THE The All Blacks beat England and Ireland for consecutive weeks and are on a five-game winning streak while playing more consistent rugby, providing an evidentiary basis from which NZR can claim they got the right result in installing Robertson as head coach in 2024.

They brought in Robertson to refresh and reimagine the All Blacks – the way they played, the players they chose and the way they interacted with their audience – and although it took a while to As the final signs of his vision manifest themselves, there is a sense now that he is on the verge of fulfilling his mandate.

And by extension, NZR can use the result to justify the process – as a big part of the reason they decided to find their next All Blacks coach eight months before the World Cup and not wait until after the tournament, was to ensure that Robertson would still be available to apply and not picked up by a rival nation.

But it is important, for two reasons, that NZR does not use confirmation bias to convince itself that it was right to break with convention last year.

The first is to remember that there is no control group in this scenario.

While Robertson and his coaching staff are begin to understand the nuances of international rugby and knowing who to pick and how to play, which is not in itself hard evidence that the All Blacks are better off in 2024 than they would have been had NZR retained his predecessor, Ian Foster.

Foster’s reign went through a difficult period between late 2021 and much of 2022, but once reset with the arrival of new assistant coaches Joe Schmidt and Jason Ryan, the All Blacks began to play with verve and imagination and are passed by. goal kick to win the World Cup.

All we can conclude is that the All Blacks have a good coach in Robertson and they would have had a good coach in Foster if they had retained him.

But the real danger in using confirmation bias to claim the right choice was made is that it would falsely endorse NZR’s controversial belief that conducting a nomination process months before a World Cup was high-level best practice. performance because it aligned them with other leaders. nations.

This argument has always been abject nonsense, which has been incontrovertibly proven by looking at the three nations that have taken this route – England, Australia and Wales.

All three opted to fire their respective head coaches in December 2022 and find new ones with less than a year to go before the tournament.

New Zealand, of course, opted to keep Foster in his role until the World Cup, but that doesn’t take away from the argument that it was high performance suicide to conclude that following the Jones’ pace was a valid strategy for the All Blacks. pursue.

Wales, England and Australia all made the difficult decision to do what they did. They reacted to political pressures and personal agendas within their executive and governance regimes, and made reactionary and unconsidered decisions.

Australia were an absolute disaster in 2023 after sacking Dave Rennie and appointing Eddie Jones, who didn’t last quite a year, during which time he led the Wallabies to ninth in the world.

If Australia had retained Rennie and then started a process to determine whether to keep or replace him after the tournament, they would certainly have been better off.

Wales sacked Wayne Pivac to appoint Warren Gatland in December 2022 and are now on a 10-game losing streak with former players of the Principality calling for the Kiwi coach’s head.

And England, despite showing signs of promise at times under Steve Borthwick, have won just five out of 10 Tests this year, and that’s after finishing fourth in last year’s Six Nations and lost to Fiji before the World Cup.

The point NZR needs to be clear on is that they may – or may not – have made the right call in appointing Robertson, but they also cannot conclude that the timing and nature of the process to get him into the role were the good ones. A.

And it is important to conclude that the process was flawed, so that when Robertson comes to the end of his four-year contract, there is a carefully considered strategy about what to do next and when to do it, which is motivated by what is good for the All Blacks and not driven by misplaced rhetoric that the best practice for high performance is to follow what other nations are doing.

All Blacks v France, Sunday 9:10 a.m. Live commentary on Newstalk ZB, Gold Sport and iHeartRadio. Live match blog on nzherald.co.nz