Why blaming the coach is our childish way of coping with complex rugby landscape

22 hours ago 6

Opinion

November 22, 2025 — 9.05am

Wallabies coach Joe Schmidt must go, the Scots should punt Gregor Townsend, All Blacks boss Scott Robertson is on thin ice, and Fabien Galthié is taking the French down a dead-end road.

That is a brief synopsis of views after last weekend’s Test matches, and you don’t even have to go to the murkiest corners of the internet to find them.

Test rugby coaches are increasingly under pressure.

As rugby has become more complex, our answers have become simpler: put the coach in the bin and start again.

There has always been pressure on coaches, of course, despite plenty of evidence (especially in the Australian context) that changing them doesn’t do much on its own.

But the trend of coach-loathing crosses hemispheres and can only be put down to supporters’ and media desire for certainty at precisely the same time in the game’s history when there is little of that on offer.

Excluding South Africa, the top 10 in the world can all beat each other with a kind bounce or a controversial refereeing decision, and this has given rise to two phenomena.

First, Wallabies and All Blacks fans’ angst that they can’t even rely on the likes of Italy to roll over any more; and second, a fury among Scots that they can’t beat the All Blacks and Argentina on successive weekends.

Those two reactions appear at first glance to be contradictory, but they reflect the same thing: no one is quite sure of the established pecking order any more, but everyone is adamant that their team would be on top if only the coach were better.

The old certainties started to shift after the 2015 Rugby World Cup as the Six Nations teams began to assert themselves, but COVID was the event that really accelerated everything.

Amid the breakup of the old Super Rugby — as has been put to the Herald, New Zealand Rugby wanted to maintain links with South Africa with a playoff format after the conclusion of respective domestic competitions, but South Africa preferred a full move to the north — taking Australasian rugby on a different course from the rest of the world.

The effects of this are complex and still unfolding, but it was hard not to be struck by a statistic used by Iain Payten in his piece on the Wallabies’ recent woes. According to data compiled by Stan Sport’s Kate Lorimer, the Wallabies and the All Blacks are the second-worst and worst teams in the Rugby Championship and Six Nations for reclaiming their own kicks.

It cannot be a coincidence that the two teams struggling in this crucial facet of Test rugby play in the same domestic competition.

But even if that particular technical issue can be addressed, there is very little evidence that a return to the old order is coming any time soon — for the Wallabies or the All Blacks.

In fact, the only supporters in world rugby enjoying any sort of consistency are South Africans and the English, although Argentina are making progress.

And even for South Africans, the respite from uncertainty will end when the Springboks’ season finishes, and the debate will return to whether the Stormers, Sharks, Bulls and Lions are doomed to fail in European club competitions due to the calendar and the Springboks’ eligibility policy — a view held loudly by Jake White.

The road to peace for the average rugby fan, therefore, is to somehow develop a Zen-like calm when the rollercoaster of results continues, as it invariably will.

It is certainly within the realms of possibility that the Wallabies exact swift revenge on Ireland and Italy next July when those two teams head south.

Coaches must still be held to account. The Wallabies’ next review will surely throw up the possibility that an attack coach needs to be added for Schmidt’s final three Tests next July.

But the hostility facing a number of coaches at present probably says more about our own difficulties in trying to find a simple answer to a complex set of questions.