The first edition of The Breakdown for 2026 had no shortage of subject matter. Scott Robertson — Razer — had been removed as All Blacks head coach halfway through his four-year contract following a damning internal review of the 2025 season. A five-person appointment panel including New Zealand Rugby chair David Kirk, former All Blacks Kevin Mealamu and Dane Coles was running the search. The panel had already been told no by Joe Schmidt, Vern Cotter and Springboks assistant Tony Brown. Sir Wayne Smith's stint as NZR performance coach was over. Scott Barrett's captaincy looked unlikely to survive.
It was, in other words, the kind of summer where a Sky Sport panel earns its money.
"I'm surprised that we're even talking about this," Mills Mauleni said. "I know we ended 2025, the international season, probably not where we wanted it to be, but there was some things that we're seeing that seem to be tracking in the right direction."
Jeff Wilson took the question of who should be next and started narrowing it. With Schmidt, Cotter and Brown ruled out, he made the case for the man Sky Sport viewers had probably already nominated themselves.
"I'd like a fresh face," Wilson said. "What I love about Jamie Joseph is his overseas experience. If you look at the coaches that have been successful — the likes of Steve Hansen, Wayne Smith, Graham Henry — they've won us World Cups, have all had overseas experience. Jamie's done exactly that. He's done it with a team that hasn't, you know, Japan. He's spent a lot of time over, he's come back, he's won Super Rugby."
Wilson conceded Joseph's first stint with Wellington had been hard on senior players, but argued he had grown.
"He came in very hard. He was really strict at the in Wellington. Some guys didn't really like it that were in the leadership group of the All Blacks or experienced All Blacks, but he's adapted too," Wilson said.
The panel was less willing to write Robertson out of the picture entirely. Steven Bates, returning to The Breakdown after a two-year break, pushed back on the idea that a sacked head coach was a finished one.
"There's no reason he can re-rediscover, I suppose, some of the magic, but also add to that experience," Bates said. "Why would you close the door? For whatever's gone right or wrong in this two-year period, he'll be a better coach now than when he was employed. You don't throw 50,000 Super Rugby titles out the door."
That the panel ended up litigating Robertson's future at all, weeks after his exit, was a measure of how unsettled the situation has been. The shortlist tightened in real time as candidates with international head-coaching credentials closed the door, leaving NZR to choose between a Joseph homecoming, a Dave Rennie return, or — as host Kafano put it — "back to the future".
The captaincy question travelled in similar territory. Scott Barrett, the man Robertson handed the armband to, took a non-playing sabbatical from Super Rugby for body maintenance. Wilson did not see him keeping the role.
"I think it just it was too much of a drain on it for me for him," Wilson said. "It just was hard for him to focus on being getting back to what he was as a player. So for me, I think it's probably unlikely in 26 that he's the captain."
Bates agreed it had drained Barrett emotionally and on the field.
"You could see there was a bit going on," he said. "The results on the field weren't going what they want, bit going on off it. Who will be the captain at the end of the day, that'll be the choice of the new head coach."
The panel did not pretend to know what comes next. The point of the conversation, instead, was that the All Blacks have walked into 2026 with their head coach gone, their captain unsettled, their assistants in limbo and a brutal Test schedule against the Springboks waiting in the middle of the year. Who replaces Razer is, as Wilson put it, the choice the appointment panel cannot afford to get wrong twice.
