All Blacks selection gamble: Why Sir Graham Henry may not fit Rennie era – Editorial
Dave Rennie has turned to Sir Graham Henry for selection input. Photo / Photosport
The appointment of Sir Graham Henry as a selector with Dave Rennie’s All Blacks was greeted with widespread acknowledgement of his valuable contribution to New Zealand rugby.
But it is also reasonable to question his suitability for the role.
In decades gone by, the internecine politics of New Zealand rugby would see All Blacks coaches foisted with assistants with whom they could not work.
This weird state reached its apogee when John Hart and Alex Wylie found themselves the oddest of couples as co-coaches for the 1991 Rugby World Cup.
Coached by characters who were like chalk and cheese – or, perhaps more likely, pinot noir and Canterbury Draught – that unhappy crop of All Blacks was unable to muster a second World Cup win, despite having a number of all-time greats in their ranks.
The new man in the job, Rennie has had a free hand in selecting his co-coaches and support staff.
He’s also brought in one of the most-respected figures in the national game as a selector: Henry, the man who broke the drought with coaching the side for that second World Cup win in 2011.
That triumph on an aorta-clenching night at Eden Park was the high-water mark of Henry’s reputation as a coach.
But the foundation of his legacy came earlier with the pod system. In an earlier stint coaching wobbly Wales, Henry developed a mode of playing open-phase rugby that has since spread through the global game, and is today accepted as much a fundamental part of the sport as a scrum, maul or post-match pie.
Henry sits comfortably among the greatest coaches New Zealand has ever produced. But his role with the Rennie regime is not as a coach but as a selector.
New Zealand rugby has a mystifying history on the selection front. When faced with an abundance of talent in a particular position, we often try to shoehorn all that talent on to the field, some in unfamiliar positions.
This is the team who put Christian Cullen at centre and who hastily shovel any lock who can run with the ball and offload into the No 6 jersey.
Henry’s reign as coach had its own selection notable foibles.
Ahead of the 2007 Rugby World Cup, Henry’s selection team chose to leave Ma’a Nonu – arguably the greatest No 12 of all time – at home.
Through the ill-fated 2007 campaign, he never once selected a match with the same four players running together at Nos 9, 10, 12 and 13 – the core of the backline.
Among the outside backs, preferred selections seemed equally unclear. Only once in the 10 matches preceding the grisly quarter-final defeat to France, had the back three of Joe Rokocoko, Leon MacDonald and Sitiveni Sivivatu started a test alongside one another in those roles.
Many fans will suggest the triumph of 2011 proved Henry had learned from his past selection mistakes.
The other issue is time.
The pod system remains a hard-wired fundamental of this most fiddly of sports, but much else has moved on – particularly the rulebook, the referees’ interpretations and how players deal with both.
Henry, a sage observer of the sport, hasn’t been buried in the data and analytics that make up the fibre in a selection discussion for many seasons.
A decade and a half has passed since he guided the All Blacks to victory. As former skipper Taine Randell said back in 2023, things have radically changed in rugby.
“[Sir] Wayne Smith, [Sir] Steve Hansen and [Sir] Graham Henry changed the game,” Randell told the Herald’s Chris Rattue.
“But it’s moved on and it feels like we are playing the same system and doing the same things that weren’t good enough to win the World Cup in 2019.”
It’s good that Rennie is seeking outside input into the processes and thinking he brings to his new job.
And while he’s seeing out the final stages of his club contract with Kobe in Japan, he surely will benefit from having eyes on the ground within the New Zealand game.
But Henry’s better contribution might be more in a broader coach-mentoring role.