Steve Hansen: The Legacy

By Gregor Paul

The making of a New Zealand coaching great

Between the years 2012 and 2019, Sir Steve Hansen oversaw an era of such remarkable success that it would be almost impossible to repeat. His 15-year career in the All Blacks coaching team is the heaviest footprint in rugby history. Of the 210 tests he was involved with, his team lost just 25 times. Of the 107 tests he served as head coach, Sir Steve accumulated a record 4 World Rugby Coach of the Year awards and orchestrated 93 victories - a winning percentage of 87 per cent, the highest of any All Blacks coach.

Steve Hansen: The Legacy delves into the highs and the lows that earned the New Zealand rugby knight a place in the pantheon of world rugby coaching greats. Revealing and perceptive, the book uncovers how Hansen dealt with the immeasurable pressure of leading the world's most famous rugby team; the tension created by being re-appointed specifically to win the Rugby World Cup; how he dealt with high-profile athletes and an exodus of New Zealand's all-time greats; the endless tug-of-war between commercialism and high performance; the increasing influence of referees on the game; the power battle between the northern and southern hemispheres; the Achilles heel that contributed to the All Blacks' 2019 Rugby World Cup loss; and how, during his career, he learnt to understand his weaknesses and use them to his advantage.

Much more than a biography, in Steve Hansen: The Legacy, award-winning writer Gregor Paul tells the compelling story of the former policeman from Mosgiel, his quest for world rugby dominance and his journey to coaching greatness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Aug 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781775492023

Gregor Paul

Gregor Paul is The New Zealand Herald's most respected rugby columnist and is a regular contributor to publications around the world. He has won multiple journalism awards for news, features and opinion writing, and is a sought after guest on radio and TV. His bestselling biography Steve Hansen: The Legacy was shortlisted for the The Sunday Times Sports Book Awards 2023. Gregor was born and raised in Scotland, and has lived in Auckland with his wife and three children since 2003.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

THE SUN WAS BEATING down in Marseilles as the All Blacks went through their last training session of 2009. There was an element of tension among the players and an edge within the coaching group as Graham Henry had declared the looming test against France to be season-defining. The All Blacks’ year was hanging in the balance after playing thirteen tests, winning nine and losing four. They needed another victory, against a strong French team who had beaten them earlier in the year in Dunedin, to confirm that they were finally moving in the right direction after losing four of their first eight tests.

The pressure had reached an explosive point in September when the Springboks claimed their third consecutive victory more comfortably than the 32–29 scoreline suggested. The primary cause of the defeat was another malfunctioning effort by the All Blacks lineout, which had descended into a shambolic state a few tests earlier and never recovered. The basic skills to deal with South Africa’s aerial bombardment were also missing and the defeat enraged a swathe of media and public alike, who had disagreed with the decision to reappoint Henry and his assistants Wayne Smith and Steve Hansen after they had presided over the worst World Cup campaign in All Blacks history two years earlier.

The relationship between the coaching group and media moved from strained to hostile in September 2009 and as the man in charge of the forwards and the All Blacks’ set-piece, Hansen was feeling the brunt of it. The focus on him was suffocating. He looked and sounded like a man slowly, or not so slowly, being crushed by the weight of expectation. To some extent he had inadvertently invited the extra scrutiny by showing that he was tapped into the public consciousness more astutely than his fellow coaches. He had set himself up as the voice of the people when he cracked an unforgettable one-liner after what was a truly dire test in Christchurch against Italy that June. The All Blacks had won 27–6, but had delivered a performance that could have curdled milk. The first 40 minutes were so awful that captain Mils Muliaina, on seeing an obviously combustible Henry waiting in the changing room, sensed that it was best not to be in eyesight of the veteran coach. His instincts served him well as Henry produced the most withering five-minute rant of his entire All Blacks coaching career, questioning the commitment of every player.

Henry was the focal point of the public ire at that time. He’d won back a job less than half the nation, and probably all of Christchurch, was adamant he didn’t deserve. The inhabitants of the Garden City had expected to see their own man, Robbie Deans, installed as All Blacks coach in 2008. But Deans’ bid was rejected and on hearing in December 2007 that he had been unsuccessful, the favourite son of the Crusaders left New Zealand Rugby (NZR) headquarters, flew to Sydney and signed as Wallabies coach later that day.

Many considered NZR’s rejection of Deans an unforgivable act of betrayal. The insult was compounded by awarding Christchurch with easily the weakest test of the 2009 calendar year. A less-than-three-quarters-full stadium could hardly believe that the All Blacks had added to their misery with such dreadful rugby. Beer cans were thrown and fingers thrust at the direction of the coaching box when the game ended.

After Henry had frostily and inelegantly tried to explain the performance, Hansen provided the only moment of levity when he brought the post-match media conference to an end by saying: ‘It is time to flush the dunny and move on.’

Hansen was the ice-breaker, the man with the human touch who could tell the people what they needed to hear in a manner that didn’t denigrate his head coach. Henry could pretend there was no need to appease the fans or concede any justification to their discontent, because Hansen was front of house, cleverly deflating the tension as the gruff, stoic but ultimately conciliatory face of the All Blacks coaching team.

By September, Hansen was adrift. He wasn’t estranged from Henry and Smith but his two colleagues were wary that he’d become volatile and unpredictable. After the loss to the Boks Hansen had lashed out when he was grilled about the lineout failings. ‘They haven’t built any statues of critics or wannabes yet. My job is not listening to those people, it’s about making sure we stay on task.’ It was a petulant, petty and inflammatory response. A few days after he made it, the All Blacks hammered Australia 33–6 in Wellington, with the forwards paving the way for the big win and the lineout operating especially well. Hansen, though, was not at the top table alongside Henry and Smith for the post-match media conference.

His absence spoke volumes, and when the squad was picked for the end-of-season European tour, there was a surprise announcement that Hansen was being shifted from coaching the forwards to coaching the attack.

On that tour, the All Blacks played Australia in Tokyo, Wales in Cardiff, Italy in Milan and England at Twickenham, before they headed to France. They won them all, playing tighter, more fluent rugby than they had all year. But Hansen kept a low profile. In London the management team invited the New Zealand media for a few drinks. Henry was there, in great form, regaling everyone about the party the Welsh had enjoyed in the same bar in 2000 after they had beaten England at Wembley. Hansen was a no-show, harbouring a sense of grievance.

In Marseilles on the way to a 39–12 All Blacks victory, an imbroglio broke out on the touchline when Hansen was talking to TV3 reporter Jim Kayes. There was heat in the exchange and it became increasingly animated until Hansen turned on his heel and made a notably dramatic exit. Kayes remonstrated with Hansen’s back. He didn’t hear the coach’s parting shot: ‘For fuck’s sake Jimmy, you have been on TV for five fucking minutes and you think your shit doesn’t stink.’

CHAPTER 1

The First 100 Days

WORLD DOMINATION

HAVING COVETED THE ROLE of All Blacks head coach for most of his adult life, there was strangely no sense of contentment for Steve Hansen when he was appointed on 16 December 2011. His nervousness was detectable from the moment he sat down in front of the assembled media pack at New Zealand Rugby’s headquarters just hours after he’d won the job. Despite having spent the last eight years as assistant coach of the All Blacks, there was, to Hansen’s mind, an incredible and almost unimaginable jump in the enormity of the responsibility he had just assumed.

For eight years he’d had access to certain parts of the All Blacks’ engine. He’d been able to push buttons and pull levers in this great big machine, but as head coach, he now stood in front of the whole control panel, entrusted to know how everything worked. He was the man with the total responsibility to steer the All Blacks through the turbulent seas of international rugby. That realisation stoked in him a mix of incredible pride, excitement and, in those first few weeks, almost paralysing fear.

Some of his stress was born from coveting something for so long only to have the sobering realisation he should have been careful what he had wished for. ‘It’s interesting because you go through the process of your interviews and you are desperate because you want the job so much,’ he said. ‘And then they give it to you and it’s like woah . . . now I have got to go and do it. I don’t think you would be normal if you didn’t feel a little intimidated by that because you understand the enormity of the job you have been given. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t have some self-doubt either.’

The weight of history was bearing down on him because Hansen had an almost spiritual connection with the All Blacks. The All Blacks weren’t just a rugby team, but the embodiment of the pioneering spirit of the nation. He was an avid historian and knew how the All Blacks had profoundly shaped the psyche of the nation: how they pervaded so deeply into the narrative of a tiny country’s struggle to break their colonial past and stand on their own two feet. Hansen knew he was taking charge of something bigger than himself and the players, that he’d been entrusted as the custodian of something remarkably precious.

One of Hansen’s predecessors, John Mitchell, had – maybe not deliberately – used the All Blacks job as a stepping stone to other things. He’d used his time with the All Blacks to become a career coach, landing roles around the world on the strength of a C.V. that contained a two-year stint in charge of the world’s best-known rugby team. The All Blacks were never going to be a box to tick for Hansen. At 52 years old, he reached the apex of his career the day he was appointed. This was everything he’d strived for, and burning inside him was a primal need to add something to the legacy: to preside over a period that could stand proudly alongside everything the All Blacks had already achieved. This was the defining act of a coaching career that until then had left only the lightest footprint on the international rugby landscape.

He also knew there was not universal public support for his appointment. Some felt he had won the job by default rather than being fully deserving of it. His ticket to the role was continuity, but not everyone in New Zealand was keen to see more of the same. In 2007, when the All Blacks crashed out of the World Cup in the quarter-finals, more than half the nation had demanded head coach Graham Henry and his assistants, Hansen and Wayne Smith, be sacked. They weren’t. Instead, they were given another four years and a chance to redeem themselves by coaching the All Blacks to victory at the 2011 tournament. Which they did.

The NZR board, having been brave enough to stick it out with Henry, convinced themselves, after seeing the All Blacks win the 2011 World Cup, that continuity was a panacea to all coaching ills and didn’t hide the fact that Hansen had always been the frontrunner to succeed Henry.

There was also a lack of alternatives. Super Rugby had a relatively inexperienced and underwhelming coaching cohort at that time. The most compelling candidates, such as Robbie Deans and Warren Gatland, were overseas and committed to Australia and Wales respectively. The only genuine challenger was Vern Cotter, the former Bay of Plenty coach who had done superbly with French club Clermont. He didn’t have any test experience, though, and was interviewed more to give Hansen’s anointment a greater semblance of being a genuinely competitive process.

Hansen never felt that he was an undeserving appointment, but he knew others saw it that way, and while it didn’t make him uneasy as such, it intensified his desire to prove himself. He felt that he would be judged more harshly than previous coaches – that public expectations would be set at an absurdly high level to counter the taint of him having arrived in office on the coat tails of someone’s else’s achievements.

Hansen had won titles while he was an assistant with the Crusaders in the late 1990s. He’d been head coach of Canterbury when they were provincial champions in 2001. He had spent almost three years as head coach of Wales and had made the quarter-final of the 2003 World Cup. He’d spent eight years as assistant coach of the All Blacks, a period in which they won four Tri-Nations, two Grand Slams and the 2011 World Cup. But those achievements had only paved the way for the real work to begin. It was almost as if the first 20 years of his coaching career were the equivalent of the World Cup pool rounds – they were merely a gateway to the serious business of the knock-out rounds. The clock was reset on the day Hansen became head coach: his career would be defined entirely by what he did in his new role.

Two months prior to Hansen being unveiled as the new head coach of the All Blacks, captain Richie McCaw had lifted the Webb Ellis trophy at Eden Park. It was a moment many New Zealanders had feared would never come. Since winning the inaugural tournament in 1987, the All Blacks had endured a series of botched campaigns where they had contrived all sorts of fascinating ways to kill their dreams of victory. They were pegged with the dreaded chokers tag and their consistent failure at World Cups ate at them mentally. But on 23 October 2011 there was McCaw, amid a snowstorm of glitter and shredded paper, clutching the World Cup to let a nation know the All Blacks were not psychologically broken. It was a hugely symbolic moment, and waves of elation and relief spread through the country in the days after the 8–7 victory against France.

Yet as much as Hansen relished and valued that World Cup victory, there was a deeper truth to the occasion that he knew others were going to find hard to accept. New Zealanders and the All Blacks had greatly exaggerated the value of a World Cup victory. Having endured so much failure and heartbreak between 1991 and 2007, the need to win had become an unhealthy obsession. A World Cup was a moment-in-time achievement. It did not of itself prove greatness or stand as a reason to elevate those who won the tournament to the pantheon of greats. A World Cup came down to winning three knock-out games and while that was tough, certainly worthy of celebration, the reality of what it was had to be acknowledged. Hansen would argue that winning the Tri-Nations – having to beat South Africa and Australia home and away almost in consecutive weeks – was tougher. Winning a Grand Slam by defeating the four Home Unions of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales in one tour was arguably tougher. As much as Hansen considered that he had achieved almost nothing in his coaching career when he came to the helm, he also believed that the team hadn’t proven that much by winning the World Cup.

Almost every other observer would have disagreed. McCaw had presided over one of the great redemption stories in sports history. Having taken over the captaincy in 2006, his leadership was questioned and doubted after the All Blacks crashed out of the 2007 World Cup. He used that failure to drive himself for the next four years, becoming one of the greatest players and captains in history. He turned 31 two weeks after Hansen took over as head coach and it was hard to believe that McCaw had anything left to prove or give to the game. And he wasn’t alone. Other brilliant, once-in-a-generation players had felt the pain of defeat in 2007 and committed themselves to making amends in 2011. The likes of Daniel Carter, Conrad Smith, Keven Mealamu, Tony Woodcock and Ali Williams had been All Blacks since the early 2000s and had channelled everything they had into winning in 2011. All would be considered among the all-time best in their respective positions. They were closing in on 100 test caps and were absolute giants of the game.

Hansen was taking over a special team of special players who had been around for an age and achieved almost everything they could in the game – Bledisloe Cup wins, Tri-Nations titles, Grand Slams, a Lions series victory and now a World Cup. And yet, the crazy thing is, he knew that at some stage in the next few months he would stand in front of this assembled group of brilliant players and tell them that in his view, they had achieved nothing.

*

THE MOOD OF THE rugby fraternity was lighter in February 2012. Fans, media, players and coaches were all that little bit less edgy, as if the need to prove something wasn’t as pressing as it had been for the last four years. The pressure dial had been cranked too far between 2008 and 2011. Suddenly it had been released and there was a hint of rugby being fun again – of players enjoying themselves when Super Rugby kicked off at Eden Park with a classic derby between the Blues and Crusaders.

As he watched the country welcome back Super Rugby and the early rounds play out, Hansen wasn’t surprised. He had always known that winning the World Cup would release the tension. He knew how hard so many people, including himself, had worked between 2008 and 2011.

He had no issues with players regaining their enjoyment of the game, but he was conscious of how easily and quickly complacency could grip them and how far the All Blacks might drop if they spent 2012 wallowing in the glory of what they had achieved in 2011. In those early rounds of Super Rugby, the situation developed more dramatically than he had anticipated. Piri Weepu, who had been such a crucial player for the All Blacks at the 2011 World Cup tournament, had reported for Super Rugby duty almost 10kg overweight, so unfit he could barely play 30 minutes. Ma’a Nonu arrived back late from a sabbatical in Japan and couldn’t find any form or rhythm. The brilliant blindside flanker Jerome Kaino, who had played almost every minute of the 2011 World Cup and was arguably the player of the tournament, dislocated his shoulder and was ruled out for the rest of 2012; likewise the Chiefs’ versatile outside back Richard Kahui. McCaw had required more surgery on his broken foot and was out until early May. Owen Franks, Sam Whitelock and Kieran Read, three forwards who were developing into world-class talents, were barely making an impression with the Crusaders, and utility back Isaia Toeava revealed he had a degenerative hip problem that made it doubtful when or even if he would be able to play. Lock Anthony Boric was in a similar boat – having endured major surgery on a bulging disc, he was maybe going to be fit by 2013. To cap it off, Sonny Bill Williams confirmed he would be returning to play in the NRL in 2013. Throw in the facts that Brad Thorn, Mils Muliaina and John Afoa had left after the World Cup and Zac Guildford was dealing with alcohol and gambling addiction issues, and there was every reason for Hansen to be worried about the All Blacks in 2012.

The bulk of the All Blacks’ World Cup squad were flat. Winning the World Cup had robbed them of the intrinsic motivation to push themselves to the edge. Their play in Super Rugby showed that many players had gone as far as they could and no longer had anything to drive them. Veteran lock Ali Williams, who was battling for form and confidence as part of a dreadful Blues team, even admitted to mental lapses in the wake of winning the World Cup. ‘Of course I had that moment when I felt flat and shoot me straight up, I am playing like shit,’ he said. ‘I don’t think you lose the hunger, you just have to re-direct yourself.’ Williams didn’t need to worry about re-directing himself, however, as Hansen had already formed a detailed plan on how he was going to help all his players do just that.

*

EVEN BEFORE HANSEN LANDED the head coaching role, he had been thinking about the situation he would inherit should he be successful. He would be taking over a world-champion side which meant, in theory, there was only one direction he could take the team. He was also aware that many previous world-champion sides had struggled the year after they had won the World Cup. It was something he had witnessed and studied at length. His first tests as assistant coach of the All Blacks in 2004 were against then world champions, England. They had come to New Zealand in June 2003 before the World Cup and beaten the All Blacks, but in 2004, having won the World Cup, they were well beaten in both tests and proceeded to fall apart over the next three years. In 2007, the Boks became world champions then lost four tests including two to the All Blacks in 2008, then another four in 2009, before they collapsed to six defeats in 2010.

There was a strong body of evidence that showed teams could easily decline in their first year as world champions. ‘At the end of 2011 there were strong conversations throughout the organisation that we were not going to have a flat year in 2012,’ said former New Zealand Rugby chief executive Steve Tew, who was in the role through to 2019. ‘We didn’t want to be one of those teams that got up and then had to rebuild because it slackened off. We wanted to have a strong four years.’

Also playing on Hansen’s mind was the growing realisation that every other international team they played was putting a victory against the All Blacks at the top of their priority list. Now that the All Blacks were world champions, that desire would only increase. Every other major international team had the goal of chasing and defeating the All Blacks. But what did the All Blacks have to drive them now that they were world champions?

Hansen asked himself how the All Blacks could motivate themselves every time they played from their lofty position on top of the world. How he would be able to take a champion team to another level? He was convinced they had another level in them. This was a question that he and skills coach Mick Byrne had mulled over long before Hansen became coach.

‘I was doing some preparation and research and realised that every single article written in England and Ireland and indeed Wales, Australia and South Africa was about how their respective national teams wanted to beat the All Blacks,’ said Byrne. ‘It was the same for them all – they all had this motivation to beat the All Blacks. It was what they wanted to do and it was what they all felt they needed to do. You could imagine if you were playing for Argentina, say, and your coach was telling you that he wanted to beat the All Blacks and that you could be part of that team – the first to beat the All Blacks – that it could be pretty motivating.

‘But, and this is not being arrogant, it was different with the All Blacks. After 2011 the All Blacks were the best team in the world and they had held the number-one ranking for some time as well. It wasn’t opinion, or arrogance, that was fact and we began talking about what our drivers were going to be. How motivated would an All Black be, for instance, to beat Argentina? The expectation to win was always going to be there so we had to ask how we were going to get better. What was it going to take to get the best out of the All Blacks?’

By the time Hansen was interviewed for the head coaching job, he had his answer. He told the New Zealand Rugby Board that his tenure would be about giving the players a higher purpose, a bold, ambitious and memorable goal to chase. For the next four years, everything had to be about reaching for the seemingly unattainable. The benchmark for the All Blacks would be the All Blacks. They had to become their toughest enemy. The score wouldn’t necessarily be treated as an indicator of success. The rest of the world would look at that as the sole barometer, but for the All Blacks success would be defined by the quality of their performance and their ability to deliver to the standards they had set. What was stopping the All Blacks from being a better team than they currently were? Why did being world champions have to be viewed as the limit? Could the All Blacks be something more than that? He told the board that yes, they could be and so a few weeks after Super Rugby started in 2012, he called a leadership meeting in Christchurch to lay out this vision to the senior players.

*

NONE OF THE LEADERSHIP group were quite sure what to expect when they gathered at the Clearwater Resort in Christchurch for one of the first of hundreds of meetings they would have that year. When Hansen wrote on the whiteboard – Be The Most Dominant Team in the History of Rugby – he immediately had their attention.

The reaction was stunned silence as everyone tried to take in the enormity of what Hansen was suggesting. This was bold and brilliant. It was the most incredible mission statement. ‘I had just been brought in and so it was one my first meetings in the group,’ said Kieran Read. ‘And he did that. It really hit the spot. It was explained really well. It was aspirational and really set the tone for us. You have got to have your internal motivation strong. That’s what drives you every day and keeps you going. But as a group there were no real outs or excuses for us once that was put up. We said if we are going to buy into this, and we did as a group, you can’t have excuses or be slacking on this or that, so it does have a big impact on your motivation. But not just that. It was about how you hold yourself and the values you keep and definitely how you train and that equates into the game as well.

‘I think it was bloody important. A lot of the guys who came out of 2007 and for a few of us who hadn’t, after winning the World Cup in 2011, we could easily have slipped into taking a breath and thinking we have won, we can maybe relax. Or some guys might have thought we could not quite push ourselves and look to 2015 without potentially keeping on top of our game in that early period after 2011. It really grabbed us as a whole group, particularly the older guys about where they could take the team that was world champion but hasn’t really dominated the world.’

One of those older guys was Conrad Smith, who had been an All Black since 2004, and who had become one of the most influential players in the side, not just for his world-class contributions on the field, but for his astute leadership and wise counsel off it. A qualified lawyer, Smith was, alongside McCaw, the deepest thinker and sharpest mind in the team. He didn’t suffer fools and could sniff out coaching bullshit in a flash. He’d turned 30 at the World Cup – a tournament in which he had been one of the All Blacks’ best players. Others may have been wondering how much more he had left in his tank, but he wasn’t.

‘I didn’t feel like it was the end of anything in 2011,’ said Smith. ‘I had no sense that I was at the end of my time with the All Blacks, but I think I would be right in saying that as an All Blacks team, with Graham Henry leaving, that was the end of the road in a sense. Everything we had planned was about winning that 2011 World Cup and there had been no looking past that. We realised that you need things to strive for and you need vision. That’s what Steve wanted and he delivered.

‘Steve obviously spent a bit of time after that World Cup to refocus things, so when we came in to that meeting in 2012, he was straight away telling the team this wasn’t the end and we are going to go up a level. He said any team can win a World Cup so why don’t we try to do something really special and be the number-one team in history. He laid out all the goals. He said to win a World Cup is great but the All Blacks jersey is better than that and other teams have won World Cups. He really touched a good point because when we hadn’t won World Cups – and we had been through a lot of losses – we used to say the All Blacks were bigger than one tournament. Now we had won a World Cup, we could understand that it was not that big a deal. It’s actually harder to go through a season unbeaten. You win a World Cup, you just win three knock-out games. But going through even a Tri-Nations unbeaten, that’s way harder. We realised that we had bigger things to try to achieve.’

Racing through veteran hooker Keven Mealamu’s mind as he heard Hansen’s vision were questions about application. He wanted to know what being the most dominant team in history would look like in terms of results and behaviours. It was one thing, he reckoned, to say something bold and gripping, but how exactly was Hansen planning to achieve greatness? On what measure would the All Blacks determine they had achieved their goal?

In terms of results, there was an obvious landmark to aim at – becoming the first team to win consecutive World Cups. Doing that would go a long way towards establishing Hansen’s All Blacks as the most dominant team in history. But of course the whole point of chasing this level of domination was to avoid falling into a three-year lull and only sparking up in 2015. To dominate the world, the All Blacks would have to retain the Bledisloe Cup. They would have to win the Rugby Championship. Not just once but every year. The style in which they won would be important. They had to play a brand of rugby that was definitive, expressive and emphatic, built on a foundation of immaculate basic skills. To be dominant the All Blacks would have to be able to play at pace, with intensity and build a triple-threat game where they could pass, run and kick, and pick their options as conditions and oppositions allowed.

‘In my interview I had said some big things,’ said Hansen. ‘I wanted NZR and the All Blacks to dominate rugby because where do you go if you have just won a World Cup? You can’t turn round and say we want to be number one because we were already number one. We had to do something different. I had staked my reputation on wanting to do that and I had talked about how we were going to do that but now that we had to go out and do it, that could have been a little intimidating. It was about believing in myself and bringing people with me.

‘Whether we were seen to be the most dominant team in the world was an aspiration. It wasn’t for us to say we were because that would be arrogant. When you have an aspiration that is big like that, it helps you get out of the bed in the morning. It gives you purpose around what am I going to do at training today as a player that is going to allow us to be dominant. Am I training to train or am I training to dominate? They are two different mindsets and when you understand that as a group it is quite powerful.’

Hansen’s vision of what constituted domination was clear and precise in terms of results and achievements. He was just as clear on the second part of his goal – which was to make the All Blacks a team of which all of New Zealand could be proud. This was equally important. He had told the board at his interview that he wanted to connect the players with the people, make them ambassadors for the sport and the country, and conduct themselves in such a way as to elicit global respect. His All Blacks would be approachable, relatable and open. They would be the sort of team who signed autographs, stood for photos with a smile and kind words, and didn’t become front-page news for what they were doing off the field.

He therefore had equally clear expectations around behaviour and conduct. A dominant All Blacks side would be as gracious in victory as they would in defeat. Results would not define them as people. Win, lose or draw, they would review each test the same way. They would uphold the traditional values of the game – see friendship and fair play as a big part of the All Blacks ethos. They would invite their opponents to their changing sheds after home games, accept all invitations to do the same when they were away, and be as as eager to drink with their opposition when they lost as they were when they won. That would be a true measure of their character.

Hansen expected them to play within the rules of the game. There would be no foul play condoned. His All Blacks would be physical; on the edge, yes, but over it, no. They would be tough but clean, rugged but not wild. They would be brave enough to take risks when they were under pressure on the field but not when they were off it. They would be punctual and professional. They could have a drink but have a clear understanding of when and what constituted too much. They would have curfews when appropriate and they would be obeyed. Those who failed to meet the standards or broke the rules would be disciplined.

Most important of all, Hansen expected his All Blacks to hold each other accountable. That’s what would create a culture of continual improvement – being willing to tell a peer they were not pulling their weight or giving the team what it needed. The standards they walked past would be the standards they accepted.

All Blacks had to lead and drive their own improvement. They had to have a growth mindset, remain coachable and be open to all forms of learning. They had to lead yet know when to let others lead. They had to be strong enough to ask for help, willing to ask questions when they didn’t understand. Hansen felt it was vital for players to show humility – for even the most senior players to accept they were not exempt from taking their turn to carry the kit bags or clean up the shed after training.

The players had to show gratitude for the opportunity they had and, to do that, they needed to respect the legacy of the All Blacks and understand they were there to write their own history. They were all just passing through and were obliged to try to hand the jersey on in better shape than they found it. To do that they had to firstly understand and be driven by their higher purpose. Everything they did had to be geared towards the goal of being the most dominant team in the world. They had to embrace, not fear, the expectations that were placed upon them. Pressure was a constant and they had to learn to love it.

‘When you hear something like that it was inspiring for the team and the leadership,’ said Mealamu. ‘Saying it was one thing but understanding the behaviours and what the whole thing was going to look like set some really high standards for our team. What made it more realistic to us was knowing what it looked like and what we had to do to be able to live up to it. Steve was clear when we asked what was it that we needed to achieve and what kind of standards did we need to set up and what sort of behaviours did we need to see. One of the most obvious things was for the All Blacks to win back-to-back World Cups. That had never been done before and the All Blacks had never won one outside of New Zealand. There were some big barriers that we understood.

‘When you put that statement out there – the most dominant team – and get into what does that look like you understand that doesn’t just go for one year. It is for everything that comes after. For us to be world champions and be able to leave some kind of legacy, we had to back that up the following year as well and the one after and not just live our values at a World Cup.’

With the vision laid out and the expectations explained, the players were asked if they wanted to change anything. No one said a word, and with their silence came confirmation that Hansen’s All Blacks had just accepted the toughest challenge any rugby team had ever faced.

CHAPTER 2

The First 100 Days

BUILDING THE COACHING TEAM

THE KEY REASON NEW ZEALAND RUGBY decided to re-appoint Graham Henry after the failed 2007 World Cup campaign was the strength of his coaching team. Henry presented the board with a coaching unit rather than just his own credentials. He had spent four years working in close partnership with Wayne Smith and Hansen and promised to keep doing so in 2008. It was a vision more appealing than the one put forward by his challenger, Robbie Deans, who didn’t know at his interview who he wanted to join his coaching team.

Hansen was not an avid reader of classic literature, but he did agree with John Donne in that no man is an island. He knew the power of a coaching team and the importance of chemistry, connection and a shared vision. He understood that to be a successful head coach, he needed world-class people around him. As an assistant to Henry, Hansen – his brief one-tour interlude as attack coach aside – had mainly been responsible for the forwards, managing their set-piece and