Will the All Blacks continue to persist with the tried and true?

Ian Foster faces two major challenges right now.

The first, and most pertinent, is simply getting the All Blacks back to their winning ways. After kicking off the year with two wins and four losses (as well as finishing 2021 with back-to-back defeats), a single victory over Argentina in Hamilton won’t be enough to quell doubts about the current set-up. But while the season can’t be ‘saved’ at this late stage, with the team now having accumulated the third-most losses of any All Blacks side throughout history in one calendar year, Foster’s men can at least add a little bit of respectability to the campaign with an unlikely run of victories.

Slightly lower down on the totem pole of priorities is building some much-needed depth in the All Blacks’ ranks.

This season, Foster has largely stuck with the same core contingent of players, with just 25 men getting two or more starts throughout the campaign to date. Others who are at least into their second season as All Blacks, such as Tupou Vaa’i, Hoskins Sotutu, Finlay Christie and Braydon Ennor have so far played bit-part roles in 2022 while the newest group – men like Aidan Ross, Folau Fakatava and Stephen Perofeta – have barely had a look in.

While some players may take the hand they’ve been dealt in their stride, others will quite understandably be questioning whether coach Foster actually has faith in their abilities to play Test rugby, which will undoubtedly play on their confidence and could affect their ability to perform when fate finally deals them some significant minutes on the park.

As it stands, the All Blacks have little more than a dozen matches left to play between now and the opening match of the 2023 Rugby World Cup, which means a significant number of current squad members will have few if any opportunities to press their case for more regular minutes – and those opportunities will become even more fleeting if Foster’s men can’t start stringing some wins together.

For some men – such as Sotutu and Perofeta – returning to the NPC might be the best course of action and then heading north at the end of the year with the All Blacks XV to rack up some games against high-quality opposition.

It’s difficult to envisage a situation where the men who are currently starved of opportunities will feature in any prominent way at France 2023. Given New Zealand have rolled out a relatively consistent line-up week after week, the expectation will be a similar group of players is used throughout next year’s tournament. With no fewer than six days between each of the All Blacks’ games at the flagship tournament (and that’s between taking on Italy and Uruguay, with a full week between the other matches), Foster will be confident that he’ll be able to effectively run with the same line-up for every fixture in the competition unless injuries strike. Even if Foster does want to rotate his charges, he would quite rightly expect that even an inexperienced international like Sotutu would be capable of fronting up against Namibia or Uruguay, which means the depth issue is perhaps not quite as serious as it will at times be made out to be.

Of course, that doesn’t mean some of the lesser-used players in the All Blacks squad shouldn’t be given the chance to prove they’re capable of being first-stringers at the World Cup.

There are few men in the current starting line-up that have proven themselves indispensable at this stage of the season. Samisoni Taukei’aho, Sam Whitelock (on account of his lineout expertise), Ardie Savea and Jordie Barrett (at least against kick-heavy opposition) are perhaps the only men to have shown themselves to be head-and-shoulders above their nearest competition and while there’s obviously an argument that can be made for maintaining continuity in selection, we’re yet to see any major fruits for that continuity this season. Would the All Blacks have faired any worse against Ireland, South Africa or Argentina with Tupou Vaa’i packing down at lock, Dalton Papalii starting in place of Sam Cane or Quinn Tupaea in the midfield instead of David Havili?

Foster and senior All Blacks have regularly peddled a positive ‘all is well’ line that the side has made great strides week after week on the training pitch, even if those improvements haven’t always manifested in on-field results but we’ve also heard that sometimes the men on the pitch aren’t always sticking to the game plan.

“Things we did talk about to combat [the Springboks’ rush defence], we didn’t do well at all so that’s a bit of an uppercut,” bench first five Richie Mo’unga said after the first Test against the Springboks. Mo’unga was subsequently promoted to the No 10 jersey for the rematch and the depth NZ needed to get a result was much more evident right from the first whistle.

“Our set-piece didn’t quite work the way we wanted in the latter part and we probably forgot to play a kicking game, so tough learning curve for this group at the moment,” Foster said after the loss to Argentina.

Forgetting to play a kicking game is a schoolboy-level error and while you can understand how that can creep into professional sides at times, it’s a less than ideal problem to have when the All Blacks are already under the microscope for underperforming. It’s all perhaps just one more sign that Ian Foster needs to be more ruthless with his senior players.

A few years ago, an out-of-sorts Aaron Smith lost his place as the starting No 9 and that demotion seemed to help him get back to his best form and a similar approach might bear fruits in 2022 – not just for Smith, but for other players who perhaps aren’t playing with the kind of form that demands starting for what was once the world’s pre-eminent team.

Will Ian Foster shake his side up to take on Argentina this week, or will he stick with the men he’s largely kept faith with throughout 2022? With what are looking like increasingly challenging games ahead against Australia, Wales, Scotland and England, the opportunities to give game time to less established players are quickly diminishing, and now might be the time to experiment.