FORMER ALL BLACKS scrum-half Justin Marshall wants to see Joe Schmidt brought back into New Zealand rugby, even though he says Ireland became too predictable in 2019.
Schmidt’s largely successful tenure in charge of Ireland ended with heavy World Cup quarter-final defeat to the All Blacks and Marshall said he hadn’t feared what the Irish would produce in that knock-out game.
“Coming into this tournament I said from a New Zealand perspective, and I mean this with the greatest of respect because I know I’m talking to the Irish, but I thought there were two teams that could beat the All Blacks and that was England and South Africa,” said Marshall in Tokyo this week.
“I didn’t think Ireland had evolved. They had a great game plan that they believed in but it is predictable and it gets analysed.
“They have great players that could implement that game plan, but when you look at Ireland and where they got to, successfully beating the All Blacks, I felt they needed to create something that the rest of the world hadn’t seen and they didn’t.
“They came out and played the same game plan they had been playing, the All Blacks analysed it, they’ve been beaten by it before, and they were aware of what Ireland would bring and they didn’t bring anything different.
“I hadn’t seen any evidence during the build-up to the Rugby World Cup or during the pool stages when Japan knocked them over to show that they had evolved.”
New Zealand coaches are renowned for their ability to adapt and evolve but Marshall felt Schmidt might have “played to what he felt were the team’s strengths” by continuing to operate in the same manner as Ireland had in their hugely successful 2018.
“Conor Murray and Johnny Sexton have a certain calibre of tool in their shed and they can use that tool very well,” said the former Ospreys scrum-half.
“The warning signs for me were the [2019] Six Nations. November was pretty good and they took the All Blacks again but they went into the Six Nations and they were poor.
“It’s like, ‘OK, we beat the All Blacks and had a poor Six Nations so we need to change things up’ and they didn’t. They showed nothing in their warm-up games that they had changed from the Six Nations, then they showed nothing different in the pool stages.
“Can I put my finger on it that it was Joe Schmidt… I don’t think he’s a coach that doesn’t want to be creative and doesn’t want to evolve. It has to fall back to him thinking that this is what he had to work with, yet this is what he selected, so this is all he can do.”
Nonetheless, 46-year-old Marshall, who now works as a pundit on New Zealand television, believes that New Zealand Rugby should do its best to bring Schmidt back into the Kiwi coaching circle.
The All Blacks are set for a new coaching staff as Steve Hansen steps down post-World Cup and though Schmidt has indicated he will take a break from coaching until June 2020, Marshall believes Schmidt could play a part in the national team staff or with a Kiwi Super Rugby franchise.
Outgoing Wales coach Warren Gatland is returning to New Zealand to become head coach of the Chiefs and Marshall stressed that bringing Schmidt’s knowledge into the mix would be a good move for Kiwi rugby.
“I hope so,” said Marshall. “I’ve always banged the drum that we need great minds in the game in our country. At the moment, we don’t have them. If you look across the board around the world, a lot of our minds and coaches are coaching outside New Zealand.
“People will go, ‘Why do we want Warren Gatland back?’ but I’m thinking, ‘Are you serious?’ Here’s a guy that has successfully coached Wales to their best-ever winning record and the British & Irish Lions, and he can come back to our country and tell us exactly what teams do to beat us. He can give us all of that information. Why don’t we want to dig into that?
“Let’s correlate all this information and grow. There’s no doubt about the fact that the All Blacks have really struggled against the outside-to-in defence and that’s a big part of what Wales do and what the Lions did against us. We didn’t cope with it.
“So it’s like, ‘Do we defend like this? How do you do this, Warren?’ or, ‘If you were playing against that defence, Warren, how do you break that down?’
“Joe is equally the same. He’s done one thing that has never been done in Irish rugby before, he’s beaten the All Blacks and he’s done it twice. How did you do it, mate? Why did you look at it and think, ‘This is how we beat them.’
“Let’s have that info on our doorstep rather than someone else’s, so hopefully we get all of them back. Bring Jamie Joseph in as well!”
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