As Dave Rennie settles into the All Blacks job and edges towards naming his first squad of a new era, two World Cup-winning former All Blacks have offered strikingly different readings of where the team stands — and both keep circling back to the Springboks.
Kieran Read, the former captain and No. 8 who lifted the World Cup in 2015, is the more worried of the two. Reflecting on the kind of belief that defined the great sides he played in, Read pointed to the 2013 comeback win over Ireland in Dublin as the benchmark.
"We were a team that had built this absolute belief in each other and then the ability to come back from whatever situation was thrown at us at that moment," Read said.
Asked whether the current All Blacks possess that same ability to drag themselves out of trouble, his answer was blunt. "No, they don't," he said. "Because they don't have the experiences or the evidence of it happening."
For Read, that hard-won certainty cannot be manufactured on demand. "There's something about belief and there's something about building that over a period of time. And you can't just switch it on," he said.
He then held up South Africa as the model. "The South Africans have it. They definitely have it," Read said. "Because they've built this experience of games that are hard and have come through and won."
It is more than composure under pressure, Read argued — it is a settled sense of identity. "They've got an ability to know exactly who they are and exactly how they play. So it's more than just a belief to come out of sticky situations. It's a belief to know how you play the game," he said. "And the South Africans know exactly how to play the game. All Blacks right now probably don't."
Stephen Donald, the man whose boot won the 2011 World Cup final and who now works as a Sky Sport analyst, takes a sunnier view of the Rennie reset. His optimism is built on the idea that New Zealand can stop chasing the blueprint of others and rediscover its own.
"I think we're going to have our own style again and not just be copycatting," Donald said on The Aftermatch podcast. "We've got our coach settled now. We know exactly who's going to be helping him, and I think it's going to be at a higher pace and a higher speed level."
His implicit criticism of the recent past was clear. "Last year and the year before, we probably fell into thinking that that's how you win Test rugby, and probably went away from what our boys are so gifted and talented with," Donald said, suggesting Rennie's gift to the side would be speed and tempo.
Donald also believes the playing stocks are healthier than the doom-mongers suggest. "I don't think we've been in such a strong position for a long, long time," he said. "I think we're in as good a spot as anyone could have imagined. I don't see any glaring issues."
Rennie was appointed in March, succeeding Scott Robertson, with Neil Barnes, Jason Ryan, Mike Blair and Tana Umaga forming the wider coaching group. The arguments of Read and Donald will be tested soon enough. A new Rugby Championship campaign and another instalment of the sport's fiercest rivalry are looming — and on Read's reckoning, the Springboks still hold the one thing money and selection cannot buy.
