All Blacks coaches expecting chess-like series against Rassie's Boks

It won’t just be the players going to battle over four Tests on the upcoming Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry tour, as the tour’s unique structure pits the respective brains trusts behind the two teams against one another in a game of chess.

It’s been a long time since an All Blacks team has had four straight weeks of learning what does and doesn’t work against a particular opponent. Even three-Test series are now becoming more rare in rugby thanks to the new Nations Championship.

For New Zealand defence coach Tana Umaga, it’s a new challenge, and one that will see him confronted by the tactical mind of a former All Blacks teammate, Tony Brown, who now leads South Africa’s attack.

“It’s obviously something I haven’t come across before in my coaching career,” Umaga told Jason Pine on Newstalk ZB. “Apart from after the first Test, when we have a midweek game, we’re just preparing for Test matches and making little tweaks; you have to improve.

“We know that a week’s a long time in rugby in terms of how you can change tactics, how you can adapt to what you’ve seen the week before. So, it’s an interesting kind of environment that we’ll be in, and it’ll probably just unfold as we go through it.

“I’m looking forward to that, and hopefully we can be a bit innovative around what we do there.”

New Zealand is still in the process of embedding a new style of play under new head coach Dave Rennie, one that plays fast and can be possession-heavy.

Umaga says the team will stick to that DNA in South Africa.

“Once you’ve started on that trajectory, you have to keep going with it,” he said. “It’s what we’ve stated and what we train, so you’ve got to keep pushing those boundaries and keep persevering.

“And we’ve got a group of guys that really want to play that kind of rugby. We just know that we need to be at our best once we get to South Africa, because we know they’re sitting there, waiting for us and looking at us, and they’ll be very confident in knocking us over. We’ve just got ot handle what happens in our camp, being the best at it.

“It is a style of rugby that is very attractive, but it means that we have to be very good at our detail and very good at the fundamentals of the game.”

Another subplot for the tour is finding which players can best bring that game plan to life. Umaga said building depth, combinations, and answering key selection questions are all factors he and his coaches hope to address further in South Africa.

“All of those things are important for us. It’s always on the horizon; you’ve always got to look at the big picture, which is that World Cup.

“It’s not that we don’t work towards making sure we get success in all of the matches we play in South Africa, but there are some bigger things at play for us around growing depth and around who we are, what we want, how we want to be perceived by our public and our country that we represent. Those things are really important to us, too.

“We’ll develop that while we’re away, and hopefully that’s what people will get to see.”