role, looking after the scrums, lineouts, breakdowns and restarts. But I told him I was going to take a job with the NZRU in their coach development department to work alongside its head, Don Tricker. I felt that was the area where I could make the biggest impact on the health of the game – ensuring we had a conveyor belt of good young coaches coming through to the elite level. I’d gone out for dinner with Don to discuss the role, and shortly after signed a contract to take it on.

A month later, I was in Japan coaching with Panasonic when Steve rang and asked if I would reconsider. By this stage, we’d already had this conversation a couple of times, and I told him it was still a no, and I’d already signed a contract. Steve was dismissive of that, and asked if I would meet him the day after I got back from Japan – and if I would just give him two years to help him settle into the job. I told him I’d bring along April, and if he could get it past her, then I’d give him those two years. Somehow, he convinced her, so I signed on again. And then, of course, after that, he said we were only two years out from a World Cup, so I’d better sign on again . . . and so we went right through to 2019.

Having my wife April on board was vital – when you’re away from home for 248 days in one year (that was my record, when I totted it up), it can be hard to maintain family life and relationships. That I am still happily married is all credit to her.

I was married previously and had two children, Daniel and Anna, but separated from my first wife and met April when I was 29, so she has been with me throughout my professional career, and I wouldn’t have achieved half of what I have without her unstinting support – and her pushing me to take on new challenges. April was working as an operating-theatre nurse in Christchurch Hospital with my cousin Karen when we met. Karen’s brother was coming down with a rugby team from Wellington to watch an All Blacks Test and all the theatre staff wanted to play a game of touch against them, so they asked me to help coach and I met her through that.

April went from full-time work (she went on to become an anaesthetic technician) to casual work so that she could come away with me on most of the tours and trips. On the road, we work big days from Sunday to Thursday evening, so the partners will often hire a car and go exploring in the early part of the week, then rejoin us on Thursday night. As a result, April has seen a lot more of the countries we travel to than I have and had some great experiences – just, more often than not, without me. Around 2006, we began having Wednesday as our day off, so I would put aside some time from analysing the following week’s opposition to make sure we would go out for a nice dinner. She’s probably seen more than 150 Test matches live and has a really good instinctive understanding of the game.

April shares my love of the outdoors, and we’ve gone on a lot of cycling and tramping trips together. My love of tramping dates back to when I was 22 years old, and my brother Stu decided that we had to take on the four-day Three Passes trans-alpine tramp, which crosses the Southern Alps. The tramp takes you over the Harman, Whitehorn and Browning/Nōti Raureka passes, staying at Department of Conservation huts along the way, and brings you down to the West Coast at the back of Lake Kaniere, quite close to where our family farm was. Department of Conservation advice is to only attempt it during the summer months.

My three brothers, myself and the late Wayne Cottrell, a former All Black first five-eighth, set off and did it. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, and I swore I would never, ever do it again. We’d remembered to bring the little shovel for burying our excrement, but we didn’t have a rope or ice axe, or knowledge of how to ford rivers properly – the experience nearly killed us. The following year, Stu rang me and said, ‘That beat us. We can’t let it beat us again.’ We’ve since hiked that route 28 times, taking different parties over, including friends and rugby mates, and April has often been there to help me guide them along and give them a real outdoors education. On one occasion, I took five Japanese boys who were here on a rugby exchange up there – I arranged for a helicopter to fly us to the top of the Browning Pass Nōti Raureka and myself and a local guide walked them back down – and they were blown away by the beauty of Browning Lake and the Awatere River.

The last time we walked the Three Passes was seven years ago, when we took some neighbours across. Since then, I’ve had a new knee, and a new hip, and the other one needs replacing, so I think that instead of taking me four days, it might take 40 and require a helicopter on standby.

The Browning Pass was originally planned to be the main route from the east coast to the west, but the terrain was too difficult and instead the road was built through Arthur’s Pass. That’s the route taken by the Coast to Coast, the famous annual multisport race which traverses the breadth of the South Island from Kumara in the east to Sumner Beach in the west.

April has completed the Coast to Coast; I went along as support crew, but she’d tell you that I was pretty useless at that job. When she was taking on the final 72-kilometre cycle leg through Christchurch to Sumner Beach, myself and a mate decided to stop at a pub on the route to cheer them on. We then got stuck in traffic, so I grabbed my own bike and cycled along the way, half-pissed, the crowd clapping for me, thinking I was a competitor – and by the time I got to the finish line, she’d already finished.

I’ve also acted a few times as the ‘tail-end Charlie’ for the 33-kilometre mountain run over Goat Pass which forms the second stage. The then-race organiser, Robin Judkins, was good mates with Bob Scott, a detective senior sergeant in the Christchurch police, and Bob would recruit some of the fitter guys from the police to help out on the course. Myself and my friend Marty Taylor would ensure nobody was left on the mountain run course, a particularly challenging run which takes competitors up the Mingha River to Goat Pass, then along the Deception River to Aikens Corner. We would set off when the last competitor hit the course and run behind them. One year we came up behind a guy with a backpack on who was moving extremely slowly. We got him up to the hut at the top of the pass, the highest point of the course, at which point Marty enquired what the guy was carrying in his backpack. Every competitor had been given a six-pack of beer by Speight’s, the main sponsor, at registration, and for some reason this bloke thought he had to carry them with him over the hill. Marty grabbed them, told the guy to get running, and we enjoyed a couple of beers before we got going again to make sure he made it, finally, to the campsite at Aikens.

My children, Daniel and Anna, are back in Christchurch these days after spells in Wellington and Auckland respectively. When he was a kid, I’d often tow Dan along to coaching sessions so he really grew up around it. I got him into analysis work initially because he had a really good eye for it and a tremendous memory; he went into coaching with Northland in 2007, and was the Hurricanes’ scrum coach for 11 years, then worked in Japan with the Kubota Spears franchise, with the Tongan and Samoan national teams, and latterly with the South Island Matatū team in women’s Super Rugby and the Black Ferns national team. He’s been to three World Cups with Tonga and one with Samoa. When we’re both back in Christchurch we meet up for a game of golf, and after every Test match I was involved in, we would phone each other, no matter where we were in the world, for a chat about the game. I think we only ever failed to connect about four times in all those years. It’s a bond I’ve treasured. Now he’s with the Black Ferns, we will have a quick chat after their matches too. He’s a really good coach and I’m proud of what he’s achieved in the coaching world.

My daughter Anna is three years younger than Daniel. She’s married with three children, Jonty (twelve), Beau (nine) and Luna (three), and coaches Beau’s under-nine team.

For the past 28 years, April and I have lived in the small coastal town of Governors Bay, sitting at the end of Lyttelton Harbour. It’s a 20-minute drive over the Port Hills from Christchurch. I was working in town as a detective and we were living in the city and I was happy, or so I thought, when one day April rang me and said, ‘Remember how we’ve always wanted to live by the sea?’ I said, ‘We’ve never ever had that conversation.’ Anyway, seven days later we were house-sitting in Corsair Bay, about seven kilometres down the road from where we are now, for a couple of her colleagues who had gone to work overseas. We did that for about two years and we realised we loved living on that side of the hill, so finally we found the home we are in now, high on the slopes overlooking the bay.

When I come back from an overseas tour and drive up over that hill, I feel the air release from my lungs and my shoulders relax, knowing I am heading back to that tranquillity: we are surrounded by kererū, pīwakawaka and pūkeko, and we look directly out across the harbour to the Pacific Ocean beyond. There’s a beach at the bottom of our driveway which we walk our kayaks down to, and we get out on our mountain bikes a lot.

There are fewer than 900 people living in Governors Bay. We’ve got one pub, one café, no shops. It’s a great community to be a part of and I enjoy that it is so small. The spirit is evident in the way everyone got together to fundraise and replace our 300-metre-long jetty. I can head down to the pub for locals’ night on a Friday and have a yarn about what’s happening in the world or with the All Blacks, or, these days, the Wallabies, or head off with a few mates to the Charteris Bay golf club 15 minutes away and hack around the course.

We’ve recently bought a section about 800 metres from where we are now and we are aiming to start building a smaller, one-level home ready for retirement. We had a conversation about retirement and where we might want to live for the rest of our lives, and we talked about different countries and different cities, but in the end decided that we were already where we want to be.

Anyway, I think I would have been happy in that coach development role, and I’d like to think I would have had an impact in nurturing and helping our young coaches the same way we prepare our young players. Young players get so much more help than young coaches, and yet who is the biggest influence on whether those young players fulfil their potential? I distinctly remember saying to one of the senior officials at New Zealand Rugby, ‘Do you know who the top twenty coaches in New Zealand are? I don’t think anyone does. They could be coaching a high-school team for all I know. Isn’t that an issue for us?’

Young players get so much more help than young coaches, and yet who is the biggest influence on whether those young players fulfil their potential?

All too often, we get some former All Black dropped straight into a Super Rugby franchise, in part because of that false assumption that a good player automatically makes a good coach.

That’s not to say our list of the best emerging coaching talent would have been correct – but at least we would have had an idea of who was out there. And once we’d done that, we’d be in a position to work out how best to develop them: if there was a high-school coach with a lot of promise, then perhaps we could have found him a gig with a university team in Japan during the school holidays. He could earn some money, but he could also coach different players in a different system, and he could be out there coaching for a few hours every day. Or we might have discovered an excellent club coach whose pathway to the next level was blocked, so we could have helped him find some representative appointments. And so the next time the Blues job became available, for example, we would have had a list of well-credentialled candidates prepared for them.

All too often, we get some former All Black dropped straight into a Super Rugby franchise, in part because of that false assumption that a good player automatically makes a good coach. Often, they haven’t really done their apprenticeship, and it’s not fair on the coach themselves, nor on the players who end up with a coach who hasn’t done the yards. New Zealand Rugby may well have addressed all this in the years since and set up some good processes – I don’t know. But at the time, it was, in my eyes, certainly a major issue for the game. But, of course, Steve Hansen is a very hard man to say no to. So, I signed another two-year contract to stay with the All Blacks.

In hindsight, it’s good he was so persuasive. It gave me the opportunity to be part of a wonderful time in All Blacks history and work with some of the best players in the world. How lucky was I that he persisted?

Chapter 9 THE ALL BLACKS PHILOSOPHY

AT THE HEART OF the All Blacks was an extreme internal drive for excellence. The pressure we put on ourselves inside that camp far exceeded any that the media or the public exerted upon us. We strove for excellence every day – and we didn’t just say that, we actually did it. The goal was far bigger than any individual. Some teams claim that, but that was reality for us. Our goal was to be the greatest of all time in our chosen sport, and to set targets like that, you have to live it every day – it can’t just be something you aspire to on a Saturday evening.

If you walked into our meeting room, changing shed or training field, you might see a player who stood out because of their extreme talent, but they wouldn’t have stood out because they were more experienced or bigger or better than everyone else. We were all equals. Being a star player didn’t give you any extra rights. In the old days, if a new player came into a team at that level, the instruction would be to sit in the corner and shut their mouth, and maybe in a year or two they could poke their heads up and be allowed to say something. That attitude is long gone. In our environment, if a new player came in, we would welcome them, and one of the senior leaders would catch up with the new boy on a regular basis to make sure they were fitting in and felt that they belonged and were being welcomed. The expectations were laid out quite clearly, and the leaders led by example. If you have poor leaders, then the young players coming in see poor leadership and think that’s how they should act. Your leaders set the example.

We were all equals. Being a star player didn’t give you any extra rights.

For my part, I would usually arrange an appointment for newer players with our mental skills coach, Gilbert Enoka, to have a general discussion and chat about themselves and the environment. It can be quite overwhelming when you first come in, even brutal. Gilbert would offer some advice and guidelines and he was always excellent. I’d say very little. A lot of big organisations work in silos. We didn’t do that – I worked closely with Gilbert, with the physio, Pete Gallagher, and Nick Gill, the strength and conditioning coach. If I felt something wasn’t quite right with an athlete, then we would get together and work out what help they needed, physical, mental or technical.

I used to love the All Blacks rule book, because it was probably the smallest book in the world. Some organisations have a lot of rules and regulations, and I think if you have to have a lot of rules then you’ve probably not got your environment quite right. We only had three rules, and that was all we needed. They were:

•Be on time. Because that affects everything we do.

•Wear the right kit. Because we have responsibilities to our sponsors and supporters.

•Act like an All Black.

That’s it.

The last one, of course, is all-encompassing. We didn’t write anything down to add to that because the players knew what was right and what was wrong, and what acting like a dickhead looked like. So just act like an All Black. It’s pretty simple.

Again, a lot of organisations will set out extensive consequences for each possible infraction of their rule books. We didn’t do that either. If something didn’t go right and it was low level, then the leadership group dealt with it. If it was high level, then the management dealt with it. And if the misdemeanour was something out of the ordinary, then New Zealand Rugby would deal with it – although it was very rare that something like that would happen because it was an extremely well-behaved group of young men.

I used to love the All Blacks rule book, because it was probably the smallest book in the world. Some organisations have a lot of rules and regulations, and I think if you have to have a lot of rules then you’ve probably not got your environment quite right.

That pressure is quite intense. It can be hard to cope, but you have other people around you who are in the same boat, so it is easy to have a quick chat over a cup of coffee or a beer and ask someone how they are travelling. Once a week, we would have a management meeting and Gilbert would hand out a form with five or six questions on it on which you had to score yourself out of five:

•How are you sleeping?

•How are you nailing your role?

•How are you feeling?

•How much enjoyment are you getting from your job?

•How motivated are you?

•How valued do you feel?

If you put down a one or a two, Gilbert would have a chat with you and help you through it.

A lot of the big organisations I’ve spoken to have really taken a liking to that system and introduced it for their own staff. The specific questions don’t matter, so much as the opportunity to take a minute to take stock of where you’re at and then we can come up with a solution. The players filled them in even more regularly (their questions would be slightly different) – the strength and conditioning staff would hand out surveys up to three times a week, because we needed to know how they were feeling at all times.

To ensure I was ready for that pressure, I would train myself up for an All Blacks camp. I enjoy training anyway, but I would ensure I turned up fit, and with as much preparation and planning completed as possible, so that nothing should come as a surprise while I was there. Those intense internal expectations meant you didn’t need to overload yourself with external pressure as well. I had a simple view. The head coach needs to understand what the media and the public are saying because he’s got that public-facing role and he has extensive media duties. But for me, I hid from the media. I learned very early on in my time with the All Blacks to never read anything written about the team. I was there; I knew what had happened; I’d seen it. I didn’t need to read someone who had hardly played the game, and didn’t understand it, making comments from the hip that would only serve to piss me off. Why would I put myself through it? If they write good things, it means nothing because I don’t place any value on it; if they say bad things, it pisses you off. So, I avoided it wherever I could.

I remember going to the local pub one day and some of the locals asked if I’d heard what was on talkback that day. I had no idea, and I didn’t want to know either. It’s just noise – and you don’t need noise. One of my favourite analogies is the one about the battery – you have a battery that gets you through the week, and a bigger one that gets you through the year, and you have to work out what drains and what recharges those two batteries. Get rid of what drains it, do more of anything that tops it up. The noise, to me, was a drain and one I did not need.

As well as the rules, we had three – then later, four – key mantras which we used as a team and which really directed the way we thought about things. Those four mantras were an accurate encapsulation of the All Blacks philosophy. A lot of that was driven by Steve Hansen – simple, direct messaging was a keynote of his management style.

1. TEAM FIRST, INDIVIDUAL SECOND

If the team management was gathered together and discussing a situation, one of us would quite often ask whether we were talking about putting the team first, or the individual first. It would make us re-examine what we were doing and whether our decision was truly for the greater good. Thinking about what’s best for the team helps you make a clear decision that’s set in concrete. It removes emotions, and takes you back to fact. And the players understood that lens.

One year, we went through a whole season unbeaten, worked extremely hard, played well, managed well and everyone got on great, and the next season one of the management team was missing because he got the chop. It was one of those decisions the powers above us made for the betterment of the team, which was quite hard to take at the time, but was part of our drive to be the best.

You accept that one day it could be you that isn’t coming back. In theory, you should walk out of the door before that happens. I don’t think anyone would be able to stay if they knew they were not quite up to it. I suppose a selfish person might think they should hang on for a few more years to pay off their mortgage. But that thought never came into my mind – because it’s not about you, it’s about the organisation.

Don’t let outcomes dictate how you travel forward – it’s about process. Get on the front foot and deal with your inconvenient facts before they become a problem.

2. WE DEAL WITH INCONVENIENT FACTS

You can sweep something uncomfortable under the rug, and not address it, or you can say, ‘We are number one in the world and playing well, but we are the worst for discipline on the field and are giving away too many penalties’ – that would be an inconvenient truth and we are going to address it. When things are going well, it’s a particularly easy trap to say we’re going well and ignore anything that’s not quite right. Instead, we say these are our inconvenient facts, and we will address them. Don’t let outcomes dictate how you travel forward – it’s about process. Get on the front foot and deal with your inconvenient facts before they become a problem.

3. BRUTAL HONESTY

This is where brutal honesty comes in. Again, it is about using language that the players understand, and again, it removes emotion from the situation – we’re just discussing a fact. You can, of course, present a fact in a number of different ways: but if you deliver it in a non-threatening way, where you can discuss it collegially and together come up with solutions, then it shouldn’t be upsetting.

4. IT DOESN’T MATTER WHO GETS THE CREDIT . . . AS LONG AS THE JOB GETS DONE

Just do your job. It doesn’t matter who gets their name in the paper or who picks up the man of the match award. The most important person here is you – you know you did the work; you can look yourself in the mirror and say you performed your job to the required level. We all know that if the superstar scores four tries, someone else has done some hard yards to get them into that position. It doesn’t matter who gets the credit, as long as we achieve the goal and the job gets done. I was never interested in limelight or accolades but I was interested in what those around me thought. Seventeen players and seventeen management would conduct end-of-year reviews on my performance (the rest of the management also underwent the same exercise) – collated and analysed by an external company. If I’d ever had a bad one, I’d be mortified. If the players didn’t rate me, the job would be untenable. They meant a lot to me. You want to do everything for your players, and if you’re no longer adding value and you’re just a good bloke to have a cup of tea with – well, probably time to pull the pin. I’d be gone before they could tap me on the shoulder.

The one pointer I always got was to make sure I wasn’t doing too much, that I would never say no to people and was always out there helping other people, so I had to make sure I turned up fresh and with my battery full. I think that one always came from Graham Henry. It was very good advice, even if I didn’t always take it: I always found it hard to say no to any coach who contacted me asking if I would go and take a session for them. I found it even more difficult if the request came from an amateur team. They have limited resources and I could remember only too well my own days in their shoes.

Chapter 10 CHASING GREATNESS, 2011–2015

THE SCOTTISH SNOOKER PLAYER Stephen Hendry was a name we paid a lot of attention to. Hendry, who won seven world titles, was ranked number one in world snooker between April 1990 and May 1998. And he was in our sights.

Between the 2011 and 2015 Rugby World Cups, the All Blacks lost only three matches. In 2013, we went through the entire season unbeaten, winning 14 consecutive Test matches. Sometimes we had to scramble out of a tight situation to do so, but really good teams learn that art. We were always setting ourselves little goals: we wanted to be the first team to win Rugby World Cups home and away in succession, and to be the first rugby team to win the Laureus World Sports Award for team of the year. And during that run, our mental skills coach Gilbert Enoka told us that not only were we ranked number one in the world, we’d held that position for quite some time. He did some research and came up with a list of sportspeople and teams who’d held world number one rankings for long spells. He’d keep track of who was ahead of us and let us know when we passed them, until the only one left was Hendry, whose record stood at 418 weeks. I think our final mark was around 500 weeks. Goals such as this help keep your focus, and as a coach Steve Hansen would never permit any complacency to creep in.

I think, because I was involved with them day to day, at the time I didn’t quite realise just how good our players were during those years. It’s only with the perspective of time that I have reflected on quite how special Richie McCaw and Dan Carter were, or how outstanding Brodie Retallick, Sam Whitelock, Sam Cane, Keven Mealamu, Kieran Read, Jerome Kaino, Carl Hayman, Tony Woodcock and so many others were. My role began to change in these years. I began to have more say in selection, not just offering an opinion on the front-rowers alone, and I started to look at different parts of the game much more deeply than I had before.

In 2007, my job had been essentially to look after our scrums, and to assist with the lineout. But my role expanded after the 2011 World Cup to include the breakdown, leading our lineout work, and helping Ian Foster, one of the other assistant coaches, with the kick-offs. It was Steve Hansen’s idea to expand what I did. While I enjoyed having this much wider role, I’d been comfortable in my little patch – and it was quite daunting for me to coach some of the best athletes in the world in facets of the game I didn’t consider myself to be an expert in. So, I had to keep upskilling myself, very quickly, and working out ways to get better, because they deserved that. Just as I’d studied the scrum, I began to take a scientific approach to the lineout, and considered how we might generate more speed of movement and jump, and the strongest position mechanically to be in at the breakdown – so I returned to Roger Enoka to work with him on that. Sometimes, the science confirms your gut feeling about what’s right to coach.

Because I was working, at first, with players like McCaw, and then later with Sam Cane and Kieran Read, who were absolute champions, part of my growth was utilising their knowledge and learning from them – another example of that thin line between coach and player. There is a fair bit of intellectual property (IP) involved in a team’s lineout drills. At any one time, counting optional variations and speed changes, we might have 40 potential lineout routines in our playbook. That meant we were always concerned about protecting that IP – and so, bizarrely, in October 2006 before playing England at Twickenham on the end-of-year tour, we had a training session in a quadrangle inside the grounds of Buckingham Palace.

On the 2005 tour, there had been a well-publicised incident in which two people in camouflage gear with long-range cameras spied on one of our training sessions until they were chased away, claiming to be from the Reuters news agency. It could have been someone trying to sell something to the media, or it could have been someone associated with the English team – who knows? But it had Steve Hansen on guard, and our venue at Latymer, a private school in West London, was still very open to public view. Unhappy about the prospect of a security breach, Steve organised a lineout drills session in a big shingled yard with very high walls around it, which I imagine must have been used by the palace guards for drill practice. The venue came complete with one of their big bosses, who kept vigil for us in his uniform with the big stick tucked under his arm. Steve did something similar in France one time: we were driving along the motorway when he told the bus driver to pull over, then ordered the forwards out to run through their lineout drills on a grass verge beside the road as cars flew past.

The burden of those lineout calls, in those later years, fell on our pack leader Kieran Read. We didn’t predetermine our calls – instead, Kieran was solely responsible for calling the move as he walked into the lineout, relying on his teammates being quick to respond to his instructions. That required our forwards to be smart and tuned in, especially as we expected them to get there at a ‘tempo’ pace – and because we changed those calls every week. It meant the players had the responsibility to do a lot of weekly homework.

For the last eight years of my time with the All Blacks, I was in charge of the playbook, but Kieran would actually write it – he was a very smart guy and far more capable than I was. Because Kieran and Sam Whitelock were the experts, we had come to the arrangement that we would use their rugby brains around the lineout, and my job was to ensure they had enough time to train – then to watch the skills being executed to ensure that the highest standards were being maintained.

On a Sunday night, Kieran would design the calling system for the week ahead; we’d have a quick catch-up where I might ask the odd question, and then we would send it around all the players so they could study it. Then on a Monday, after the team review, the forwards would stay behind and Kieran and I would run a short review session with them, and then Kieran would take over and walk them through all the new options and explain them.

At the Monday-afternoon training session, we’d jump and lift and work through the movements. Many would be the same as the previous week, just with a new name, but there would always be something new to learn. That night, any of the forwards who needed a bit more help would come into the team room and would walk through all the calls and their roles, and then they might go back to their rooms and do a Q & A with their teammates to ensure they knew it. Because, come Tuesday morning, they had to know it well enough to be able to put it into practice. If someone didn’t know it by then, you’d be looking to one of the leaders to jump in and say that simply wasn’t good enough. That would rarely happen – the boys invariably did their homework and would turn up well prepared.

Because the referees are miked up, teams could hear each other’s calls on the television commentary, so most international teams would have a huddle as they went to the lineout, then send one player running over to the hooker – who throws the ball in – to tell them what the call was. Usually, there would be two calls – a regular one, and a ‘bailout’ in case the opposition had set up a different formation for their throw.

I would study the other team’s lineouts to try to decipher their calling patterns, but also to pick up any physical ‘tells’ in their body language that might be a prompt – for example, some players might have their hands on their hips if they were about to jump, but keep their hands down if they were not, or their foot position might be subtly different. At the forwards’ briefing, I might be able to tell them that if Johnny raised his hands, then this particular move might be coming. But even if you picked what the opposition were planning, if they did everything right – their jump speed, lift speed and throw timing – it would still be very difficult to beat. The converse of this was teaching our players to behave the same at every lineout so that they weren’t giving away any tips to the opposition coaches.

Now he was the head coach, Steve realised he had some changes to make in his approach. He had been experiencing a lot of conflict with the media, and he was smart enough to know that he needed to do better – they’re there every day and there’s no point engaging in a constant battle with them. Former TVNZ executive Ian Fraser is a good mate of Steve’s and he gave Steve a lot of tuition in how to present himself. Steve took all that on board, and as a result he began to enjoy a much better relationship with the press.

Steve didn’t have to change how he dealt with the players. He was an excellent man-manager and his EQ – emotional intelligence – was incredibly high. He’s a very caring person, and while he can give you a serve, he can also give you a cuddle. And he was extremely loyal to his players. They learned they could trust him: he would always do exactly what he said he was going to do. He was a man of his word, and had an innate sense of fairness. He could still remember when he’d been a player, and how that felt, so if you were injured, you weren’t forgotten. He had a remarkable ability to get a team ready for the big occasion. The players appreciated all of those qualities, and in return, they had a real affection for and loyalty to him.

We had some interesting overseas trips between the 2011 and 2015 World Cups. In July 2015, we played the first-ever All Blacks Test in Samoa, after a campaign led by the television journalist John Campbell, who argued that the islands had given so much to the sport, we owed them something back. Playing Manu Samoa in Apia was a wonderful experience. We were all given lavalavas, jandals and short-sleeved shirts. Where we could, we mingled with the locals. It was an excellent advertisement for the game.

One of our major sponsors, insurance company AIG, was headquartered in Chicago, so we went over there twice – once for a game against the US national side, and again to play Ireland in 2016. This is a game I remember very clearly because my friend Joe Schmidt, who was then the Irish coach, reminds me quite regularly that it was the first time the Irish had ever beaten the All Blacks, in 111 years and 29 attempts, a win even celebrated by then-vice president Joe Biden. Three years earlier, we’d endured a hell of a game against Ireland, needing a converted try inside the final minute to win, part of our run of 14 straight. Those two really tough games against the Irish were the start of their rise to be a real force in the international game over the years that followed. We had a great after-match function with them in Chicago – the Irish staff were wonderful people and we got on really well with them.

I remember the changing sheds and the coaches’ box were on opposite sides of Soldier Field – so far apart from each other that they took each set of coaching staff around in golf carts before taking a lift up to the top of the stand; then we had to reverse the journey at half-time and full-time, when we ended up having a cart race back. I also remember sitting in the hotel lobby having a coffee with a guy I used to coach in Canada and looking out the front window and seeing a local policeman on horseback, and one of the All Blacks getting a ride home on the back of the horse. Even over in America, they were very aware of the All Blacks brand, and they had an affection for all things New Zealand – our openness, our friendliness, and also the attitude we took to how we played the game.

We won the Rugby Championship in each of 2012, 2013 and 2014 (and the Bledisloe Cup along the way as well) but we didn’t actually win it in 2015, a tournament again shortened for the World Cup. But Steve didn’t mind experimenting with his teams – Waisake Naholo, Codie Taylor, Nehe Milner-Skudder, Lima Sopoaga and James Broadhurst all earned their first All Blacks cap in the Tests leading up to the tournament – and he was able to give players he believed needed more game time extra minutes on the field. He always stood by his decisions, regardless of the flak he might get. As usual, it was all aiming towards a World Cup campaign.

Come the 2015 World Cup in England, Steve was very careful to front-load the team. They worked very hard at the start, and did less and less as the tournament went on. It was a decision he was prepared to stand by. So, he flogged them in training before group games against Georgia and Namibia. We might have been expected to win those games by a hundred points. Instead, the scorelines were just 58–14 against the Namibians, 43–10 against the Georgians and then 47–9 against Tonga. We got the job done, but the players didn’t perform particularly well – they were knackered. We certainly copped some criticism, but we knew why we were following that strategy.

Then, as we got into the knockout phase, we began to taper back, and for our last big training session before the final, Steve limited our time on the paddock to just 40 minutes. The result was the players were fresh and eager when it came to game time. I can remember, the morning after the final, Keven Mealamu remarking to me that if he really had to, he could play another Test match the following week – that was how good he felt. It was a stark contrast to the way we had limped over the line in 2011.

We played France in the quarter-final at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff – a 2007 rematch. It was a magnificent game and I think the All Blacks produced one of the best performances of my time with them. We won 62–13, with Julian Savea scoring three of our nine tries and Dan Carter kicking eight goals. The semi-final was against South Africa, and we won by just two points, 20–18. I can remember our forwards winning a couple of crucial lineouts on their throw; in one of them, Sam Whitelock was virtually horizontal, and managed to get a fingertip to it ahead of the mighty Springbok Victor Matfield.

I went into the shed after the game and lay down on the massage table to try to recover from the tension of the game, with a stubby of beer. I was trying to pour the beer down my throat, but because I was lying on my side, half of it was missing the target. Someone grabbed my foot. It was Wayne Smith, my fellow assistant coach. ‘I’m getting too old for this shit,’ he said. ‘I can’t take this anymore. What say we don’t go to the final next week? We’ll just sit at home, you and I, in our hotel room, and watch it on TV. Better still, why don’t we record it, check the result, and then look at it if we win?’ After the final, we were out on the field together and I put my arm around him and said, ‘Just as well we turned up.’

That game, at Twickenham in London, was an arm-wrestle against the Australians until Beauden Barrett scored a long-range try to put us in control and we ended up 34–17 victors, with Carter kicking six goals and a drop goal. Once again, it all rushed past quickly: the final whistle, shaking the boys’ hands, going up for my medal, having a beer in the dressing room, a few more at the hotel with friends and family around – family from America and Canada had come over, and April and my son Daniel had both flown in – and then you wake up the next morning and it all dawns on you that you’ve won a World Cup. It’s a funny old feeling.

Then, inevitably, afterwards Steve once again came to ask me if I would give him two more years: there were so many players leaving, the argument went, that we would be setting up the poor coaches coming in to fail. So, let’s give them two years to get the team sorted out, and then we’ll hand the baton over. That, at least, was the theory. Then, of course, we’re so close to the next World Cup, you can’t leave now. Now, I suppose I am quite gullible, but also, it’s great to be asked – because it would have been very easy for them to come to me after the World Cup and tell me my time was up.

After that 2015 final, Dan Carter, Richie McCaw, Keven Mealamu, Tony Woodcock, Conrad Smith and Ma’a Nonu all retired from international rugby. It’s become the norm that our most experienced players target a World Cup, then retire or sign a final lucrative contract overseas. As a result, when a large group of your senior players retires, we know who the group who will replace them are. What we don’t know is whether they can handle the step up. There is a big gap between Super Rugby and international rugby. Some players can bridge that gap, and some can’t. And others take some time to adapt. You’re never sure until they’re out there on the field. Then we can identify how we help them – do they need more strength and conditioning work, or do they need more help on the mental side? We would treat each one as an individual and try to help them in the way they needed.

We’d prepared for the 2015 exodus. Sam Cane had been a very young player when he was introduced to the All Blacks leadership group. But Steve Hansen had known about McCaw’s impending retirement, and it made sense to have his heir come in and learn his craft as a leader while McCaw was there to guide him. And we’d long known how special Cane was. I’d first been told about him when he was just 16 years old. When there’s a good young kid out there, everyone hears about it. The rugby development officers around the country would report back regularly on the good kids they had seen.

Just as I heard about Cane when he was just a kid, I remember when future All Blacks captain Kieran Read first came to Christchurch. A mate of mine rang up to say he had this kid playing No. 8 for the Canterbury University Senior B team who was quite special. I turned up, and it felt like every coach in New Zealand was on the sideline watching this kid.

In the case of Sam Cane, I finally met him when he was part of the famous New Zealand under-20 team of 2011, the best junior representative team I think we’ve ever had: Luke Whitelock, Brodie Retallick, Codie Taylor, Brad Shields, TJ Perenara, Beauden Barrett, Charles Piutau, Lima Sopoaga, Brad Weber, Waisake Naholo, Dominic Bird, Ben Tameifuna, Steven Luatua, Francis Saili and Gareth Anscombe – many All Blacks emerged from this one team. I remember talking to the coach of that team, Mark Anscombe, Gareth’s father, after my first day working with them. Mark asked me, ‘What are you seeing?’ I told him I saw seven All Black forwards in his pack. Brad Shields would go on to play for England, Ben Tameifuna for Tonga and Steven Luatua for both New Zealand and Samoa. The only one of that starting pack who didn’t make it into international rugby was the loosehead, Solomona Sakalia, and he made the Chiefs Super Rugby squad.

Every year I would go and work with those junior international squads and spend a couple of days working on the set piece with them. Then, in the last eight years, we began bringing all the forwards into camp a day or two before the backs and I would run a set-piece coaching clinic with them. It was vital in identifying talent early. You might have 28 players and we’d invite coaches in and do a two-day camp and then a trial, and perhaps 30 coaches would turn up and observe, like watching thoroughbreds at the horse sales. I considered it the most important work I did all year, including working with the All Blacks. I was helping to ensure that the conveyor belt was in good shape and that the next wave of talent had two quality days of technical coaching on the set pieces. I’d have two analysts with cameras filming it all, and the improvement we would see over two days with that instant feedback loop was remarkable.

At all times, I had a list in the back of my head that would be constantly updating which players were in the pipeline. And when those players became All Blacks, I already knew them. I had coached them for two full days at the under-20s, I had run into them in the National Provincial Championship, and I would definitely have worked with them at their Super Rugby franchises. We would go around all the franchises, watching them train, and in some instances, with the permission of their franchise coach, taking a session with them. By the time that player arrived at the All Blacks, we had spent a significant amount of time together, which meant we could form relationships quickly and help them develop so much faster.

You might have 28 players and we’d invite coaches in and do a two-day camp and then a trial, and perhaps 30 coaches would turn up and observe, like watching thoroughbreds at the horse sales.

Every Tuesday throughout the Super Rugby season, there would be a group phone call between all the All Blacks management – coaches, physio, doctor, mental skills coach and manager. We would have a list of 50 players we were considering, and each week we would talk about every single one of them, covering their form, fitness, injuries and off-field issues. So, when it came time to select a team, we’d have had a robust debate already.

From that discussion, we might decide to go and catch up with one of those players – so I’d often fly up to visit a franchise and arrange with their coaching staff to go and have a coffee with a player we were thinking about. The Super Rugby coaches were all excellent to deal with and they would allow us into camp whenever we wanted to – and they’d often tip us into a player we ought to start watching. As an All Blacks coach, those Super Rugby coaches are your experts – they deal with the players you’re interested in every day, and they’ll tell you about their character traits, their motivation, their attitude to training, their technical strengths and weaknesses. We’d have a plan for each player we were interested in, so they knew what they needed to get better at on a weekly basis. We would give them directions about what we might want to see in their game, a specific skill we wanted them to pay attention to, and perhaps suggest a drill they could work on and even video and send to us.

With any prospective All Black, I would have talked extensively with their franchise coach about their progress. We would have all that information ready, first when we were making that decision whether to pick them as an All Black, and second, to be fully prepared when they turned up. So, when Sam Cane arrived at his first international camp, we knew exactly who he was. It was that process of development that meant that while the generations changed, the team stayed number one for those record-breaking 500 weeks.

Taking something complicated and making it simple – that’s the art of coaching.

Chapter 11 KEEPING IT SIMPLE: OR THE PITFALLS OF THE MODERN COACH

TAKING SOMETHING COMPLICATED AND making it simple – that’s the art of coaching. When I met Doug McClymont, he took the arcane world of biomechanics and explained it so that I fully understood it. I am sure I could have gone to see a hell of a lot of other biomechanists, and had them confuse the shit out of me, but Doug spoke a language I understood.

And so the biggest pitfall for the modern coach, as I see it, is overcoaching. There is a temptation to overcomplicate things. It is a return to the outdated coaching style prevalent in my playing days, where we were dictated to: told what to do, and expected to go and do it without question. Everything can be so processed and programmed: one minute of this drill, two minutes of that drill, with the coach ticking the boxes as they go. It’s understandable – you only have so much time to work with the players. But don’t be driven by the clock. You’re a coach, so coach. You’re a teacher, so teach. As I’ve said before, anyone can run drills.

Find time in your sessions for a player to respond, or ask questions, to get some deep learning. If you simply do a drill, then move on, and next week do the same drill again, if you don’t demonstrate it and run through it again, half your players won’t know what you’re talking about because you haven’t allowed learning time and time for retention. If you think a new drill takes two minutes, allow four. That allows for some learning time. When you’re finished, let them have a look at the tablet, and give them time to discuss it with their mates.

If there’s six things I want to achieve in a session, I’ll identify the two that absolutely must happen and be understood with deep clarity by the players, no matter how long it takes, even if it means discarding the other four topics. Normally, I will cover off the five or six topics I have written down, but I will have coached them far differently than merely running through drills: the easy trap is to allocate time for each of those six points, run the drills, blow a whistle and move on without analysing whether you’ve actually achieved anything. When people ask me to come down to watch them coach, I will ask them afterwards how they felt, and often the emotion is anxiety, because they’ve felt that they have had to rush through their session. It’s an unnecessary and self-imposed pressure. I know what I want to do in a training session, but that’s not to say I will get it done – the players will dictate to me how far I get. But the result is that very rarely do I feel I’ve taken two steps forward and one step back.

If there’s six things I want to achieve in a session, I’ll identify the two that absolutely must happen and be understood with deep clarity by the players, no matter how long it takes, even if it means discarding the other four topics.

To coach simple, you have to know your subject extremely well. Only when you really understand it can you boil it down to something you can pass on in a clear manner.

Someone once said to me, ‘People say you coach simple’. I could take that as someone taking the piss, or as a compliment, but the way I took it was that the players understood what I wanted because I was simple to understand. To coach simple, you have to know your subject extremely well. Only when you really understand it can you boil it down to something you can pass on in a clear manner. Then give them time to process it, to learn it properly, and away you go. And as I say, learning is motivation, and motivation is enjoyment, so they are learning, they are motivated, and because they are learning, I’m motivated as well and we all enjoy it.

For my final eight years with the All Blacks, I was tasked with coaching our lineouts, mauls, scrums, kick-offs and breakdowns. After a Test, I’d spend all day Sunday cutting up about 130 clips of different parts of the game. I might show ten of those. But you have to find those 130 to make that final edit of ten.

Steve would want some of those clips for his team review. So, he might take a couple off me. Then I’d have five or six to show the forwards, when we had our conversation. I’d have a couple more ready for one-on-one conversations. Some players would come because they thought they had to – but I don’t want that. There has to be a reason, otherwise, I’m draining your battery. To avoid that, I would have it organised. It needs to be quick, short, sharp and to the point, with a plan for moving forwards.

For example, Sam Cane. We had played a Test match against Ireland. Sam came to me and said, ‘My cleanout was shit.’ I said, ‘Yes, I hear you, but I don’t think it’s your cleanout, I think it’s your positioning of getting to the cleanout. Here’s a clip I just want to show you.’ He was getting caught side-on in the ruck, so he couldn’t properly use his power. He asked me if he should change his running lines. I got the team sheet out, and said to him there’s a guy in room 121 who is the best in the world at it, so go and talk to him, and then come back to talk to me. So, off he went to see Richie McCaw, and he came back to tell me Richie had told him not to worry about his running lines, but instead always be in a position to clean out if you have to. You have to position yourself to either catch the pass or clean out, and you’ll naturally get there. McCaw was the best in the world, so why would I try to take a stab at even answering the question? There’s your answer, I told Sam, away you go. That was my one-on-one with him complete, because I had only one thing I wanted to look at with him.

Too many coaches get tied up analysing an entire game with someone – but that has the potential to drain your players’ batteries. Now, if having a one-on-one meeting for 40 minutes every Monday night drains it a wee bit, well that’s no good. Maybe a three-minute meeting over the one critical thing, that charges the battery. Does it drain it? Does it fuel it? Just ask the question.

We used to have a two-hour management meeting every Thursday. Everyone hated it. I’d have rather poked my own eyes out with a sharp stick. I dreaded it. So, we spoke to the manager, and he adapted. We still got the work done, but inside 30 minutes, and then went for dinner and a glass of wine and a chat. And everyone loved it. One was draining the battery; one was fuelling it. We had a discussion, changed the format, and still got the work done.

I think the same applies in the business world. When I go and speak to businesses, I ask them to consider what drains and what fuels their batteries. Then they need to go and explain to their boss what is sapping their energy and why it needs to change. And they’ll find someone else who says the same. You still have to do the work, but how can you adapt it so that it stimulates them?

Back to the players: I have a responsibility to the players to keep them engaged and excited about the work. When you stop being motivated, you stop learning. Every training session, you’re striving to get better, and I am out there to make you get better. The moment you stop enjoying it, it becomes a job. I can spend a long time planning a coaching session, but these days I use that plan as a starting document. If I see something that needs attention, then we will nail it, and I don’t care how much time it eats out of my session and how much I have to get rid of. That’s the art of coaching. If you’re a coach, then coach, don’t just be a drillmaster. And beware of strength and conditioning coaches – they can get a bit above their station sometimes. I can recall in my early days as a coach telling one to take some cones and f— off down the other end of the field!

When I go and speak to businesses, I ask them to consider what drains and what fuels their batteries. Then they need to go and explain to their boss what is sapping their energy and why it needs to change.

When my son Dan rang me and said he was planning to start coaching, and asked if I had any advice, I told him two things. I think both are traps for the eager young coach. The first is not to try to teach them everything you know on day one. Some coaches try to win the players over by showing them how much knowledge they possess. So, they go in and hit them with an information scattergun to get their approval. It just confuses the shit out of them. It’s a common error, so identify it, and stop. Ask yourself, ‘How do I help them?’ Keep that in mind and you will focus on what you really need to say. Have a yarn, form a relationship, build trust – and work on the big rocks that need correcting, not the little pebbles. The second lesson came to me from the very wise Gilbert Enoka, who actually taught Dan at high school. Gilbert said to me, ‘Don’t be scared of silence.’

In my first year with the All Blacks, back in 2004, I took a session which Gilbert attended. Afterwards he said to me, ‘Jeez, I really liked how you coached today. What I particularly liked was your questions – you asked some fascinating questions of the players.’ But then he added: ‘Do you know who answered most of those questions?’ I thought for a moment, and came up with a few names. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you did.’ It was then he told me not to be scared of silence. It was a great line, and it has always stuck with me.

From then on, I carried a telescopic pole – the sort you might use for a camera – with me at training. It was useful for all sorts of things, like tapping front-rowers on the back when they were in the wrong position in the scrum, or demonstrating the best spinal alignment. But where it worked best for me was in the huddle, when I asked a question. I would rest my chin on my hands on the top of the pole and wait for the answer. It sent a crucial but subtle body-language message: I was relaxed, and not going to bite their heads off for the ‘wrong’ answer, and it dropped my eyeline below theirs, so I wasn’t trying to exert a dominant coach–player dynamic. Once the players understood I wasn’t going to answer the question for them, they realised they would have to think about it. If the silence stretched uncomfortably long, I might say, ‘Maybe I didn’t ask that question in quite the right way, so let me put it to you differently’, and put it back in their court again. Eventually, they realised they wouldn’t be ridiculed or embarrassed, whatever they said.

Now, as a coach, if you find you’ve got the same smart players answering all the time, that’s fine. Some coaches will say we have a lot of naturally shy Polynesian players who don’t like speaking up. Don’t force them – they will know when it is a safe learning environment and they will speak up in their own time. Again, it’s an easy and understandable trap: you’re nervous, and because you’ve asked the question, you know that you already know the answer. But if you jump in, you’ve not given anyone any time to think of an answer. Remember: you want to know what they know, not what you know. You’ve already got that part.

Remember: you want to know what they know, not what you know. You’ve already got that part.

Every Friday night before a Test match, I would hold a game of backgammon in my hotel room. Keven Mealamu would have a green tea. Tony Woodcock, Andrew Hore and I would have a stubby. Later, we had Richie McCaw join us. Then in the next wave, it was Kieran Read, Wyatt Crockett and Brodie Retallick and cups of tea all round. When Brodie Retallick’s mum bought him a board for his birthday, we ended up with two games running at once.

I’d put some music on. We never talked footy – unless they wanted to. We’d talk everything else but that. Then I’d go off to dinner with April, and the boys would go off and play cards. There were only four occasions when I didn’t organise the game – and on two of them, we lost the next day. On one of those occasions, Woodcock came over. ‘We’ve only got ourselves to blame,’ he said. ‘It’s not about how we played. It’s the backgammon.’ I’d forgotten about it. ‘Never again on my watch,’ I said. It became a superstition.

In the old days, there was a chasm between coach and player. These days, it’s a thin line, and I think as an assistant coach, you can afford to make that line even thinner. While you are coach and player, you’re all in it together and striving for a common goal. The development of a safe learning environment, not just physically, but psychologically, is important – and that helps narrow the gap because it permits the players to question, to challenge, to discuss.

For this inclusive approach to work, everyone involved needs to feel comfortable to speak up. I’ve found that, in general, some Polynesian athletes and some female athletes won’t contribute until they trust you and the environment that you create. That trust comes over time, and is generated from the way in which you communicate and interact with people. You need to show people that you are not going to make them look foolish or score cheap points against them. You’re not going to force anyone to take part. And then, over time, those who are naturally more retiring will start contributing.

Keven Mealamu, for instance, is one of the greatest footballers I’ve coached. He’s a really smart guy and a magnificent human being. Now for about two years, if we were waiting for a lift, he’d never walk in before me. It was a deference which probably had a cultural basis, so I would never force the issue with him, but on the day he walked into that lift before me, I thought: ‘Hallelujah’. To me, it meant that while I was nominally in a position of power, we were equal. We’ve just got different roles to play.

Now that’s not how it used to be. The coach was God. You did as you were told. When I began coaching internationally, I remember one overseas coach being asked about my methods, and replying: ‘Oh, he’s all bells and whistles.’ I remembered that. It was because I was a bit different. But I always say to young coaches: Ask them, they will know.

If you go to a player and ask the question, they’ll generally know the answer. It’s how you frame it. Instead of saying: ‘This is what happened,’ ask them ‘Well, what do you think happened here?’ It’s a big difference. So, you ask, and usually you get the right answer, and then I can say, ‘yes, so now let’s go and tidy that up’. If they don’t know, that’s fine, you’re there to help them. And if you as the coach don’t know, then you should admit that too, because you’ve got to be vulnerable. Be honest, and say ‘I don’t know, but we’ve got it on video. Let’s have a look at it and work it out together.’

Likewise, if a player comes up with a new drill, then I will explain that it has come from them; I’d never take the credit. It’s very powerful when you can show you’re open to ideas. When you’re looking for a solution to something, it’s good for your players to know that you’ll welcome their input in finding that solution.

Many years ago, when I would go anywhere and everywhere that I was asked to run a coaching session, I was driving home from taking an amateur team when I suddenly thought to myself, ‘Did I give them what they wanted?’ It sounds stupid. But for me it was a lightbulb moment that has influenced my coaching philosophy ever since. For example, recently Joe Schmidt and I held a session in Australia for ‘pathway’ coaches – that’s young coaches who are rising through the representative system. I did my preparation for that session in terms of what topics I expected to cover with them. But I actually began the session by asking them what they wanted to learn. In the old days, I would have stood up and delivered a PowerPoint presentation. Now, I had one ready this time around too, but I wanted to have a yarn to them first and say, ‘Look, you’ve probably been to a few of these conferences and gone away thinking, “I wish they’d spoken about that.” So tell me what that is, and I’ll put it up on the whiteboard here and we can talk about it.’ I’ve been around long enough that I know roughly what they will say, but I think it is a far better way of working with people who’ve come ready to listen and learn to find out what it is they really want to learn.

If I go to coach a school First XV team to take a session on the lineout, I would have previously gone along with a set of drills, run their forwards through them and driven home happy. But now, I’d rather ask them how many games they’ve played so far this season, how they’ve performed in them, and specifically what they’ve identified is going well, and what isn’t going so well. Then we can have a discussion about that, and how they think we should go about fixing it. I’ve got enough experience to be able to adapt what I have to suit that situation. That does require some confidence in your own ability to come up with a plan on the fly, especially when you know you’ve got limited time with them that’s now even shorter because you’ve spent some of it talking. But it’s worth it to walk away knowing that they have identified for themselves what needs fixing and you’ve given them the tools to do it. It works for the coaches too, because you’ve shown respect to them by asking them for their opinion and input before jumping in. It’s an approach that gives you the best bang for your buck.

Chapter 12 ONE LAST ALL BLACKS HURRAH, 2017–2019

THE VISIT OF THE British & Irish Lions in 2017 ended in a drawn series – and it was a controversial one.

The opening Test of the tour was at Eden Park, where we’d been unbeaten for 23 years. We had won 37 Tests in a row at that stadium by that point, and while the Lions were in touch at 13–8 at half-time, we got out to a 30–15 win with two tries from Rieko Ioane – our fifth consecutive victory over the Lions.

In the second Test, Sonny Bill Williams was sent off after 25 minutes – the first All Black sent off on home soil in history. I remember sitting in the coaches’ box and thinking to myself, ‘Well, at least it’s not a forward.’ And then I saw Hansen and Foster chatting away, and they leaned over and said, ‘Can you play the rest of the game with seven forwards? Because we’ve got to protect our backfield with a full set of backs.’ So, we took off one of the loose forwards, and played the rest of the game with seven forwards, which was hard work. We got right through to the last couple of minutes, and then the referee Jérôme Garcès penalised Charlie Faumuina for tackling a Lions forward in the air, and Owen Farrell kicked the winning penalty. The Guardian called it a ‘tight call’; I thought it was a decision which defied logic – Kyle Sinckler had jumped into the air just before he was tackled. It was clear to me that we had a better team – if you can play with 14 men at that level for a long period of time and be competitive, you’re a good team.

In the third Test, back at Eden Park, the Lions got a penalty near full-time to draw level at 15 apiece, and we kicked off right on full-time. One of their players went up to catch the ball, and knocked it forward to one of the other players who grabbed it in an offside position, so it should have been a penalty to us. In every game of rugby before and since, that would be a penalty to us. The referee Romain Poite awarded us one; and then the assistant referee, another Frenchman, persuaded Poite to change his mind. Everyone in the world knew it was a penalty, except one guy on the sideline who persuaded the guy in the middle to reverse his decision. It felt like Inspector Clouseau: a mind-blowing cock-up where two of the best match officials in the world decided at that moment not to adhere to the rules.

If we were winning, then the critics would say that we were peaking too early for the next World Cup. Or if someone got close to us, or beat us, they’d say the aura had gone. Given we were operating at an 85 per cent success rate, that criticism defied logic.

Instead of a penalty, Poite ruled a scrum, and a golden chance to win the game – and the series – was taken away from us. Instead, Kieran Read, in his 100th Test, had to hold up the series trophy alongside Lions skipper Sam Warburton. While it was a tied series, over three games, they were in the lead for about three minutes, and we felt robbed by some atrocious decisions. We were the better team. As we walked off down the tunnel afterwards, one of the bosses of World Rugby was overheard saying to someone ‘Wrong decision, best result.’ Steve Hansen later found out about this discussion, and was rightly incensed.

Former England and British & Irish Lions coach Clive Woodward wrote a column suggesting that we were not as good a team as everyone thought we were and that a golden era was dawning for northern hemisphere rugby. He’s always been a dial-a-commenter, and I didn’t pay much attention to that comment. It was something that was said about us almost every year. I found that we would be subjected to two recurring lines of commentary. If we were winning, then the critics would say that we were peaking too early for the next World Cup. Or if someone got close to us, or beat us, they’d say the aura had gone. Given we were operating at an 85 per cent success rate, that criticism defied logic.

We defended the Bledisloe Cup again in 2019 despite Australia beating us quite convincingly in the first game; a week later in the second game we beat them 36–0. Such a turnaround has become more commonplace in the modern game where if one team can get momentum and maintain it, they can pile on the points quite quickly. In that first game, that was what happened to us. In the second, the boys were highly motivated by fighting to retain the Bledisloe Cup. Throughout those years, it wasn’t that our performance was slipping but that other teams were getting closer to us. The French, for example, won two world under-20 championships in a row – which signals that they have a generation of world-class players coming through and also that we don’t have that distinct advantage at junior level that we once enjoyed. We would win that under-20 competition quite regularly but it’s become much more even. Look at whoever wins it, and that’s a reasonable guide to how their senior team will fare in three years’ time.

The 2018 season probably showed how competitive international rugby had become. We beat the touring French in a 3–0 series, we beat Australia twice to retain the Bledisloe Cup (and again later in the year in Yokohama, Japan), and also defeated Argentina twice in the Rugby Championship, but went down to South Africa at home for the first time since 2009, losing 34–36 in Wellington. We scored two good tries from mauls but South Africa beat us fair and square. We did beat them with a late comeback in the return game in Pretoria. And then in the autumn internationals, we had two incredibly tight games – we beat England by a point, then lost for only the second time ever to Ireland in Dublin.

The following year was World Cup year again. I thought our preparations in 2019 were very good. In the first pool game, we played South Africa and we beat them, and performed well. We eliminated their lineout maul with accurate, timely sacking, and that really reduced their attacking capacity. We also beat Canada by 63 points and Namibia by 62, with our game against Italy cancelled due to a typhoon. In the quarterfinal, we produced one of the best performances of my time with the All Blacks to smash an Irish team that was one of the tournament favourites.

And then we had England in the semi-final. England probably hadn’t played that well for the four years before, or probably in the four years after. They scored their only try after a couple of minutes, and then we essentially spent the rest of the game on defence. I remember when the final whistle went, leaning over to Ian Foster and saying, ‘We were bloody lucky to get second, you know.’ England were unbelievably good. And then the following week, they could barely catch the ball and were well beaten by South Africa, 32–12. That’s how the World Cup works. A team can produce a superlative performance out of the blue. We probably didn’t play to our absolute best – but we weren’t that bad. It’s just that they were sublime. Our previous loss in a World Cup had been 12 years earlier, in that 2007 quarter-final.

After the game, the New Zealand coaching staff went through into the England changing room and sat there for half an hour, having a beer and celebrating their win and chatting to them. Their head coach, Eddie Jones, was away talking to the media, but all the rest of his staff were there and we enjoyed their company. One of them was an Australian, Scott Wisemantel. I ran into him two years later and he said that really stuck with him, that we’d lost a World Cup and we’d still gone down to congratulate them and share a beer. But why wouldn’t we? It’s one of the elements that makes our game special.

The following week, we won the bronze-medal match against Wales. After the game against England, Steve asked me to speak in the shed. I said to them that I understood that it bloody hurt at that moment, but that we were still playing for a medal, and it was still something to be proud of. So, sure, they could be upset that night. But the next morning, they needed to be back on the training field, and preparing as well as we possibly could to play again. We won that match 40–17 (a game that marked Kieran Read, Ben Smith, Ryan Crotty, Mark Todd and Sonny Bill Williams’ last games in the black jersey) and I can clearly remember standing up on the dais and looking down at the Welsh team on the field with their heads down, and thinking, ‘This is a lot better.’

In the gym at my home in Governors Bay, I have all my World Cup jerseys framed on the wall, with the medals inside the frames. I had that 2019 jersey framed and put up alongside the others, because we still put in four years of effort to get ready for that tournament. And while we had one blip, we otherwise played pretty well.

Going into the 2019 tournament, our futures were already settled. We’d all decided that it was our last hurrah. Steve and I had been there since 2004 and we both felt it was time to give some younger coaches an opportunity. I’d reluctantly held a press conference at the Crusaders’ training ground to announce my retirement, when I would have much preferred to just quietly slip out the back door. Ian Foster was taking over, and he asked me if I was interested in staying on. I told him I was definitely out. Fozzie hired Scott McLeod, John Plumtree, Brad Mooar and Greg Feek as his assistants. I did do a little bit of mentoring in the background, though, much as Wayne Smith is doing with the current team, just to try to help a little bit.

Three years later, the All Blacks lost a Test series for the first time to Ireland, on home soil, and Fozzie came under a lot of pressure but ultimately retained his job through to the 2023 World Cup – although I thought that during that time, he was treated appallingly by the media and by New Zealand Rugby. Ian’s then-assistants, Plumtree and Mooar, were sacked and he asked me again if I would come back in to coach, and that was a tough decision to make because he was going through a difficult time, and you always want to be able to help out your mates.

My 16-year All Blacks career was a really long time to survive as a coach – a job with little security. Coaches get sacked every five minutes.

I’d very rarely say no to Fozzie, but I’d made up my mind that my time was up at All Blacks level and they needed younger and newer blood – and I was neither of those things. I suggested Jason Ryan, who I knew would do a good job and who had coached a lot of the All Blacks with the Crusaders, so would be able to make a smooth transition; I’d worked with Jason from his first day as a coach as something of a mentor to him. Fozzie also made the shrewd decision to ask Joe Schmidt to combine roles as a selector and attack coach.

When Steve and I finished up, we were thanked and presented with a gift at the annual Rugby Awards in Auckland, and that was it. I had thought that New Zealand Rugby might have come up with something to do with my passion for coaching development, but that didn’t happen. I didn’t really have any firm plans for what came next – I assumed that someone would phone up at some stage and ask me to do something. I was also quite relaxed about the possibility that if the phone never rang either, we’d survive – I wouldn’t need to get a job immediately to buy some groceries. But when I didn’t hear from New Zealand Rugby, I figured I ought to forge my own path.

My 16-year All Blacks career was a really long time to survive as a coach – a job with little security. Coaches get sacked every five minutes. I think I was extremely fortunate to be around at a time when the All Blacks had such success. I almost can’t see it ever happening again. Sport works in cycles, and it will be someone else’s turn next. But we had some very special players, a great coaching group and really good management.

As a coach, I just wanted to coach. Find your sweet spot in life . . . and stay there. That’s what I did.

And I had the best job possible. While I was a head coach with many of the teams I worked with in my amateur days, to be a head coach at that level would be the last job in the world I’d want. One reason is because they don’t coach much, if at all. Instead, they spend a lot of time dealing with the NZR board, the media, the sponsors and contracting players. It’s a lot of peripheral stuff that doesn’t involve being out on the field, and a lot of the stuff I was never interested in. But as an assistant, 99 per cent of my job was out on the grass. A whistle and a pair of boots and I was happy.

I’d learned that lesson in the police: I stayed a detective because I was out there doing the work I’d become a police officer to do. A mate made it to the rank of detective inspector and said it was the worst move he’d ever made – now he was stuck behind a desk doing paperwork. As a coach, I just wanted to coach. Find your sweet spot in life . . . and stay there. That’s what I did.

Chapter 13 LIFE AS AN ALL BLACKS COACH

AT THE START OF each rugby season, I knew we would need four players for each position in the pack to give us sufficient depth and options by the time our international campaign began, usually in June. So, I would write down four names in the order that I thought they currently ranked – although that order would change throughout the year the more rugby I saw. And if I only had two names I thought were of Test-match standard, then I knew I would have to focus on that position in particular in the months ahead of the Super Rugby campaign.

What came next would be a lot of homework. The Super Rugby season runs from February to July, and so during the first half of the year, we would spend time visiting each of the five New Zealand franchises playing in that competition – the Blues, the Chiefs, the Hurricanes, the Crusaders and the Highlanders. I would get to each of them at least twice during their campaign, to observe training, do some coaching if they asked me to, catch up with the odd player for a coffee, and talk to their staff. The physio, the other assistants and the strength and conditioning coach would be doing the same circuit because we all wanted to have a really good head-start with the players, so that when we got hold of them we were completely familiar with them and the way they operated.

Talking to the franchise coaching staff gave us a huge amount of insight we couldn’t get from anywhere else, so I’d talk to the coaches on Monday mornings after some of their games and ask them, ‘Are you seeing what I’m seeing?’ and we could have a conversation about our analysis of that weekend’s match. Hopefully we weren’t a pain in the arse for the franchises, and they found it to be a two-way street – we understood they had a competition to win and we didn’t want to get in the way of them achieving their goals. Time spent watching those teams train was always worth it. I can remember going to watch the Crusaders train and spotting a young Codie Taylor (who went on to play 96 Tests between 2015 and 2024), having a quick yarn with him, then calling Steve Hansen on the way home to tell him that we might have found ourselves another hooker.

I would, of course, also watch every game those New Zealand teams played, and spend about five hours analysing each one, particularly looking at my key areas of involvement. If I watched a game live, I’d watch it as a fan, usually at home or down at the Governors Bay pub with a pint – I wouldn’t be analysing it, I’d be trying to enjoy the moment and get lost for a few hours. Occasionally, I might think, ‘Oh, better have a look at that tomorrow’, then have another beer. The analysis came later: we used a package called Sportscode which would download every game and we could tag and code passages of play into different categories and watch multiple angles of the same incident in succession. I would spend time watching my key areas, such as the scrum, and then look at specific players’ entire involvement in a game. I would prepare a document on how those players I was interested in had performed, highlighting the good and the bad so that if one did get picked, I knew his strengths and the areas of his game I believed he needed to work on.

We would also, on occasion, get out to National Provincial Championship (NPC, the level below Super Rugby) or even club fixtures to watch a player coming back from injury to see where they were at, and just to connect with them so they knew they remained in our plans. Going down to watch games, watch players train, talking to their coaching staff and talking to the players themselves was all part of the due diligence we would undertake to offer the selectors some informed input into their decisions.

The selectors picked who they wanted – that was their job. But I wanted to give them some informed comment – if they phoned up to ask me what I was seeing, I wanted to have all my homework done. At international level, 80 per cent of coaching is in your selection; it’s imperative you get that selection right. Most importantly, you don’t want a dickhead in your team, or someone who saps the mood (although generally, once you reach that level, most of those types have been weeded out).

Once those players were selected, I’d have a package of video clips ready relating to that player, so that when he did get into camp, I could sit down with him and say, ‘Here’s some things I’ve seen you doing well, and a couple of things I wouldn’t mind showing you for work-ons’, and use that to start the conversation.

As an All Blacks coach, for almost a third of the year you’re in the routine of preparing for the cauldron of a Test match on the coming Saturday night. For most of those 130-odd days in the All Blacks camp, here’s how it would work for me.

On a match day, about five hours before kick-off, we’d go to an indoor sports hall and do a light walk-through, mainly focused on our set pieces and with the secondary aim of getting them moving. We’d load the players back onto the bus, and have a pre-game meal together when we got back, before the team went for a rest. We’d normally all arrive at the game about 80 minutes before kick-off. I’d be involved in a warm-up for the forwards, and then a team warm-up. There would be a quick huddle back in the shed, the team leadership group would have a word, and then we’d go out – we always worked on the theory, which I subscribed to, that you’d done your preparation during the week, and the players didn’t need you dribbling in their ears just before they took to the field.

For the first few years, I’d then take up my position on the sideline with the substitutes, and for the last eight years, I’d be in the coaches’ box high in the grandstand, because I needed to see the video footage of the lineouts, breakdowns, scrums and kick-offs ready for half-time, so I could be prepared to talk to the forwards if I needed to.

After the game, the boys who’d played 20 minutes or less or not been involved at all would be taken outside for a 30-minute fitness session with the trainer, Nick Gill. I’d usually go out and hold the water bottles and help him with whatever he needed. That allowed the boys who had played to have their own space in the shed before we all got involved, and it showed a little bit of love to the boys who hadn’t played that night. We’d have a team talk in the shed, pass on any announcements, and then take the bus back to the hotel where we would always have dinner with family and friends. It might be well after midnight by then, but I’d be pretty wired and it would often be after 2 am before I got to sleep. I’d be up again by 6 am to start work.

By 7 am at the latest on Sunday morning, the analysts would have delivered all the footage of the previous night’s game that I needed, and I’d get to work. I’d spend all day in the hotel room working through that footage or, if we were travelling, I’d work on it on the bus or plane. I’d be cutting up little clips to show to individuals or the group: usually about 130 from each game, but as I’ve already explained, I’d usually end up using only a handful of them. The rest were there to fall back on if required.

We would have a coaches’ meeting at 7 am on Monday, to go over the game and talk about what we’d seen. That would lead in to a team review, which Steve Hansen would run, before we split into forwards and backs reviews; I’d take the forwards meeting with some of the player-leaders. Later that day, we would get out on the field and run through anything new: lineout calls, kick-off options, any new open-field plays. It would be a light run – what we called a clarity session – because the players would still be too sore from Saturday’s game to do anything too physically taxing.

On Monday evening, we’d have another coaches’ meeting to work out our plans for training the next day, and then we would do our one-on-one meetings with the players. It was important to get those done early in the week so that we could start to look ahead, instead of harking backwards to what was done and gone.

In my early days with the All Blacks, the players would come to my room for a chat about the game and to watch some video clips, but as time went on and we knew each other better and became more comfortable, those conversations could often be done on the fly, in a lift or at reception or over a coffee at breakfast. Some weeks, it might be as few as three players, other weeks as many as eight. The younger players usually needed a bit of help and a bit of steering. You can’t underestimate the value of instilling confidence in a player: our job was helping them to understand what international rugby looked like. You’re not there to smack them – you’re there to identify an issue and devise the solution. Quite often players are desperate to tell you everything they’ve done wrong. I don’t like that and I’ll stop it before it even starts. Instead, I would say, ‘Tell me what went well?’ We’d start there, and then I’d ask what they thought they needed to work on. We would maybe come up with one thing, and then what work they would do on it, and once it was all clear, they could walk out of the room with the issue in perspective and the weight of the world lifted from their shoulders.

On a Tuesday morning, we’d have an attack meeting, which would be run by the team leaders, before heading off to a full team training session, usually working on the set piece and set-piece attacks. At the end, everyone else would come in and refuel and get on the bus and bugger off for a recovery session, usually in the pool. But the front row had to stay behind with me and do a 30-minute clinic, a technical scrummaging session. I would tell them they were allowed to do extras because they were special. For the first half of the session, the time was their own – they could do the drills they wanted and I would provide the equipment they required. We would spend the second half together going over our preparation for the team we were about to play. I considered this a hugely important session. After it finished, we would come back in a minivan to the hotel for recovery, then a weights session.

Quite often players are desperate to tell you everything they’ve done wrong. I don’t like that and I’ll stop it before it even starts. Instead, I would say, ‘Tell me what went well?’ We’d start there, and then I’d ask what they thought they needed to work on.

Tuesday evenings would be our ‘clubrooms’ night – the brainchild of Dan Carter and Wayne Smith. We’d go by bus to a local rugby club, or if there wasn’t one nearby, we’d use a room in the hotel. Everyone had to wear their own club rugby jersey, management included. Many of the All Blacks had been star young players who’d gone from First XV to Super Rugby academies into first grade, so as adults they didn’t have much affiliation with their old junior clubs. It was good to reignite that link. We would get one of the newer players to stand up and talk about their club and its history and culture. It would be 40 minutes of light-hearted fun: music would be playing, snacks on the tables, you could have a beer or a juice if you wanted, and there would be raffles. We’d have a nominated club captain and give out player-of-the-day awards – chosen by the players, not management – and have a few skits and generally the piss would be extracted from the coaching staff. Then we’d get on the bus and go out for a team dinner.

Wednesday would be a day off. The golfers would organise themselves for 18 holes on a local course (on the proviso they used carts and didn’t walk – after all, it was a rest day). The physio, Pete Gallagher, would organise a bus to take some of the others around the city for a tour and a coffee somewhere. What we didn’t want was players sitting in their rooms all day. They’d have to be back in the evening, when they would all get massages.

For the coaches, Wednesday would be the time we began looking further forward – to the game after the next one. We’d start our planning and analysis work now, otherwise we wouldn’t have time to get it done. The analysts would have done a lot of preparatory work for us, but we’d watch the opposition’s previous four games, and look at how individuals played, where their attacking threats were, what defensive pattern they used, identify spots where we felt we could attack them, and start to write up tip sheets. I’d be looking for any lineout cues, any weaknesses in their maul, where on the field we would be best to kick off to, what their scrum strategy was.

On Thursday mornings, we would have a quick indoor meeting about our defence, and then have a team session for about 20 minutes outdoors before the backs would go to the gym and the forwards would have a defensive lineout practice before following them to the weights room. The players would have a decent break over lunchtime before a full 15-on-15 team run. This would be physical, fast and tough. We’d run for about 40 minutes, every so often swapping reserves in and out, and at times it would be faster and for short spells harder than some of the actual games we played.

The aim was to stress them out both physically and mentally, and push them into difficult situations. Usually, we’d run four plays, then give them a rest, a chance to huddle up and discuss, then run another four. We would cop the odd injury at that session, but it came with the territory and I think it was well worth it. I would watch from the sidelines except when it came to the scrums, when I would run on and referee to make sure they were conducted exactly how they would be during the Test match.

They’d go back for recovery work, and then in the evening we’d go out in small groups for a walk or a meal. That was probably the peak of our week – that Thursday session was the cream on the cake of our preparations and we would effectively hand over the baton to the team leaders during that run and reduce our involvement so the players could prepare themselves for the game ahead.

On a Friday morning, there were usually some duties to attend to: sponsor functions or meetings, jersey signings, visits to schools or hospitals, or junior coaching clinics. In the afternoon, we’d hold the captain’s run, generally at the stadium where we would be playing. It truly was a captain’s run – the captain, or at least whoever was playing number ten, would dictate what he wanted as the team ran through a no-contact session of patterns and game scenarios. The players might be rewarded with something sweet, cakes or similar, in the sheds afterwards. Then it was Saturday, match day, and so we went again.

This would be our routine for about 16 weeks a year: a three-week Test series in June, then the six games of the Rugby Championship (two each against Australia, South Africa and Argentina), and then a six- or seven-week end-of-season tour to the northern hemisphere. This has absolutely no science behind it, but I believe the reason a northern hemisphere team has only once ever won a World Cup (England in 2003) is because they simply do not have the practice of being in camp together for long periods of time.

We are so used to travelling and living in each other’s pockets for 16 weeks of every year that when it comes to a World Cup, six weeks together in camp isn’t anything different to what we’re already used to doing. We are also experienced with adapting to changing time zones – we might be travelling to Argentina, flying in from New Zealand via Chile then, after that Test match against Argentina, moving on for a 26-hour flight via São Paolo to Johannesburg, taking an internal flight to somewhere like Port Elizabeth to play the South Africans; and the kick-off times aren’t consistent either – the French favour a 9 pm start, the Springboks 4 pm. As you get older, it gets harder – they chuck you some melatonin tablets and sleeping pills, but otherwise you just have to get on with it. The northern teams don’t experience it anywhere near as much as we do – for a Six Nations game, they’re probably away for a night and then home, and their end-of-year tour may only be three Test matches. I can’t help but think that gives us a significant upper hand when it comes to the big dance.

Chapter 14 WORKING REMOTELY

HANMER SPRINGS IS A beautiful resort town about 130 kilometres from Christchurch, known for its thermal hot pools. It also has fast fibre internet – better than what we had at our home in Governors Bay – so that was where for three years I did most of my work for World Rugby, Major League Rugby (MLR) in the US and the Japanese Top League (known now as League One). I’d finished with New Zealand Rugby in March 2020, and I picked up contracts with the two competitions, and with the sport’s governing body. The commute to Hanmer took me two hours, and I’d sequester myself there at our holiday home for a couple of days each week, popping out for a coffee every time I needed a screen break. It was a truly remote job – I never actually went to an MLR game in the flesh.

The Americans were in the early stages of development, with a new professional competition. They’d brought in former international referees to get their system working, and they wanted me as an analyst to work with their referees and coaches. A lot of them had limited time and resources compared to their Super Rugby equivalents, so I wanted to help with what I thought would be their ‘big rocks’ impeding progress – I ran some Zoom clinics with the coaches, and suggested some skills and drills I thought might help.

The Japan Top League had me working in a similar role, analysing every lineout and every scrum in each of their top-division fixtures, marking the referee’s decision correct, incorrect or inconclusive, and writing a summary of what had happened. I would also take the odd Zoom call with their coaches and referees to discuss technique and approach to the set pieces.

Kiwi coach Joe Schmidt had been appointed World Rugby’s director of rugby and high performance, and he asked me to come in and lessen the load on their head of referees, Joël Jutge, by taking on some of his analytical work. I would watch every Six Nations and Rugby Championship game, with World Rugby supplying me six different camera angles of each one. During the Six Nations, I would hold a Zoom meeting with the coaches every Tuesday morning, and then one with the referees in the evening, and discuss what we were working on and which areas needed tidying up. I’d do a general presentation to the referees, and if one of them had a specific issue they could talk to me privately or I would pass on ideas to Joël.

When I was analysing Major League Rugby, Japan Top League and Six Nations simultaneously, that meant about 17 games a weekend being sent over to me. Considering I would watch everything twice, that would mean looking at over a thousand scrums and lineouts every weekend and making a judgement on every single one. Watching that much footage gave me a fairly sharp eye for detail and analysis. But I never said I was right, I just offered up what I saw and hoped it would help referees make better decisions and coaches to instil good behaviours. Part of the brief was looking for bad intentions – did a front-rower’s foot slip, or was that scrum collapsed on purpose? Was I seeing patterns of behaviour that needed to be discouraged? Some coaches could find it hard to accept that I was a neutral who just wanted the best for the game.

So, for three years, that was my work – as well as continuing to help out the Panasonic club (formerly Sanyo) in Japan, as I have for two decades. I’d make one trip over there a year and the rest of the time work remotely, watching footage from training and games and helping all their forwards coaches. Watching all those decisions week after week, I can tell you that, encouragingly, very few of the referees’ calls could be described as 100 per cent wrong. Most were right, some were 50-50 calls, and others you could understand how the referee had reached their decision, and know that perhaps with the benefit of review, he might have made a different call.

Way back in 1988, when I was a young coach in Canada, I would often have to referee the games of the high-school teams I coached because of a shortage of match officials. I was useless. I understood the game, but I was always getting in the way of play. What that experience gave me was an appreciation of just how difficult it can be to make a decision when you’re at ground level with bodies getting in the way. It’s a completely different perspective from sitting in the grandstand and seeing everything. I think every coach should go and referee a couple of games to broaden their understanding of the game. My brief, unsuccessful refereeing career gave me some insight into their role and an enduring empathy for them. The emerging referee I most like the look of is a Georgian named Nika Amashukeli, who I think will be world-class: confident, competent, and not too reliant on his assistants or the television referee to make his decisions.

That mixture of work all came to a halt in 2022, when I had to go back into the All Blacks camp for one Test in Auckland against Ireland, after three of the coaches went down with Covid and Ian Foster asked me to help out. Joe Schmidt – who had stood down from the World Rugby job in 2021 to return to New Zealand – and I came in for a week. And then after that I was invited to be the forwards coach for the Black Ferns at the 2021 World Cup (played in 2022). World Rugby considered that I had a conflict of interest (and I was too busy anyway), so I stood down for three months.

I think every coach should go and referee a couple of games to broaden their understanding of the game. My brief, unsuccessful refereeing career gave me some insight into their role and an enduring empathy for them.

Returning to the All Blacks when I thought that stage of my life was all over was quite surreal. Foster and his assistants John Plumtree and Greg Feek had all gone down with Covid. Schmidt was a selector, so he got roped into running the last few days’ preparations for the Test, and brought me in with him. On the day of the game, Foster and Plumtree both came out of isolation, feeling absolutely knackered but able to sit in the box.

What I took from the experience was savouring being back in the shed once more. I’d never thought I’d get to go back into an All Blacks changing room again, so it was rather special to sit there and have a beer with Sam Cane afterwards. Sam said to me, ‘How do you feel?’ And I said, ‘I feel bloody good, because I’ve now got one more Test than Hansen, and he’ll never catch me.’ We had a laugh about that. I went on to Dunedin with them to prepare for the next Test, and did a couple of days with them until Greg Feek came back from Covid and took over from me. I went home – and immediately went down with Covid myself. I think Joe caught it too.

It was the usual situation: a mate calls, they’re in the shit, so you do whatever they ask you to do. It was the same as ever, really – I turned up and carried on as if I had never been away. They had all the equipment I usually used laid out for me, and I caught up with all the same staff from before; there were a couple of new players, but I’d worked with them all at the lower levels at some point.

Greg came back, and I just quietly went away – but it was a nice way to finish to get one final Test match. Fortunately, it was a victory over Ireland, which was great. Going back was a bonus, and not least because I’d never imagined being in an All Blacks shed even once, let alone 218 times. I had a quiet moment that day to think how privileged I was to be invited so often into a shed that’s a hallowed space which very few people get invited into, apart from the opposition, the occasional prime minister and sometimes someone’s family if it’s their 100th Test.

I knew for certain it was for the last time. Or at least, I thought I did – I’ve learned over the years that you can never say never, because I’d said I would never work with a team again, and never take a full-time job again, and two years later that’s precisely what I did.

I went back to my job with World Rugby in time for the men’s World Cup in France in 2023. I spent 60 days with the senior tournament officials and the referees in a hotel about nine kilometres from the centre of Paris. I made it along to only one game, the tournament opener, in the flesh, and I managed to watch the final in a little Parisian bar with April. The rest I saw, sometimes up to four games a day, in the same hotel conference room. I’d watch them with the tournament bosses, and sometimes Schmidt’s successor as director of rugby, Welshman Phil Davies, the former Leeds, Worcester and Cardiff coach, might join us.

As well as my analytical role on the set piece, part of my role was to offer a coach’s view of any incidents in the game. I would also sit in on many of the referees’ performance reviews, which they would conduct with their assistants, the television match official and their referees coach, offering input if they wanted it. The only time I really got out was when I was invited to take a session with the under-20 team of the Paris club Stade Français.

My time with World Rugby came to an end when Joe Schmidt called me again with another job offer. This time, it was to ask if I would go and help him with the Wallabies, where he had been appointed as head coach, to help him through an 18-month period through to the visit of the British & Irish Lions in 2025. But I think even if Joe hadn’t rung, the time was right to step away. I’d spent three years in the role, and it felt like enough. I hoped I had made a slight difference – I still get referees getting in touch now wanting to discuss specific incidents or interpretations and I am always happy to help them.

Chapter 15 A VERY SHORT RUNWAY: THE BLACK FERNS, 2022

THE BLACK FERNS COACH Glenn Moore had resigned suddenly, only a few months before a home World Cup. Wayne Smith was asked to step in. He called me up and said, ‘We don’t have much runway. But can you give me a hand?’ And so began one of the most challenging and yet rewarding assignments of my career.

The previous November, the Black Ferns had been to Europe on tour, where they had been hammered by England and France. New Zealand Rugby held a review after that tour in which one of the players said she had suffered mentally as a result of Glenn’s coaching; the review came up with 26 recommendations to improve the women’s game but cleared Glenn, and NZR chief executive Mark Robinson backed him to stay in the role. The original plan was that Wayne Smith, Graham Henry and I would act as his advisors during the World Cup campaign. But Glenn decided to leave. I thought the way New Zealand Rugby dealt with the situation was very poor and it almost broke Glenn, who is a great guy and a great coach.

That left Wayne in command for the delayed 2021 World Cup, being held in October and November 2022 in New Zealand. When you only have a few months to get ready, every second counts. So, we got straight into it. Because of those results on the end-of-season tour, we made an early decision that the only way we could be competitive and give ourselves any chance at the World Cup was to play a style of football that they hadn’t played for a while: a fast, skilful, athletic type of game.

Once we had made the decision that this was the only way we could play, then we had to pick the players who we thought had the capability of playing that way, and decided that some of the veterans didn’t. Those were tough conversations. As Smithy said, we want to play a game where the attacking style is like a blur, where they don’t know who to tackle because there’s so many moving bodies. You need athletes to take that approach.

Neither of us knew the players very well, so we had to learn about them quickly, because 80 per cent of coaching is in selection. Fortunately, we had assistant coach Whitney Hansen – daughter of Steve – who knew all the players inside out and gave us a lot of insight. The defence coach Wesley Clarke had a lot of experience with them too. They had the in-depth knowledge of the players we already had, and the ones we were looking at. We could talk about the style of players we wanted for each role, and they could tell us who might fit the bill.

What we didn’t know was who was going to be captain. But early on we noticed that the first five-eighth Ruahei Demant, a qualified lawyer, had asked some really insightful questions, and Wayne said, ‘I think she’s the captain.’ We were lucky there: she was outstanding. She was player of the match in the final and won the world player of the year award.

Then Smithy had the awful task of going around telling a lot of the established Black Ferns players that they weren’t being selected. He contacted each of them individually and did it in the right fashion. Then we went out and picked some players who had been so far off the radar they didn’t even hold national contracts. Smithy had to deal with the NZR board and the CEO and trying to find money for contracts. He did a great job. I had the easy job – I just had to coach.

We didn’t have a lot of time, but equally, we couldn’t keep the players with us all the time. So, we ran a series of camps. At each camp, I would arrange for men’s squads to come in and compete against the women. My logic was that if we had the best female players in New Zealand, then any other group of women we assembled would be inferior opposition, and effectively a waste of time, because it wasn’t going to leave them battle-hardened for the World Cup.

For the first one, we went to Lincoln University, near Christchurch, and brought in the first-year students from their varsity team – all very good players, many of whom were at the university on rugby scholarships – to work with us on scrummaging and lineouts. I’d explain to them how much pressure I wanted them to exert so I could gauge the Ferns’ progress. We did that for a couple of sessions, then we played their full team in a trial match and lost by about 40 points. Two weeks later, we came back and ran another camp with the same crew and played them again in another game, and this time it was a draw. I thought to myself that we were on the right track – it was just a question of whether we had enough time left to make all the progress we needed.

Another time I brought in the Canterbury B tight five to work with us; and at a training session in Auckland, we had the First XV from the North Shore’s dominant schoolboy team, Westlake Boys’ (where the former Kiwis rugby league skipper Hugh McGahan is director of sport), train with us. Graham Henry organised to get the men’s under-85 kg Auckland representative team to come in and work with us for a whole day, where we also worked with the next crop of emerging female players so they were prepared for any injuries during the tournament. All the young male players we brought in were outstanding. I would ask them to give feedback, and go and talk to their opposite numbers after sessions.

My job as coach is to stress and stretch your ability – and that should be happening to you until the day you retire.

The aim was graduated and controlled progression. I’d go to the blokes separately and tell them what level of power I wanted them to exert in a particular exercise, but I wouldn’t share that with the ladies; I’d go back to the men and ask them how they were getting on, and so we would go up to 60 per cent, for example. The second time we were at Lincoln, the Lincoln boys told me they had to go 100 per cent against the Black Ferns. It’s like playing squash: you learn from playing someone a grade above you. That was our theory: we’re going up against people better than us, but we will develop quicker.

Wayne and I had to learn that coaching women is very different to coaching men. With a men’s team, you’ll explain what you want them to do, you might demonstrate it once, and then you send them off in their group to execute it. With a women’s team, I’ve discovered that they will stand there and ask about every detail of what you’ve just asked them to do and why you want them to do it. It took me a while to understand that they were not trying to be a pain in the arse, they just wanted absolute clarity on what was expected – perhaps because they want to please the coach and show them they can do that activity correctly. Sometimes the blokes might say they’ve got it, wander off, then look at the captain to see what he’s doing, and follow suit.

They put so much pressure on themselves to be 100 per cent correct in everything they did at training. They would beat themselves up if they failed at something. But getting things 100 per cent correct right away is simply not possible. I asked one player if they had ever done a particular drill before. They hadn’t. So, I asked them what made them think they would be able to do it perfectly on day one. I understood that they wanted to; but if you were learning how to use a computer, you wouldn’t expect to power it up on day one and code a website. This was stuff they had never done before, so what would happen is that they would eventually be able to achieve that skill – but it might take a few weeks. Then what happens is I would make that drill harder again, so you fail again. They’ll take another week or two, and then I would make it harder again. My job as coach is to stress and stretch your ability – and that should be happening to you until the day you retire. We accept mistakes at training, because we’re trying to get you to play at a level well above where you’re at right now. All I asked them was to give me 100 per cent of their effort.

Wayne Smith had a great saying: ‘If you’re not making mistakes in training, you’re not trying hard enough.’ Once the Black Ferns players understood that if they made an error, they didn’t have to beat themselves up, we made progress. As a coach, sometimes you have to give your players permission to fail effectively – as long as they are giving you that 100 per cent effort.

Wayne Smith had a great saying: ‘If you’re not making mistakes in training, you’re not trying hard enough.’ Once the Black Ferns players understood that if they made an error, they didn’t have to beat themselves up, we made progress. As a coach, sometimes you have to give your players permission to fail effectively – as long as they are giving you that 100 per cent effort.

Because we didn’t have much time, we had to accelerate that progress. I remember Graham Henry watching one of our very first lineout sessions. It was pretty poor, to be honest. And afterwards he sent me a lengthy email with ideas of how we could win lineout ball without having to jump and lift – essentially, to do it like a kids’ team. And yet by the end of the tournament, they ended up having, in my opinion, one of the best lineouts in the world. That’s how quickly they learned.

They were learning so fast and they were getting stronger and technically better – in their attention to detail, their capacity to learn, their ability to understand their bodies. We did a lot of work in a dojo for our defensive skills and we were able to get plenty of work into them on the mats to harden them up quickly; it helped that Wesley Clarke knew some jujitsu. It quickly accelerated their ability in contact. That sort of work was entirely new to some of them. The players were a joy to coach. After completing each part of a training session, they would huddle up. And at the end of a session, they would usually do a dance. I’ve got delightful memories of them getting Graham Henry in the middle of the circle, dancing along, absolutely loving it. They called him ‘Teddy Bear’ and told me what a lovely gentleman he was. That might come as a shock to some of the male players he’s coached before!

We were aware that our strategy had its risks. Particularly when we played our first pre-tournament warm-up game against Australia. They were all over us in the first half; we just managed to scrape home in the second. Our performance was pretty average, and at that stage I thought that if we made it into the playoffs we would have done well.

The other positive was how much fitter and stronger they were getting. We had an excellent trainer, Craig Twentyman, and he made significant inroads. The English and French teams had been in professional strength and conditioning programmes for years, whereas some of our players were completely new to a professional environment. It must have been extremely daunting for some of them, and so they deserve a lot of credit for the way they faced up to that challenge. Looking back, not one of them let us down.

Our opening game of the tournament was against Australia at Eden Park. As coaches, I think we were a little naive in our approach to that game. The players came into the shed, saw the photos of themselves above their lockers, and were taking selfies, singing, making TikToks, and on video calls to their friends and families. We were playing a bloody Test match in 40 minutes’ time. Sure enough, we were down 17–0 in the blink of an eye. They had just become overcome by the occasion and their minds were not in the contest.

It was completely foreign to what Smithy and I were used to – and we didn’t want to stop them from preparing themselves how they wanted to. But at the same time, we needed them ready for battle. I think they learned from that about how to handle the big occasion and that they needed to be mentally ready. As coaches, I think we realised we could have rehearsed that aspect a little better.

But they got their shit together and we caught the Aussies and passed them quite easily in the end. We then disposed of the Scottish and took on Wales in the quarter-final and played some good football. That gave us a semi-final against France, whom I thought were actually the best all-round team in the tournament – strong in all facets of the game and playing a really good style of rugby. We squeaked out a win, and afterwards Smithy and I sat in the sheds – we had our own separate part, as we couldn’t be in with the players. We’d just made the World Cup final and there wasn’t even a beer in the shed, so we decided to go back to the hotel. We came out of the stadium, and a police inspector came over and shook our hands and congratulated us. It turned out she was a former Black Fern, and she offered us a ride in the police car and an escort to the hotel. The players and their families joined us there for dinner.

England were the red-hot favourites. They had lost only a handful of games in eight years leading into the tournament – I think, at the time of writing, they are now on a streak of 50 games with one loss. It’s an unbelievable record. I thought that they were so physically strong that we might not get enough ball at the breakdown to get near them and be competitive. But as Al Pacino says in the movie Any Given Sunday: ‘We fight for that inch.’

The final itself was a great game of rugby. We were behind early on but scored a couple of really good tries to get back in the hunt and we managed to win. If we played them ten times, we might win one or two. But this was our one. I remember the moment when the final whistle blew. I was sitting there on the bench with the reserves, wired up to the other coaches, and I clicked the talk button and said: ‘Well, f— me.’ Those were my exact words.

It was such a great spectacle – I think it did a huge amount for the growth and visibility of women’s rugby. The players were outside talking to the fans and signing autographs for what seemed an age. I think people loved their honesty: what you saw with them was real. The male players can be quite guarded, but the Black Ferns told it how it was, and that’s what got the public behind them, because they related to that spontaneity. I think a lot of those young women will go on to do some great things in life outside of rugby.

The result accelerated the development of the women’s game here. There are more central contracts; there’s a lot more international competition on offer. They’ve just gone up to Canada for a tournament with all the best national teams in the world – my son Dan is now their forwards coach, and so we chat before and after games, and sometimes he sends me footage of their training. He effectively replaced me, although not immediately.

Looking back on my time with the Black Ferns, the experience made me a better coach. It gave me a different perspective on coaching and taught me to adapt to a different audience with a different way of learning.

Looking back on my time with the Black Ferns, the experience made me a better coach. It gave me a different perspective on coaching and taught me to adapt to a different audience with a different way of learning. I’d like to think it made me a more rounded coach. I think it was extremely fortunate that Wayne Smith had agreed to take on the head coach’s role: to have someone with his experience in that situation was absolute gold. Smithy later told me it was the toughest gig he’s ever had, given the distance between what we started with and where we got to. But it was also one of the best we’ve ever had as well.

Chapter 16 HELPING A MATE OUT OF THE EXCREMENT: THE WALLABIES, 2023–2024

WHEN JOE SCHMIDT RANG me up with the offer of becoming his assistant coach with the Wallabies, I believe his precise words were: ‘I’m in the shit. Can you give me a hand?’

Joe took the Australian national team job in January 2024, and he had originally wanted to recruit the ex-All Black front-rower Greg Feek, with whom he’d worked in Ireland for ten years before ‘Feeky’ went on to be the All Blacks scrum coach. But Greg turned the gig down because he was helping at the Blues and New Zealand Māori. So, Joe was a bit desperate when he rang me. I didn’t feel I could turn a mate down. And what he was offering was a hell of a challenge.

I get on pretty well with Eddie Jones, who preceded Joe as Wallabies coach, but Eddie left a fair bit of debris behind when he quit the team after the 2023 World Cup to take a job in Japan. They had finished last in that year’s Rugby Championship and, for the first time ever, failed to progress past the World Cup group stages. To be frank, Joe and I found them in a pretty poor state. The Australian Rugby Union (ARU) was financially battling, a lot of their best players were playing their club rugby overseas, and the ARU had taken the stance that to try to make it more appealing to stay home and play in the Super Rugby competition, they would, in general, only consider domestic-based players for international selection.

I understand that thinking, but it limited our selection pool a little. In the first seven Tests of 2024, we introduced 19 debutants – which would be an extremely unusual number for any international rugby team. That meant we fielded a very young side, and one which was extremely inexperienced at this level. They needed time to adapt after taking what is a huge step up from Super Rugby. As a coach, I had to be much more patient in my approach. Fortunately, Joe and I both had the experience to understand exactly the situation we were in and how we needed to take time to develop them.

We both signed contracts through to October 2025, with the objective of getting the Wallabies competitive for the visit of the British & Irish Lions between June and August, complete the annual Rugby Championship, and then hand the team over to new coaching staff. Neither Joe nor I have experienced any pushback from anybody about being New Zealanders coaching an Australian international team (Joe is the third Kiwi head coach of the Wallabies, after Robbie Deans and Dave Rennie). I think most people have been appreciative that we are making the effort. Joe is working extremely hard to make a difference, to get them ready for the Lions. We’ve got some really good, highly motivated staff around us, too, who are working very hard towards that goal.

We were given a 13-Test schedule for 2024 and, in a perfect world, we would have stopped at 11 and not included the two Bledisloe Cup Tests against the All Blacks – because that was a strange feeling coaching against them. But you have a job to do and you get on with it. However, listening to the national anthem, when you’ve sung it a couple hundred times before a Test match, and watching the haka as an opponent – that was tough.

After the first Test, a few of the coaches and players came into our shed and had a beer and presented James Slipper with a gift for becoming the most-capped Wallaby in history. Then, after the second one, the entire Wallabies squad went into the New Zealand shed to take a gift to Sam Cane to mark his 100th Test match. I had the chance to catch up with a lot of the players I had coached and the management I considered friends. But it felt different, because it wasn’t ‘my’ shed – I was an invited guest and I wasn’t a part of it. And it was, potentially, the last time I’d ever be in an All Blacks changing room.

I think we did as well as we could for our level of progress. We got within three points of the All Blacks in the first Test, which was a big surprise. We were 21–0 down after 15 minutes and it looked bleak. But the players showed some real courage and got back into the game and really had a chance to win it. They were very disappointed afterwards, knowing they’d had a genuine opportunity to win the Bledisloe Cup for the first time in 21 years, and they hadn’t taken it. In the second game, New Zealand scored five tries to one against Australia, but the best team won on the day. It was a great atmosphere, a great crowd, and a great game of rugby.

It would have been revealing to play South Africa, our first opponent in the 2024 Rugby Championship, to see how much we had improved over the year. I certainly felt we had grown in key areas and a lot of our younger players had become more attuned to the demands of international rugby. After that, we went on a northern hemisphere tour to play England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

With the Wallabies, I’ve still used the same techniques and philosophies, but my approach has been slightly different. I’d say I have been less demanding of the players. Given the situation, it has been more about slowly easing them into the required standards and expectations. If you’re too honest, a new player can lose confidence. Part of the job is making them believe they are good enough to be out there – and letting them know that you’ll be there for them when they come off the field, and be ready to help them identify the things they did well, and the things they need a bit of help on, and how they can do it all better next week. We know, and they know, that they are way behind on experience, but I have found them good to coach and they are truly motivated. But a lot of the work I am doing with them I would probably have done back in the development grades with players in New Zealand. The lessons are ones they would probably have encountered in our provincial NPC competition. But they don’t have that grade in Australia, so their players have to make the jump straight from club rugby to the Super Rugby competition.

In assessing how to help them catch up as fast as possible, you have to work out what an athlete is capable of taking in, mentally, and then work your way through it over a period of time. If you go and chuck it all at them on day one, you’ll confuse them – and you won’t get much output in return. Instead, you keep it simple. That doesn’t mean dumbing it down. It means making it very clear what we are trying to achieve and letting them get on with the task. In general, what we’ve identified for them to work on, they’ve got better at.

By mid-September 2024, we had used 45 players, a lot of whom hadn’t had much international experience, and 19 of them who’d made their Test debuts. Some aren’t physically developed enough to play international rugby, yet. But they have real potential, so we give them a wee taste and it hits them between the eyes how much work they have to do. Now they understand why they have to do their weights programme, have their diet right, sleep well. They know how hard it is, how fast it is, how physically and mentally strong you have to be to cope with its demands. You can only shadow-box for so long before you have to get in the ring. You might come out with a bloody nose but you’ll have learned an invaluable lesson while you’ve been in there fighting.

So, they have had that leap from club rugby to Super Rugby; now they are discovering that Test rugby is quite different to what they’ve been used to at franchise level. And the gap between Super Rugby and the international game has grown immensely over the last few years. Losing the South African, Argentinian and Japanese teams from Super Rugby has really damaged the competition. And it means that the players have to handle a major step up to Test matches. I’ve found it takes them several games to adjust to the speed of the international game. A decade ago, you could confidently say that Super Rugby was a superior competition to the English Premiership or the French Top 14, but I am not sure you could make that declaration since Super Rugby became restricted to the New Zealand, Australian and Pacific Islands franchises.

We’ve lost the ability to expose promising young players to some tough challenges which helped shape them for the next level. The Australian and New Zealand teams all play roughly the same style of game – whereas you go and play the Jaguares or the Sharks and you get a different type of game, you have to learn to handle the travel and the jet lag, and how to fly back home from the game and be ready to play again in six days’ time. That’s some great lessons these younger players are not getting anymore, so you have to find ways to replace that experience.

A decade ago, you could confidently say that Super Rugby was a superior competition to the English Premiership or the French Top 14, but I am not sure you could make that declaration since Super Rugby became restricted to the New Zealand, Australian and Pacific Islands franchises.

The value of a strong Super Rugby competition is immeasurable, because an international coach can only do so much once they get hold of the players. You only have them for a short period of time, whereas their Super Rugby coach has them for at least half a year. The influence they have, and the competition they have available to them, is substantial. So, if the competition is a diluted one, then you’re picking from a diluted player base and bringing them into an international environment with limited time to upskill and prepare them for that leap in class they are encountering. This doesn’t just apply to the Australians, although it has hurt them more because they lack that intermediate tier; it has also impacted the All Blacks and I think that’s why we’ve seen a slide in their results, particularly in the early stages of an international campaign, over the last few years.

When Joe and I began work, we started by going around each of the five (now four) Australian Super Rugby franchises to watch them train, and then we began running mini coaching camps at each franchise with the players we had identified. That’s because so much of this job is about relationships, and we needed to start forming them immediately.

Back in New Zealand, I would have coached them as schoolboys or at the under-20 level, or done sessions with them at their NPC or Super Rugby teams. With the Wallabies, I came in cold: they’re just a name on a squad list. So, I have to go and learn about who they are, and develop a trust with them. It takes time to build that bond. I’ve been quietly chipping away, bringing them in for a cup of tea and a chat. Ninety-five per cent of the conversation isn’t even about football – unless that’s what they really want to talk about – but about who they are as a person. I want to know their background, their relationships, their story. You’ve got to understand what motivates them and how they tick. Then you can understand how to coach them. You have to cater for every learning style: some learn by doing, some by watching tape, some by direct verbal instructions. You can’t make big changes on day one when they don’t know you and you don’t know them. The sense I’ve got from the Wallabies players is that they have been, over their careers, more directed by their coaches than the players I’ve encountered with the All Blacks. I’ve always believed in an approach that is more player-driven than coach-driven.

Elite players go through three developmental stages. You get a player who is completely dependent on their coach. Then comes co-dependency, where you work together. Then you get players who are independent. That’s where you want them: players whom you’re just there to help and facilitate their career journey. My observation of the Wallabies is that there’s only a handful who’ve progressed out of the dependent category, because a substantial number of them are in their first year of international rugby. I’m working to take the rest through the stages so they can drive their own development, and once we’re there, we will see a lot more growth. At that point, we’re going into a meeting and I can ask questions about how they thought something went, or give me some feedback on that, rather than standing before them showing them clips and telling them what they did.

You’ve got to understand what motivates them and how they tick. Then you can understand how to coach them. You have to cater for every learning style: some learn by doing, some by watching tape, some by direct verbal instructions.

Of course, that takes us back to the safe learning environment – which, as we know, takes time to create. Part of doing that with this group is another of my favourite coaching philosophies: loving them the same at 9 pm as you do at 7.30 pm. After our first big loss, a couple of the players told me they were watching me and Joe as we came into the shed to see how we reacted. I asked them what they saw. They said we treated them the same after defeat as after victory. Turned out the odd one of their previous coaches hadn’t done so.

I go around the room, and I thank them all for their effort on the day, and in the week’s preparation – the reserves and the non-playing members, substitutes who didn’t get onto the field included, because they’ve worked hard and helped the other boys get ready to play and been a valuable part of the effort. What we want to do from a defeat is find some positives, and then find some work-ons. You can’t hit them over the head with everything that went wrong. At this stage of their growth, that’s only going to set them back. You want them confident enough to keep charging out of the trenches.

At the start, Joe and I commuted back and forth from New Zealand, and then came a busy period of travel. We began with two Tests against Wales and one against Georgia, all of which we won, then two defeats at home to South Africa, which underlined the mountain we had to climb. It was a solid four months in Australia, and then I managed four days at home in Governors Bay, before a couple of days in Sydney followed by a flight to Buenos Aires for two Tests in three weeks against Argentina. I’d not experienced long-haul travel in economy class for 20 years, but the ARU run on tight budgets at the moment. We in no way felt entitled to fly business class, but we’d often be working on the plane, which is definitely easier with a bit more space. After flying 24 hours or more, we wanted to be fresh so we could hit the ground running – there’s never that long between stepping off the plane and getting into the next game.

In Argentina, we won the first Test with a penalty right on full-time. In the second, we led 20–3 and simply ran out of steam in tough conditions, and ended up getting hammered. That was a good learning experience. It was also the second time in Argentina I’ve had to deal with the dressing-room toilets flooding the changing room with urine and faeces. The first was with the All Blacks when the doctor and the dietician spent the whole first half using towels to steer the sewage away from the main room. On this occasion, it took the stadium plumbing staff only the length of our warm-ups to mop up, but it was a good reminder that international rugby isn’t all beer and skittles.

Because we had less than a week off after the Argentinian tour, April and I stayed in Sydney before we resumed camp at Sydney Olympic Park for two Tests against the All Blacks in Sydney and Wellington. Then I managed four days at home, before flying to Japan for a week with Toyota, home for two days, then back for a week’s camp with the Wallabies. A week at home, then a camp in Sydney, before five weeks on the end-of-season tour to Europe where we played England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. I got home on 2 December after five months on the road; it was good to take April away on holiday to Rarotonga ten days later. That travel has been the pattern for many years, although it’s more exaggerated with the Wallabies because it’s harder to get home in the days off because the gaps in the schedule aren’t long enough to warrant it.

Those 13 Tests in 2024, plus a warm-up game in 2025 against Fiji, were our preparation for our three games against the British & Irish Lions – that’s how long we’ve had to produce good structures to create a battle-hardened team able to compete and then hand it over in good shape with the foundations prepared for a new coach. That team has to be competitive against the Lions. It cannot be a whitewash.

And then, after that, the plan is retirement . . . almost. I’ve just signed a contract to help my mates Steve Hansen and Ian Foster at Toyota in Japan as a consultant – I’ll help mentor some of their coaches and fly over for a week or two each year. It should be an enjoyable gig – working with my mates, not too much travel, a couple of trips a year. It’s where I began my professional coaching career with Steve, and it seems a fitting place for me to end it.

Chapter 17 LIFE AFTER THE ALL BLACKS . . . AND A FEW THOUGHTS ON COACHING

WHEN I FINALLY RETIRED from the All Blacks, I fielded requests from coaches all over the world to deliver Zoom mentoring sessions. After a while, April pointed out that I was working as hard as I ever was, but now I was doing it all for free. Following that conversation, I set up Mike Cron Coaching Limited, and built a website.

Charging for my time got rid of the tyre-kickers, and left me with the coaches who were really dedicated to progressing, learning and developing. I’d get coaches contacting me from places I had no idea they even played rugby: a Kiwi who was coaching in Qatar, and one of my most committed clients, a coach in the Belgian city of Antwerp. He’s coaching a senior team and a provincial team – they won a championship this year and he sent me a video of them celebrating in the sheds, which I thought was a very nice touch. I always admire people who want to get better.

At first, a lot of coaches are interested in the what and the why, and I understand that and am happy to cover that off and give them a few drills, but I always want to end up talking to them about how they get their message across.

I ask them to send me some footage of their players, so I can gauge what level they are working at, and some footage of them taking a coaching session so I can offer some feedback. I’m not saying that I am right, I’m just offering suggestions and being an extra pair of eyes for them. At first, a lot of coaches are interested in the what and the why, and I understand that and am happy to cover that off and give them a few drills, but I always want to end up talking to them about how they get their message across.

In coaching, it’s not what you say, it’s what the athlete hears. There’s a lot of different ways of getting your message across – through analogies, photos, humour, video clips – and attention spans are limited. I’ve learned a few things through my coaching career that I wish I had known when I had started, and I want to pass those on now as a mentor.

I’ve talked a lot about the importance of developing a safe learning environment, but it is crucial because everything else flows on from there. In my opinion, the best coach at training is the player doing the activity with their teammate: listen to your players. If you develop that sort of environment, then you end up with 32 coaches on the paddock instead of one or two. That’s huge. Peer coaching is how you get the fastest improvement and how you reduce the gap between your very best players and those with less natural talent.

It’s important to teach the skill within the drill. A lot of coaches simply coach the drills. If you’re just running through a drill, there’s not much teaching or learning going on. I’ve always believed that anybody can turn up and simply organise a drill. But the good coaches teach the skills within the drill – what that means is that you should think of the components within that exercise, the core skill development you’re trying to drive, and the opportunities for the people taking part to give you a bit of feedback and tell you what’s going right and wrong. That way we can self-correct, and we never train mediocrity.

An example I use is to ask the coaches to imagine that every other team in their competition is out there on the same night at the same time doing the same drill. Then I ask them to consider how the top team will perform that drill better than all of the others. It’s a concept that provokes good discussion. For instance, you have your players in pairs taking turns to tackle a hit shield five times each. If you say, ‘I’ll do five hits and then you do five hits, okay we’ve done it’, and we move on to the next drill, what have we achieved? As one player hits the pad, the other might say to them, ‘You had great front-leg drive, can you go back and do it again? or ‘When you hit, one arm was well ahead of the other, can you punch both arms together?’ Your players still complete their five hits each – just like every other player in our metaphorical competition is doing on that same night – but we’re learning, we’re not permitting mediocrity and poor technique to enter our skillset and stay there. And remember: the input doesn’t have to be War and Peace, it might be a single word.

Peer coaching is how you get the fastest improvement and how you reduce the gap between your very best players and those with less natural talent.

Another aspect I stress with my coaching students is how to ensure their players retain what they’ve learned from a training session. Within a coaching session, it’s likely you will work on several different facets of the game. I believe that you get a better outcome if you clearly split the session into different chapters and talk about the outcomes. If, for example, I finish work on a lineout session, I get the players into a huddle. We bind together, to ensure a physical and visual connection. And then I ask them to imagine that in the middle of our circle is a large learning pot. I’ve taken the lid off. Then I want them to fill that pot with everything they’ve learned in that session. I encourage them to speak up and volunteer anything – which again, relates back to the generation of a safe environment that makes them feel comfortable in talking to the group. Then I put the lid on the imaginary pot, and then off we go to our next session on, say, scrummaging. At the end of the scrum session, we go through the same routine with the imaginary pot all over again.

Now, as they go off to get their scrummaging boots on, I rate myself out of ten on two counts: how well did I coach that session; and how much learning did they get from it? If I rate myself a nine out of ten, and the learning two of ten, then I’ve got a problem. I can measure the second one because I know how full my pot was – and how quickly they filled it.

I began working like this when I learned about primacy and recency effects in learning. This is the educational theory that we pay more attention and devote more mental effort to items presented to us first, at the beginning of a lesson. The recency effect is that we retain the last things we heard because no information intervenes between the last things you’re told and the end of the session. Working to that theory, you place your essential concepts at the beginning, and recap at the end.

So, if I’m doing a 20-minute lineout session with a team, it doesn’t work to run through it and then send the team off to join the backs. If the theory is correct, by doing that I was missing out the ending. I realised there had to be a better way to conclude that part of our work. By coming up with the tight circle and the metaphor of the pot, hopefully retention of the key elements of the session is much better when we turn up for the next session.

The safe learning environment means they do contribute. If they feel threatened, or unsafe, or embarrassed, you’ll get no response. If they understand it’s safe, you will fill the pot quickly. Learning is motivation, motivation is enjoyment. If an athlete isn’t learning, they’re not motivated. If they’re unmotivated, they’re not enjoying it. The same is true for coaches. That’s why it’s important as a coach to go and learn from other people and upskill yourself. The pot technique can be used at all levels. If the answer is wrong, you never criticise, or belittle or embarrass. If they’ve misunderstood, then I say, ‘Perhaps I didn’t explain that very well, let me come at it from a different angle to see if it makes a little more sense.’

Learning is motivation, motivation is enjoyment. If an athlete isn’t learning, they’re not motivated. If they’re unmotivated, they’re not enjoying it. The same is true for coaches. That’s why it’s important as a coach to go and learn from other people and upskill yourself.

Now, if you’ve rated yourself poorly on the session, you need to identify why. Every coach will understand this – sometimes you stop seeing things; you lose focus on what you’re looking at. You become like a mouse on the wheel, running faster and faster. You stop seeing things, stop listening – and these are major red flags. So, I developed a safety net. Now, whenever I feel like that mouse, I ask the team to take a slow walk to the halfway line and ask the senior leaders to have a quick discussion on what we’re learning and then walk slowly back. It’s a great chance for your senior people to lead, but it also gives me a chance to reset. I take a few deep breaths, get myself back into the here and now, so that when they arrive back, I know what the first thing I’m going to do is, and how I am going to deliver it. It means that if I ever reach the point where I’m not really seeing what’s going on in front of me, I can reset and refocus.

As coaches, we all write down what our session plan looks like: three minutes of this, four minutes of that, add it all up, we’ve got 25 minutes and off we go. We look at the watch regularly, we blow our whistles, and move on to the next drill. That’s how I coached when I was younger, but it’s certainly not the correct way for them to learn. I’ve come to realise that you can’t try to get through too much. You need to allow a bit of fat, some time for people to learn, or question, or watch something on the tablet. That’s your learning time. It does require having some confidence in your coaching ability and style.

The best approach, I’ve found, is to write down the things I need to achieve from a session. Then I circle the two or three I must nail at all costs, and identify the three I am willing to sacrifice if I must. That leads me to coach completely differently: I am relaxed, so the players are too, and if they ask, ‘Can we do one more?’, then the answer is, ‘Of course we can.’ Can they look at the tablet? Of course. It’s a much better answer than telling them that we haven’t got time, so we will do that after training – or, even worse, we’ll do it on Thursday. You’ve just lost your players a bit when you say that. Instead, I ask the trainer to tell me when I’ve got two minutes left of my allocated time and then, deliberately, I ignore the watch. You’re not beholden to the watch – that’s not to say you can go over your time limits, but you’ve created a good learning environment for your players.

Most people coach the way they were coached. I did the same thing way back in 1983. But I soon learned that one way is being an instructor, and the other is being a coach. Which do you want to be? For me, having a very thin line between player and coach is a great approach, and far better than the gaping chasm we had between the two back when I was still playing the game. I want to give the players responsibility;

I want to value their input. I’ve always changed things at training based on feedback from players – it may even be just a word or two, and that’s enough to prompt me to refine what I’m doing. If you don’t have that safe environment, they won’t say anything. If you’re the mouse on the wheel, you won’t hear it.

If we finish a drill and the players are still talking, I’m not going to blow the whistle and demand silence. For me, that conversation is gold: they’re discussing what they’ve just done and quite often there’s some learning in there. So, I’ll just prompt them, and they’ll usually tell the group something interesting. I remember one time we were working on a scrum machine and I was trying to coach the boys that there were occasions when we had a really fast, explosive contact with the opposing scrum and we risked over-extending our legs. I wanted us to work on ‘catching up’ our feet when we did over-extend ourselves.

Tony Woodcock, who was the world’s best loosehead prop in his day, suggested taking some players off the back of the machine at the start, so that our weight would shoot forward and we would have to catch our feet up to stay balanced. After the hit, the players would jump back on the machine to add weight. It was a good idea, it worked, and once again, a player had come up with something that helped us because we had an environment where he was comfortable to offer a suggestion.

In a nutshell, I’d tell any coach that these are the key lessons:

•create a safe, motivating learning environment;

•the best coach is the person you’re performing the activity with;

•fill the safe learning environment pot; and

•rate yourself out of ten.

Most coaches I’ve talked to have never thought of these ideas, but most like them. Some will say they are worried their players are a bit shy and might not speak up – I tell them the only way to find out is to create that safe environment, and ask them correctly and encouragingly.

Too many look at the outcomes. If it’s a lineout drill, it’s not enough to say we jumped, and lifted, and caught the ball. I say, ‘Take me through the process.’ To take an analogy from golf: you can’t say I putted the ball, and it went in. That’s your outcome – but was my process and technique correct, and can I repeat it over and over again? Keep your focus on that process. Quite often at lineout training, I will have my tablet filming from the waist down. I’ll look at it before the next one, and if there’s something not quite right, we can fix it so that we are not repeating poor technique. Some days, I won’t even look at the ball, but solely at the movement, the speed of the jump, our lifting technique – and I take away the outcome entirely from the equation.

However, this is all just information. I could have the best golf coach in the world come and talk for an hour, but all he’s given us is information, and how we use that will decide if we get any better at golf. For anyone to benefit from a Zoom call with me, they need to take what I’ve talked to them about and consider how they would coach that, and how they would get the message across in their own style, with their own group of players. Each coach is, after all, an individual. Some of the coaches I have mentored have ended up coaching international teams. That gives me a lot of pride and I do follow their achievements. I am at the end of my career, but many of them are just starting out, and it is rewarding to see them develop and progress and watch how their teams go. One guy I work with, I will actually end up coaching against later this year, and I am continuing to help him. If I can say I even had one per cent input into his development, that would be great.

I don’t think about trade secrets. In the modern game, if I come up with a new drill tomorrow, then within two days it will be on the internet. I’ve always worked on the theory that if you’ve got one idea, and I’ve got one idea, and we share them, then we’ve doubled our store of knowledge. And it’s only information. It’s up to you how you use that, and you should back yourself that you as a coach will use it wisely. I’ve had an international coach tell me about a new drill they’ve come up with, and I’ve thought, ‘That was a good idea’, and used it myself. You’re coaching against each other, but you share because you want your athletes to get better and the game itself to be better.

I don’t think about trade secrets. In the modern game, if I come up with a new drill tomorrow, then within two days it will be on the internet. I’ve always worked on the theory that if you’ve got one idea, and I’ve got one idea, and we share them, then we’ve doubled our store of knowledge.

In my most recent job with the Wallabies, we’ve played against South Africa, suffered a hammering, and I’ve still gone into the sheds to have a beer with the Springboks attack coach, Tony Brown, whom I’ve known for a long time, and their scrum coach Daan Human, with whom I’ve done some Zoom sessions. Perhaps that makes our sport a little different to others – once the final whistle goes, we can all be friends.

The All Blacks coaches would often invite our opposite numbers out for a meal on the Thursday night before a Test match. We had a tradition with the Irish coaching staff that we would meet them in a little local bar in Dublin on the Thursday night. We took the England coaching staff out to a teppanyaki restaurant when Stu Lancaster was in charge; we’ve also often had dinner with the South Africans. We’d talk about the game – not the game ahead of us, but the state of the game worldwide. You form some long-lasting relationships that way.

I’m still mentoring some very senior international coaches. The All Blacks forwards coach, Jason Ryan, is someone I’ve worked with since he finished up playing senior rugby with the Sydenham club in Christchurch. And I’ll be there for him as long as he needs me: we caught up after the first Wallabies versus All Blacks Test match of 2024 and we picked up the conversation as we had before. Hopefully I am a sounding board for him. In our last conversation, I ventured the opinion that the coaching balance was not quite right and that he needed an assistant forwards coach because working alone in such a role is too tough for one person and it was putting undue pressure on him. Just a thought from a guy on the outside who was once on the inside.

I’ve mentored the England scrum coach, Tom Harrison, for the last three years, and the Italian forwards coach spent a week with me last year. Other coaches might call me on occasion, to ask about a player, or about a coach they are considering hiring. It’s a small world at the international level and there’s a lot of mutual respect among the coaches. It can be quite a lonely life coaching at the top level, so having someone you can call to talk to is important.

From my perspective, the two coaches who have helped me most are Steve Hansen, who I could always have a frank and honest conversation with, and my son Daniel, who I spoke to after every Test match and who has a very analytical mindset. He has often tipped me in to things to watch on the replay of the match: it’s good father–son communication, but he’s also a very smart operator who has a very good eye for the technical side of the game.

Very early in my coaching career, I understood the power of visual feedback. I started off with a little camera with an LED screen, about three inches square, and we would all gather around that to watch the drill we’d just completed, or sometimes we would go inside and plug it into the TV.

Coaches get themselves into trouble when they say, ‘I’ve not got enough time for that.’ If you have the ability to show an athlete visual feedback on the field, I’d call that five stars. If you show them after training, it’s three stars. If you show them tomorrow morning, it’s one star. As a coach, if you have the opportunity to do something five star, then you do it. If a couple of players do a tackling drill, it’s great learning to get them to pop to one side and watch it back. Training doesn’t stop, everyone else carries on, but you have this opportunity to give instant feedback and then go away, repeat the drill and video it again. Again, it’s learning, and motivation, and you are correcting poor technique or cementing good technique. They know that we don’t want to train mediocrity; they know this is a learning environment.

All coaches in any sport can utilise the people around them more effectively. There’s always a manager or a parent or an injured player on the sideline. As a coach, when you run a drill, I’m convinced you only see about 30 per cent of what’s going on. If you are running a defensive drill, ask that injured player to stand on the sideline and raise his hand every time the players stray offside. Then it’s easy for the head coach to tell them they are cribbing and need to give themselves another metre. By including a couple of other people, we’re now seeing 100 per cent of what’s going on. Leaving people on the sidelines idly chatting is a missed opportunity.

If you’re coaching a kids’ team, give a parent a very specific task and get them to come and whisper in your ear when they see it happen. They feel empowered, and you’ve got more information. And if you relate it back to the peer coaching model, and having 32 players as coaches, if you can have more coaches out there, it again stops mediocrity sneaking through. No matter what team you coach, you can develop progress.

Coaches often say that it’s all right for me to say all of this, because I’ve got all the time in the world to coach my players and they’ve only got them twice a week. I tell them that we wouldn’t have them on the grass any longer than you would as a coach with a senior grade team: I get the same amount of time you do. Sure, they’re in the hotel and we have meetings, but that field time is still limited. So, I’d say how do you ensure you treat every second as valuable? Doing brain-dead drills for ten minutes at a time is not the way to do it. Think about the purpose of those drills, the skills within the drill, the peer coaching, the visual feedback. You could get the guy who owns the dairy on the corner to come and simply run the drill, if that’s all you want.

A lot of coaches are volunteers, or talked into it because their son or daughter plays on the team, and that may make them nervous to ask the question. But you don’t need to have all the answers. People don’t expect you to have all the knowledge. But some methods and techniques, and some feedback and some shared knowledge and some visual feedback, and you will get through. And it’s okay to ask the players what they thought when something happened. You might get a great and illuminating answer that helps. It’s good to ask an open-ended question and see what answer you get. It’s the same in any classroom setting: the guy at the blackboard doesn’t necessarily have all the answers.

The amount of time I wasted early in my coaching career running drills without learning is mind-blowing to me now. These days, I coach nothing at all like that. I think my lightbulb moment was a conversation with the forthright All Black hooker Andrew Hore, which must have happened some time around 2007. We were having a cup of tea after training and he said something like, ‘I am sick and bloody tired of two minutes there, three minutes here, four minutes there – when are you pricks going to start coaching us?’ It was a very good point. You’ve got a group of coaches who all want to do their thing and so the training is all structured to give them their block of time. I realised we were just drilling the players instead of coaching them. Once again – create a safe learning environment in which you are free to discuss things, and if you listen, you’ll get some gold. That was a valuable piece of gold for me. It was brutally honest but it was helpful and it was feedback I passed on and incorporated into my work.

I realised that we were just going from one drill to another without much learning being integrated into the session – which led me to the conclusion of not being governed by the watch, but by what I observed in watching the drill. Now we finish that individual drill only when the group has learned what it needs to learn. I won’t write down for the players what my session involves – the players will just see ‘30 minutes with Mike’. They just need to know which type of boots to wear. Don’t spoon-feed them – on the field of play, they’ll need to make fast, independent decisions. And I don’t want to be tied to a fixed session anyway – because if I see something we need to do, I will veer off in a fresh direction. It’s important as a coach to have the capacity to think and adjust and adapt to what you see right in front of you.

A final thought on coaching: I believe a coach can coach any sport – to a certain level. I’ve coached netball, softball, prepared a team for an erg (indoor rowing machine) competition, a dragon-boating squad, and helped my wife April prepare to compete in an Ironman event. Sure, you won’t have the specific expertise to coach at an elite level, but you’re certainly capable of coaching to a reasonable level. The only difference between sports are the rules: the way and method of coaching remains the same.

I believe coaching is 50 per cent technique and 50 per cent confidence. The art of coaching is getting the player to understand the skill within the drill, and to develop deep understanding so they gain retention. Knowledge is king.

Mike Cron’s dream All Blacks pack

An exercise like this is a bit like comparing racehorses from different eras. So, I’ve kept it to the earlier part of my career with the All Blacks, and left out some later legends such as Codie Taylor, Sam Cane, Dane Coles, Ardie Savea, Owen Franks, and many, many more – but with that caveat, here’s my pretty impressive group of big men.

Tony Woodcock (118 Tests, 2002–2015)

Tony had played a handful of Tests before my involvement with the All Blacks, and had then missed 2003 through injury, so I began coaching him at international level only in 2004 when he was relatively raw. I liked what I saw immediately: he was what you’d call farm-strong – if you hit him, nothing moved. He was like teak.

Tony was a very coachable player: he had a very simple, process-driven approach to the game and he knew what was required. He was low-maintenance, hardly ever got injured, and never, in my memory, played a poor game – I don’t think, in my time, he was ever beaten at the set piece. He was the best in the world for a long period of time, and not just at the set piece – he was a great player around the paddock, too, because he was also a ball player. And he could play 80 minutes. At that time, you’d only carry one prop on the bench, so either he or Hayman had to play a full game, and Tony could do that and get back up the week after without any drop-off in quality.

Tony was a great team man. He didn’t speak much, but if he did speak, everyone listened. He ended up as my scrum captain at one stage. He was a smart man too – just because someone doesn’t speak much, doesn’t mean they’re not intelligent. I’d say we were joined at the hip for a while.

Keven Mealamu (132 Tests, 2002–2015)

Keven had converted from openside flanker to hooker at about the age of 18, which was quite late in life. The critics said he was too small, he couldn’t scrummage and he couldn’t throw the ball into the lineout. But when we got him into our environment, our then-starting hooker Anton Oliver mentored him. Anton did a lot of work with Keven to help him with his scrummaging to get him to international standard. Keven had the advantage of being extremely athletic – he had excellent footwork when he was carrying the ball, and he had the technique, the attitude and the guts to be on the top of his game for a very long time. While he was a real gentleman and didn’t have the biggest frame, he was a tough customer and was deeply respected by his opponents – most of them would come into the sheds after a game to have a chat with him. As a bloke, out of 10, he’s a 12, just one of the best human beings I’ve ever met.

Carl Hayman (45 Tests, 2001–2007)

Carl ended up as the best tighthead prop in the world. For a big man – he was 193 cm tall and weighed 120 kg – he had an outstanding engine. In one Test against France, he made 26 tackles – I wouldn’t have made that many in a year. He was an outstanding scrummager as well. I saw an interview with the recently retired England prop Joe Marler, who said Carl was the toughest opponent he’d ever gone up against. He disproved the fallacy that you could be too big, too tall, to play tighthead. He was quiet and unassuming and just got on with it and, like Woodcock, he could deliver an 80-minute performance. He was the best in the world in his position for a long time. He played over 40 Tests, then went overseas. I thought he did that far too early in his career – he could easily have played over a hundred. I’m sorry to see what a tough time he’s gone through since retirement.

Sam Whitelock (153 Tests, 2010–2023)

The second-most-capped rugby international of all time. A great lineout technician, huge engine, highly intelligent. I enjoyed working with Sam: he was a tough character from a pig-hunting country family. Steve Hansen was a huge influence on his career. Steve was actually really tough on him early on at times – I think maybe too tough – but he shaped Sam into one of the best international players in the world. He didn’t want to put on weight initially, but Steve made him and got him to the right size for Test-match rugby.

Sam would tell you that when he started out, he was a pretty average scrummager – but through a bit of coaching and, more importantly, putting his arm around the vastly experienced Brad Thorn for a lot of Test matches, he developed into an outstanding one. He was always a great leaper in the lineout, and an excellent athlete. If someone had told him early in his international career that he would become an international-class tighthead lock, he’d have said no way. But he became outstanding in that role.

Brodie Retallick (109 Tests, 2012–2023)

World player of the year in 2014, and rightly so. He went to Boys’ High in Christchurch and as a kid he was uncoordinated as hell, then as a teenager missed out on the Crusaders Academy so had to go to the North Island where he ended up in the Chiefs system. In one season, he went from hardly being able to do up his own shoelaces he was so uncoordinated, to being an All Blacks under-20 selection – he progressed amazingly quickly. He was probably still a bit cumbersome when he turned up, but Steve got some netball drills into him and we did a lot of individual work. He ended up the best in the world, and at his best, he could terrorise any opponent – he was outstanding at the cleanout, great in the scrum, great in the lineout, great with ball in hand, and so tough. If he hit you in a maul or a cleanout, you stayed hit – he was all bone and sharp edges. You had to be careful about managing his game time: he gave so much of himself that, on a short turnaround, especially as he got older, you had to be a wee bit smart about it.

Jerome Kaino (81 Tests, 2006–2017)

I think if you asked Richie McCaw or some of the other guys of his era, they would rank Jerome as their favourite number six. He had a huge work rate, which allowed the openside flankers to play their game. He had an outstanding World Cup in 2011, and by then his body was buggered. He went to Japan, played in the Top League for Yamaha, and his body came right and he came back and played in the 2015 World Cup and was outstanding once again. He was a pure professional – another uncomplicated, low-maintenance athlete. When we talk about number sixes in New Zealand, the conversation is always about whether someone is ‘the next Kaino’, that’s the level of esteem he was held in.

Kieran Read (127 Tests, 2008–2019)

Kieran had an excellent rugby brain and was a very smart man with an incredibly humble demeanour. He’d grown up in a multicultural part of South Auckland and that, I think, meant he had a very easy rapport with the Pākehā, Māori and Polynesian members of the team. His teammates certainly loved him and he was an excellent captain.

Kieran was an absolute athlete, particularly in the lineout, where he was outstanding. As I said, he ran all the lineout options, structures and strategy, and I just handled the skill side of it. People probably don’t appreciate how tough he actually was. I suspect he played a lot of Tests where his body was well below 100 per cent, but he’d never let on and you’d never know from how he performed. I don’t think he ever played a bad game.

Richie McCaw (148 Tests, 2001–2015)

Richie’s had a lot written about him, but it’s all true. I can’t find a fault in the man. He was brought up in the small South Island town of Kurow, and he never lost those country values. He may not have been the fastest player on the field, but nobody could beat the speed of his rugby instinct. He had some limitations when he first started out, but he worked on them and excelled. Mentally, he was very intelligent but also one of the toughest men I’ve ever met with an innate drive to excel. His engine was unbelievable – he could run all day. For a coach, he was very easy to deal with. He didn’t speak as much as other captains, and he would allow other leaders within the team to say their piece, but when he did speak it was worth listening to. His captaincy style was more by example than by words – but what an example to follow.

Six of my dream pack played over 100 Tests, but guys who came later were equally worthy, such as Owen Franks, Dane Coles, Codie Taylor and Sam Cane – it just shows how lucky I was to work with so many tremendous athletes over the years.

Afterword Sir WAYNE SMITH

WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT that the most innovative, creative, caring and successful forwards coach I ever worked with was someone to be avoided on the playing field? As a 76-kg five-eighth playing club rugby for Belfast, I was warned about the Christchurch club prop with long studs. In an age where club rugby was littered with tough, uncompromising props, rucking was revered. Crono felt he had a responsibility to remind opposition players never to get on the wrong side of a ruck or maul. How did we get to this, then? A story of world-leading coaching methods that have brought Mike Cron global rugby success over 30-plus years.

I first used Mike as a part-time scrum coach for the All Blacks in 2000. Two-man coaching teams were the norm back then, and I reached out for more specialist advice around scrummaging. It was soon obvious that Crono was special. He thought differently to any other coach I had worked with and brought a quiet confidence to the players he was coaching. It wasn’t until he joined Graham Henry’s 2004 All Blacks coaching staff (along with Steve Hansen and myself) that his true value started to become recognised and appreciated.

As the attack coach, I was really keen to get fast ball off stable platforms. A conversation with Crono encouraged him to provide this, and his scrum sessions became legendary. He carried a notebook, and every time the scrum collapsed at training, he would make a note. At the end of the session, the forwards had to do 10-metre army crawls for each scrum collapse. Initially, it wasn’t unusual to see forwards crawling for 150 metres up and down the field. Our scrums soon stayed up. No longer would we strike off collapsed messes with untidy ball.

It was the first inkling that this coach was wired differently to others. When it came to professional development at the end of each season, going to other rugby clubs or similar sports teams wasn’t for him. He saw little value in that. His growth mindset let him to the Royal New Zealand Ballet, Cirque du Soleil, MMA, and Sumo wrestling in Japan. All Blacks trainings became a thing of beauty, with tight forwards balancing on slack ropes tied between the goalposts. Sumo contests within small circles were often the norm, along with ground wrestling and one-on-one scrummaging contests with players connected by customised halters.

The activities themselves weren’t that important – it was the way that they developed skills relevant to scrummaging, body movement at rucks, and lineout jumping and lifting that counted. The contests were clearly motivating, and the increasing excellence of our performances on the field started catching the rugby world’s attention. Mike wasn’t one to run training sessions without ensuring learning was being maximised. When other coaches went home from training to look at video of their sessions, then followed up with player reviews in the following days, Crono decided there must be a more effective way of getting improvements. So, he started showing instant replays of technique, skill and decision-making during the activities. With a big-screen TV set up meticulously in an open-sided tent, Mike ensured that the learning was gold-medal class. Instant feedback using questions to the players ensured that performances were always on an upward trajectory.

Mike’s coaching portfolio was also expanding. The scrum coach was setting about becoming the greatest all-round forwards coach in the world. Lineouts, mauls, rucks and tackles became part of his coaching arsenal, and his players were flourishing. In the period from 2004 to 2011, the All Blacks won 88 games out of 103. These included three Grand Slams over the home nations, multiple Bledisloe Cups and Tri Nations championships along with a World Cup. Throughout this period, players thrived alongside Crono.

In 2004, we were preparing for a pivotal, season-ending Test against France in Paris. At our selection meeting, Graham asked Mike if our young loosehead prop Tony Woodcock was ready for a start against Peter de Villiers. Crono was adamant that Tony would rise to the challenge, and he did. We won that Test 45–6, and Woody went on to be the best loosehead in the world and a Test centurion for the All Blacks. Along with other tight forwards such as Keven Mealamu, Andrew Hore, Carl Hayman, Owen Franks, Ali Williams, Brad Thorn, Sam Whitelock and Brodie Retallick, Mike Cron shaped All Blacks packs that dominated the world and won two consecutive Rugby World Cups (2011 and 2015).

Aligned with player empowerment, empathy, a questioning approach and sense of fun, Crono has become the most renowned teacher of players and coaches in the world of rugby’s hidden arts. From working with World Rugby, international referees, the All Blacks, Wallabies, Japanese Top League and the New Zealand Black Ferns, he has left a global trail of success in his wake. In my experience, Crono is one of a kind and I am forever grateful to have coached alongside him and to call him a mate.

Perhaps his one weakness is an inability to say ‘no’. No doubt, as Crono approaches retirement, he will forever be saying ‘yes’ to requests from all and sundry who seek knowledge around how to get the best out of the people and teams they coach – and the game will be the better for it.

Sir Wayne Smith

All Blacks coach 2000–2001, All Blacks assistant coach 1998– 1999, 2004–2012 and 2015–2017, Black Ferns coach 2022

Acknowledgements

MIKE CRON WOULD LIKE TO THANK:

My three brothers, Gary, Phil (who has passed away) and Stu, who were my heroes growing up, and are still my heroes. They helped me immensely. My two children, Anna and Daniel, who have supported me along this journey.

The next person to thank would be the late Doug McClymont, the biomechanist who had such a tremendous influence on how I came to view rugby and coaching.

Then there’s Steve Hansen. He gave me the opportunities that shaped my career, first with Canterbury and the Crusaders, then with Wales in 2003, and then, crucially, with the All Blacks in 2004. Every budding coach needs someone to give them a foot in the door, and Steve had that faith in me.

Last but not least, my wife April. She has been unbelievably supportive, and without that support, I couldn’t have done it. I’ve been away a lot, and it takes over your life, but she’s always backed me at every turn.

STEVE KILGALLON WOULD LIKE TO THANK:

My kids, Henry, Rosa and Alistair, who always like seeing their names at the back of my books. Commissioning editor Alex Hedley for coming up with the book and putting me together with Mike. Mike Wagg and Sarah Yankelowitz for guiding it through to publication.

About the Writer

STEVE KILGALLON is a senior investigative journalist with the New Zealand news website Stuff. He has worked as a sports reporter, feature writer and editor for Stuff and the Sunday Star-Times, as well as for the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia and The Guardian in England. This is his sixth book, after The Sports Insider, with Jack Ralston; Never Give Up, with Ian Winson; Relentless, with Scott Donaldson; Tools for the Top Paddock, with Kane Brisco; and Inner Warrior, with Jaye Pukepuke.

Photo Section

This is called a tension drill – Scott ‘Scooter’ Barrett is leaning on me, and I’m about to whip away one hand and he has to try and hold his position, then I’ll repeat the exercise with the other hand. It works to develop core strength and tension. (Phil Walter/Getty Images)

After a Test match, the boys who hadn’t played would go out onto the field and do a fairly intensive half-hour session so that they wouldn’t be a day behind the rest in terms of their workload. I’d help out the trainer Nic Gill – here overseeing Dan Carter and Carl Hayman having a boxing session, which means they would have been carrying leg injuries. (Dave Lintott Photography)

My good mate Gilbert Enoka and I were both on the 2015 New Year’s Honours list: I received an MNZM, and Gilbert got the ONZM. (Mike Cron collection)

The late, great Sir Brian Lochore, a former All Blacks captain, coach and selector, leaning on the scrum machine with me. (Mike Cron collection)

The fourth-most capped All Black of all time, Kieran Read, with the Bledisloe Cup. (Hannah Peters/Getty Images)

With my brother Stu on one of our many tramping trips. We’re on the Browning Pass/Nōti Raureka, at the top of the South Island’s Main Divide – 1411 metres above sea level. It’s a four-day tramp and we’ve done it about 28 times, guiding groups of mates over. It’s bloody tough – twice we had to get a helicopter out to help with rescues. (Mike Cron collection)

With Ruby Tui during the White Ferns world cup campaign, in the middle of training. (Hannah Peters/Getty Images)

A significant moment in time: the last game of the season in the away dressing room at the Stade de France in Paris, 2004. That was the first year Graham Henry, Steve Hansen, Wayne Smith and I worked together and this game was the first time I’d been asked to offer my selection suggestions – and I’d suggested Tony Woodcock, pictured on my right. Graham backed me, even though Woodcock was down his pecking order of frontrowers. Both Tony and Carl Hayman, on my left, were outstanding that night, along with hooker Anton Oliver. Neither Tony nor Carl had been involved at the 2003 World Cup so this was the starting point for all the good things that followed. (Mike Cron collection)

The old band back together in Japan with Toyota Verblitz – Steve Hansen, myself, Gilbert Enoka and Ian Foster. (Mike Cron collection)

Going low: I liked to study scrums from a different angle. You can learn a lot at ground level. (Ross Land/Getty Images)

All Blacks front-rowers Tony Woodcock, Anton Oliver and Greg Somerville, with the late Jerry Collins packing on the side of Tony Woodcock in the second row, about to hit a scrum machine as I issue the commands. (Ross Land/Getty Images)

My thirst for knowledge took me to some unusual locations. Here I am at a mixed martial arts gym on the Gold Coast – my guide was Api Hemara, on the left, the son of former All Black Bruce Hemara. (Mike Cron collection)

The Millennium – now Principality Stadium – in Cardiff, Wales: a familiar spot for both me and Steve, as the place where we began our international careers. This was a pre-match walk through the day before our first visit back there as All Black coaches in 2005. (Mike Cron collection)

All Blacks forward Jeremy Thrush is dangling from the goalposts working on a lineout jumping drill – the stretch bands help them leap faster than they are physically capable of, and it fires up the muscles so they can jump higher in the real lineout. It looks bloody cold, so I’m guessing this is somewhere like Scotland. (Phil Walter/Getty Images)

I could never have imagined this photo happening: here I am with the Wallabies coaching staff, including my good mate Joe Schmidt standing in front of me, in the dressing room after we had beaten England in 2024. (Mike Cron collection)

In the dressing rooms at Eden Park with head coach Wayne Smith and advisor Graham Henry in November 2022, after the Black Ferns had won the delayed 2021 Women’s World Cup. I rate this as one of the greatest experiences of my career. (Mike Cron collection)

In Governors Bay, studying video with long-serving and outstanding All Blacks strength and conditioning coach Nick Gill. (Mike Cron collection)

My connection to Canadian rugby is really strong, thanks to the year I spent there as a young coach. This photo is from a trip in 2011 to run a scrum-coaching camp for the then Canadian coach, an old friend and former All Black, Kieran Crowley. (Mike Cron collection)

A group photo with my fellow All Blacks coaches. I am pretty certain this was in Argentina, because I recognise that carpet; the Buenos Aires hotel we stay in has had it forever. (Mike Cron collection)

I couldn’t have enjoyed such a rewarding career without the unwavering support of my wife April. Here we are riding the Alps 2 Ocean Cycle Trail in the South Island. We’re somewhere in central Otago here – it’s a tremendous experience I’d recommend to anyone. (Mike Cron collection)

On the field after winning the 2011 Rugby World Cup at Eden Park. (Mike Cron collection)

After the 2005 British & Irish Lions tour, which we won 3–0, with my front-rowers, Tony Woodcock, Greg Somerville and Campbell ‘CJ’ Johnstone. CJ was the first openly gay All Black; I was invited to his wedding, but unfortunately was overseas. (Mike Cron collection)

The Bledisloe Cup is pretty big: I can tell you it takes about 38 stubbies of Steinlager to fill before everyone has a drink from it. We defended it throughout my time with the All Blacks, in a run from 2003 onwards. This photo is from 2005, with Derren Witcombe, Greg Somerville, Carl Hayman, Tony Woodcock, Keven Mealamu and myself having a beer. The Prime Minister had the odd slurp on it too. (Mike Cron collection)

Governors Bay has a population of just under a thousand people, a 150-year-old pub, a restored 300-metre-long jetty and is my happy place. (Mike Cron collection)

In the pub at Governor’s Bay with friend and neighbour Ralph Woodward, who’s 99 and still kicking. After the World Cup in 2015, he wanted a photo with me and with the medal around his neck. We probably could have picked a better backdrop than the door to the ladies toilet. (Mike Cron collection)

My son Dan Cron is a really incisive analyst and great coach of the game and we speak after every All Blacks Test. We’ve also coached against each other three times: on this occasion, he was on the staff of Tonga. (Mike Cron collection)

My two grandsons Jonty and Beau followed the Black Ferns throughout the campaign – Jonty is wearing my winner’s medal. (Mike Cron collection)

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