New Zealand Rugby will have to adjust to All Blacks defeats as world order changes
Tuesday, 30 December 2025
ANALYSIS: The cavalry isn’t coming to save the All Blacks next year.
There isn’t a new Jerry Collins or Jerome Kaino waiting in the wings, or even a Liam Squire.
No new Ma’a Nonu or a big bad Brad Thorn to sort out the Springboks and English.
The sight of All Blacks No 6 Simon Parker getting hammered back behind the gainline by England’s Sam Underhill at Twickenham is the new reality, as well as the scrum woes against the Springboks in New Zealand and the maul defence being splintered by the Scots in Edinburgh.
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The world has caught up with New Zealand rugby and the headwinds are now so significant that getting back to the top is a goal that should be tempered with a good dose of realism.
There are precedents in other sports for the new reality facing the All Blacks. The decline of West Indies cricket is often cited as an example of cautionary tale, but in terms of New Zealand rugby it is too dramatic as a case study.
Italian football, however, is a much better example. The Italians are currently having to qualify for the football World Cup next year via the playoff route, having failed to secure automatic qualification.
What’s more, Italy failed to qualify for both the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, the latter failure coming after a loss to North Macedonia in a playoff game.
Italians still love football - they’ve won the World Cup four times and possess some of the world game’s most recognisable clubs such as AC Milan - but time waits for no one in modern sport and as football changed Italy remained wedded to a methodology that worked in the 1990s and 2000s.
Their once-dominant domestic competition, Serie A, has been lapped by leagues such as the English Premier League, and as money and talent was gradually redirected towards Spain and England the quality of their domestic player pipeline also suffered.
The All Blacks are not going to fail to qualify for a Rugby World Cup in our lifetimes, but the signs are there that they are simply becoming a top four team rather than the world’s best or even a top two team.
South Africa are, by some distance, the best rugby nation on the planet at the moment and have the population size and structures to sustain that: from their powerful rugby schools to participation in European rugby competitions, which is where the balance of power clearly now lies.
England and France - at full strength - have now both shed their inferiority complex against the All Blacks and Argentina have beaten the All Blacks four times since 2020.
Scott Robertson’s winning percentage with the All Blacks is about 73% - and that might be as good as it gets for the All Blacks in both the near term, with four tests against South Africa looming next year - and the long term.
In fact, while there are plenty of calls for New Zealand Rugby to “fix” the All Blacks and Black Ferns, a more laudable aim for the national union might be to foster a love for the sport - and domestic sustainability - than does not depend on the All Blacks winning about 85% of their tests.
A return to that level of dominance is not going to happen, in part because professionalism will never let it happen.
With the sport on the eve of its third decade of the pro era, it is now becoming apparent that professionalism has been the great leveller.
While some countries have been slower than others to fully embrace the transition from amateurism, the rise in professional standards across the world has taken away many of the advantages previously enjoyed by the All Blacks (and Wallabies).
Not only have the Six Nations sides improved out of sight in areas such as strength and conditioning - a previous Achilles heel - but their aptitude for the technical and tactical parts of the game has taken them past New Zealand rugby.
Ireland might have peaked, but their 2022-era team and their attacking structures have influenced the global game far more than anything that has come out of New Zealand in recent times - to the point where teams in New Zealand started to mimic them.
The innovation in bench use famously started in South Africa, and even the supposedly full English are well down the track in developing hybrid players that can play in the backs or forwards.
The days when the rugby world solely sought out New Zealand rugby IQ to provide a cutting edge are gone, and Bath won the English Premiership last year under a South African coach, Johann van Graan, while Glasgow won the United Rugby Championship the year before with Franco Smith, another South African coach.
New Zealand and Australia’s relative isolation from the rest of the rugby world, locked in by Super Rugby Pacific, is another hurdle that must be overcome on the test stage.
It is true that no competition anywhere in the world can properly prepare players for the step up to test rugby, but the All Blacks’ and the Wallabies’ shared anxieties under the high ball this year surely can’t be a coincidence.
Is Super Rugby Pacific adequately forewarning All Blacks selectors of skill or tactical deficits in advance of the test season? This is surely a question that any review into the All Blacks must ask.
There will be a part of the New Zealand population - perhaps still significant - that is waiting for an All Blacks resurgence to restore what is perceived to be the natural order of things.
But while the All Blacks will still enjoy some big test wins and produce some very good players the previous eras of dominance are over and they won’t be coming back.