Departing All Blacks assistant discusses next move after Northern Tour

Not many would have predicted that when All Blacks head coach Scott Robertson named the rest of his coaching staff two years ago, two assistant coaches would leave their role during a Rugby World Cup cycle.

Leon MacDonald left during the first season as the team’s attack coach, and now another assistant coach whose main role is “strike coach”, Jason Holland, has left his role alongside Robertson and the rest of the coaching staff.

Whether the All Blacks elevate another coach into Holland’s assistant coach position, or look to bring someone in from outside the environment is still unknown, but Robertson says after the end-of-year review, they will decide what’s best for this team.

“That’s a great question. Look, I haven’t personally done it, because respectfully we wanted to get this season out of the way so Jason could leave on a really high note and then we’ll look at the market, what we need, we’ll go through the review, and then find what exactly what this team needs,” the All Blacks head coach told reporters in New Zealand from Cardiff.

For Holland, who was previously the head coach of the Hurricanes in Super Rugby Pacific, his move away from the All Blacks assistant coach role was for him to have a change, after he announced he wouldn’t be re-applying for his contract renewal at the end of this year.

Speaking to Jason Pine on Newstalk ZB’s Weekend Sport radio show, Holland explains that he hasn’t got his next move sorted yet, and has been focusing on this All Blacks end-of-year Northern Tour.

“No, not yet. I always said that I didn’t want to really talk about it until I made sure I gave everything to the next couple of weeks of this tour,” Holland told Pine.

“So, no, I don’t know yet.”

It might only be a slight improvement from last year’s four losses, but this year’s campaign, that included three losses for Robertson’s side, had some great moments but they weren’t consistent enough according to Holland.

“I think there’s some really great moments in our season. There’s some great things in it, but I think we’d accept it and challenge ourselves and our consistency of doing things, you know, doing things right for longer, and that’s gonna be a big work on going forward.

“We played some good footy and then we make silly errors, or take the pressure off us, off the opposition, and put them back onto us. So, you know, with that skill set, or a little bit of the way that, we lose the air a lot at times during the season, which turns games.

“There’s definitely things where this team needs to be better. But there’s massive potential, because you see such good parts of the game for so long, but in a Test match that won’t be good enough if you’re not executing or kicking well or catching well under pressure.

“So the beauty about this group is, probably internally, they challenge each other pretty hard, so that’s that bodes well for for the next couple of years.”

The 53-year-old departing assistant coach has had a lot to do with All Black playmaker Ruben Love during his short career, coaching him at the Hurricanes and now the national team.

Holland is full of praise for the 24-year-old, saying not many people work harder than Love, during trainings and in the off-season.

“He’s been absolute champion on this tour, he’s got Damian and Beauden in front of him for the first three games and he’s set the boys up in our training weeks absolutely brilliantly by playing exactly where the opposition were going to play on the weekend.

“The opportunity, was was awesome for him and he’s a great talent, 15 or 10, you saw what he can do. The try banging off that right foot with the fend and those are the great things that when Ruben is getting all the simple parts in his game right, then you see the magic.

“Massive future, and there’s no doubt that he’ll work hard for it. There’s not many people to work harder than Ruben.”