The All Blacks and New Zealand rugby have always been known for their innovation.

If you’ve got a long enough memory, you’ll remember Rob Penney looking to introduce the Canterbury 2-4-2 forward shape during his first year at Munster to… pretty mixed results. When Munster started deploying O’Connell and O’Callaghan on the wing during the early stage of Penney’s tenure it was considered so unusual that he might as well have been telling them to wear cowboy hats if they were playing away from home.

But this would be a fairly standard practice in the 2-4-2 shape as practised by Canterbury/the Crusaders. The idea of a “forward shape” at all would have been fairly new thinking in the northern hemisphere in 2013 – just 10 years ago – but it was commonplace back in New Zealand.

That’s how far they were ahead of most of us in and around the early 2010s though.

It didn’t take in Munster because, to be blunt, our forwards didn’t have the skill set for it, something the players from that period would freely admit to. The 2-4-2 forward shape needs a lot of handling ability from your forwards to make it work and a lot of Munster’s forwards at that stage would be more comfortable singing acapella over the tannoy in Thomond Park than they would be passing the ball as part of an integrated attacking structure like that.

That’s just how they had grown into the game and, for a lot of them, they would never fully grasp what Penney and Mannix wanted from them.

A 2-4-2 system needs a very active presence at #10 and for Penney, there was a real clash there in his first season between what he probably needed at #10 from a physical perspective – Ian Keatley – and a generational leader of the team in O’Gara who was dipping physically at that point.

That all lead to a messy first year under Penney in the league – where most of the experimentation happened – and it never really worked out exactly the way that Penney/Mannix or Munster wanted when it came to radically upscaling our on-field performance.

Connacht under Pat Lam won a PRO12 playing a version of what Rob Penney had tried to bring into Munster three years later. Scarlets would do the same under Wayne Pivac the season after that but they had three years to build that style of play into their group without a massive amount of pressure on results.

Pivac’s Scarlets finished 6th and 5th in the PRO12 in the two years prior to winning the title and finished bottom of their Heineken Cup pool each year.

Connacht finished 10th and 7th in Lam’s first two seasons as he built in his style of play while making a negligible impact in Europe before winning the PRO12 in his third season.

For Munster, there was no such luxury as finishing down the table in the PRO12 and, more importantly back then, exiting at the pool stage two years in a row – we had to win and win now so there was no time to implement a system and no wiggle room to soak up the losses that sometimes come with building a new way to play.

That kind of innovation was too far ahead of where Munster were at the time to be effective. Penney was trying to teach knights how to use kung-fu but that’s the way New Zealand rugby thinking was perceived at the time – to be so far ahead that their rugby science looked like rugby magic to the rest of us.

But nothing stands still in this game. Yesterday’s innovation is today’s standard practice and with pro-rugby still in its infancy by global standards, things advance really, really quickly. Soccer has been professional since the late 1800s. American Football has been professional since the early 1900s. Rugby went fully professional in 1995.

New Zealand rugby currently finds itself in the same position as an old samurai who tells his rebellious charges that while he might have taught them everything they know, he didn’t teach them everything he knows, before getting his katana stuck in his robe and falling off a balcony.

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The Beleaguered Ian Foster™ is clearly trying to implement a way of playing for the All Blacks of 2022 but finds himself hamstrung by a litany of issues elsewhere and, in my opinion, a clash between values and practicality.

In 2021, Ian Foster made headlines in the aftermath of the second Lions test by saying;

“I watched it between 22.00 [New Zealand time] and 01.00. It put me to sleep. The Lions series, the one we had here, the one over there, it’s become a very tight, almost risk-free type of series, aren’t they? Teams are almost afraid to play, they are just relying on a low-risk strategy.

“So we are seeing two teams who desperately want to win a big series playing low-risk, highly effective rugby. Both of them are good at the close contact stuff, the close-quarter fighting, the kick and chase and the pressure game. Two teams playing a similar style, it’s a bit of a slugfest.”

The headline from that quote is a fair bit spicier than the actual content, to be fair because Foster seems to be lamenting the tight, attritional nature of test rugby more so than he is doing the rugby equivalent of Yawning Johnny English GIF Reply that you see from OAPs under tweets that anger and confuse them.

On its own, the quote is uninteresting and far from unique in the aftermath of a dour and attritional second Lions test that drew criticism from many quarters for the lack of attacking enterprise shown. When you combine that quote with quotes by Ian Foster in May 2022 about dealing with high defensive line speed ahead of the series with Ireland, however, you begin to get a picture of Foster’s philosophy as a coach and how it might bleed into the All Blacks.

“You can use a Northern Hemisphere equation of playing against [line speed] by saying ‘okay let’s just kick everything’, in other words, let’s not play against it. Keep turning them around, keep turning them around. Whereas, our DNA has always been ‘we want to play, give us the ball’ we want to be better than that and try to look for things.

“Now that gets us into trouble, we’ve all seen that.

“The last five or six years we’ve been working hard on getting the balance of getting our kicking game, our running game. We’ve probably become a wider passing team, we like the big passes and creating space. Whereas against line speed you get smacked.

“Some of our instincts that come out of Super Rugby, they then come into the international stage against those sort of teams and suddenly they don’t quite work,” he said.

Can you get a picture of where the All Blacks are at? They want to be a high possession team – which is fine – but seem to be eschewing elements that might temper their on-ball tendencies.

From a structural perspective, Ireland and the All Blacks are quite similar when it comes to stuff like our counter-transition kicking game, our on-ball and high PPC tendencies and our classification as a “cruiserweight” team relative to South Africa and France.

Ian Foster seems to be encouraging a “heads up” style of rugby that would be in keeping with New Zealand’s general rugby aims and the ones that Foster has spoken about specifically. What does “heads up rugby” mean? Everyone has a different definition but it mostly looks to create a framework where key individual players have a lot of freedom to make “plays” based on the pictures that the framework provides.

The ability to create freedom is a key function of the framework. Essentially, you want to get the ball to the likes of Ardie Savea, Brodie Retallick and, in particular, Beauden Barrett, Jordie Barrett and their other playmakers with an idea that they can make a direct play themselves or hit one of the key attacking weapons in the space created.

It’s an idealistic form of attacking. Almost every coach gives freedom to their creative players these days – nobody wants robots – but you have to have players to take advantage of it. Almost more importantly, you’ve got to make sure that your framework creates predictable offensive space to allow your creative players the time and opportunities they need to make the attack work.

Without that space, your attack can look clueless.

Even as far back as 2018, when Ian Foster was the attack coach under Hansen, there were a few questions about the All Blacks’ change in offensive approach, especially when they lost to Ireland in November of that year.

During a press conference in 2018, Beauden Barrett was asked about some of the games the All Blacks had lost that year and the perception out there that the attack was the main problem;

“What we’ve been playing with is different structures so that ultimately at some point we can pick and choose, depending on who we’re playing against.

“I guess the frustrating thing is not being able to get the ball to where it needs to get to, to execute key moments and to hurt defences.

“It’s been a good year for us in terms of trying a few new things which are important to keep growing.”

Nobody designs an attack to, like, not be good. Every coach – especially the coach of the All Blacks with an attack specialisation – wants to play effective rugby that ultimately wins them games and keeps them in a job. The All Blacks seem to have an extra obligation to play rugby “the right way” too, especially after Foster’s quotes about last year’s Lions series.

When we add up Foster’s quotes on dealing with line speed as a high possession side and passing the ball wider before cross-referencing that with Barrett’s long time – four years ago – frustration with not being able to get the ball where they need to when they need it, and you have got a rough idea of what the All Blacks want to do, what they’re trying to empower in their team and how teams have been taking it away from them.

It seems like Foster has been using a very fluid style of rugby that looks to use different shapes in different areas of the field to produce an attacking framework that is very difficult to scheme against.

In theory.

Here’s a headline stat to start us off – Ardie Savea passed the ball more than the entire starting Springbok pack combined. He only passed the ball three times fewer than the entire Springbok starting pack AND replacements combined. Remember that the Springboks used a 6/2 split.

We are often told that a primary carrying forward should be passing this much by Play The Right Way Merchants, of which there are many in the media and around the media. CJ Stander was often criticised for not passing, then not passing enough, and then not passing with enough panache for some people’s liking as he developed through the years for Ireland.

The question with forwards passing is always, always about effectiveness. Passing is fine, but it’s just a tool to help you navigate through a game. If passing helps you win, great. If it doesn’t, why are you doing it?

Ardie Savea passed the ball as often as Beauden Barrett.

In total, the All Blacks starting pack made 44 passes combined and just 48 carries. This would be an incredibly high PPC rate for a group of forwards but it’s for a purpose – it plays into an incredibly wide style of attack used by the All Blacks as part of a system that uses 3-2-X off transition ball and a throwback 2-4-2 shape interchangeably depending on positional context.

The All Blacks use a lot of screen passing and tip-ons from their forwards to extend their playing lines and open up attackable lanes for Beauden Barrett to snipe after, not just from the first receiver slot. Beauden Barrett shows up all over the attacking line with Jordi Barrett acting as an auxiliary handler from the screen.

Much of this is down to the All Blacks backfield management with Beauden Barrett defending in the left backfield. Against a side, that kicks as much as the Springboks, that puts a lot of pressure on your secondary handlers if Beauden Barrett is involved in the direct transition, as he often is – as designed by the Springboks.

You can see Jordi Barrett’s handling coming under a lot of pressure there, especially as they run through a 3-2-X shape where they struggled to get handlers into layered positions as the ball progressed across the field. You’d think that would be a natural position for David Havili to take up but he didn’t really get on-ball enough in that first test against the Springboks, certainly not enough to influence the game in a meaningful way.

When the All Blacks had possession in the Springboks half, they would slip into a 2-4-2 style shape where they would look to stress the Springboks blitz by loading up on the first layer of the attack.

You can see it here with Ioane acting as a late arriving decoy on the three pod – making it a classic middle pod of four structure.

The next phase loads out of the previous ruck but, like a lot of the All Blacks work, it’s stymied by too much passing from the forwards. The Springboks are primed to defend a carry or deeper pass 50% of the time, so can float to cover almost everything the All Blacks are doing.

When you couple that with your primary playmaker having a tighter PPC rating than your best ball carrying forward, you can begin to see how New Zealand played incredibly wide without ever really playing outside of the Springboks.

This is the problem with playing Heads Up Rugby. Would Ian Foster be better off telling Barrett to rotate more around the centre of the field and to get on-ball more as a passer? Barrett had 11 passes and 15 carries against the Springboks – I think that needs to be radically different this coming weekend. Richie Mo’unga made 10 passes and carried the ball 4 times when he came off the bench and I think that’s a much better blend from your main playmaker. If the All Blacks are going to be using a lot of different shapes and progressions, they need to have a steady hand as the primary playmaker and first receiver. They need someone to run the shapes they’re calling, especially if they’re going to kick half as much as the Boks.

Fluidity is fine but the All Blacks are so fluid that they’re running down the gutter at the moment. They can tighten up, and drive more through the forwards without losing their identity. I think a change to Mo’unga at #10 could go a long way to shoring up their offensive problems too. It’s not what he can do as a ball player – it’s what he can allow others to do.

If they can get the exact same possession this weekend and bring their PPC rating down in the forwards – less screen passing, more direct carrying – they can and will score tries without compromising their vision or kicking the leather off the ball.