Dave Rennie is playing hardball with NZ Rugby, securing a foreign assistant in Mike Blair and pushing to pick overseas stars. Photo:: AFP
Image: AFP
COMMENT
Springbok coach Rassie Erasmus can afford a bittersweet smile as he digests the confirmation of his Kiwi counterpart Dave Rennie’s backroom staff, which is headlined by old school All Black Tana Umaga and canny Scot Mike Blair.
Bittersweet because Erasmus will recognise parallels with his own appointment in 2018 while understanding that Rennie has picked a staff prepared to go to war with him in the Greatest Rivalry series with the Boks in August and September.
Rennie has opted for less is more — he has trimmed down the number of assistants from the Scott Robertson regime — and gone for a tight-knit group of coaches who have a proven track record with him.
His chief assistant will be Neil Barnes, who was Rennie’s right-hand man at the Chiefs when they won Super Rugby titles in 2012 and 2013.
The key appointment is Blair, who has been working with Rennie in Japan at the Kobe Steelers. The pair finish up in Japan in June and within a month will be hosting Nations Cup fixtures against France, Ireland and Italy as the All Blacks “warm up” for the Springboks.
Obviously, Rennie highly rates Blair, and them being a team at Kobe gives them between now and July to plot the All Blacks’ attack before they step into their official roles at the All Blacks.
The appointment of a foreigner in Blair is a policy departure for the All Blacks and a victory for Rennie over the conservative New Zealand Rugby Union.
Rennie put his foot down and said he wanted the Scot, who is as highly rated in the northern hemisphere for his attack coaching as Tony Brown is in the south.
As a former Scotland captain, British and Irish Lion, World Player of the Year nominee, and Scotland’s most capped scrumhalf of all time, Blair turned his playing pedigree to coaching at the Glasgow Warriors in 2016, where he was Rennie’s assistant. The pair took the Warriors to the PRO14 semi-finals and Grand Final in 2018 and 2019, as well as Champions Cup quarter-finals in 2017 and 2019.
Blair was working with Gregor Townsend at the Scotland national team before Rennie lured him to Japan in 2023.
Umaga returns to help coach the team he once captained and earned 74 Test caps for. He is a legendary All Black renowned for his leadership and defensive expertise.
Umaga epitomises the Maori word mana, which is difficult to translate into English but refers to a mixture of prestige, authority, status and power. A man oozing mana is just the ticket to coach a rugby team on how to defend, and the All Blacks will respond to him.
Meanwhile, Erasmus will be closely watching events with Rennie and the All Blacks as he recognises a similar picture to where he was with the Boks in 2018. Like Rennie is now, Erasmus was 18 months from a World Cup and told his governing body he would take the job on certain conditions.
One was that he could choose his own assistants and cherry-pick them from world rugby, and secondly, the rule stipulating that only players based in South Africa were eligible for the Springboks had to be abolished. Rennie wants the same and will remind NZ Rugby that Erasmus was given what he wanted and the Boks haven’t stopped winning World Cups since.
Rennie has got his foreign assistant coach and is known to be negotiating with NZ Rugby regarding picking overseas-based players such as Brodie Retallick, Richie Mo’Unga, Sam Cane, and loads more.
If Rennie gets his way, and so far he has, it will be a game-changer for the All Blacks and a massive boost ahead of the four-Test series with the Boks.
Erasmus knows this only too well — he walked this bold path in 2018, and South African rugby has never looked back.