'Sometimes it crushes you': Ex-All Blacks manager on Barrett's captaincy

Former All Blacks manager Darren Shand has weighed in on the All Blacks captaincy debate, voicing his concerns that the role is hurting Scott Barrett more than it’s helping him.

Shand was with the All Blacks for 20 years before his 2023 exit, working with some of New Zealand’s finest captains throughout the team’s dominant 2010s era. He also observed what the great coaches of that time expected from their leaders.

Scott Barrett is the latest in that line of Kiwi captains, but after 21 Tests in charge, the lock still hasn’t convinced everyone he’s the man for the job.

Reflecting on his time in the environment, Shand outlined what he saw as the best leadership model and what traits make a successful All Blacks captain.

“How you turn up every day as a leader, be it a player or a coach, has massive implications for others,” he told former All Black Justin Marshall on the Sport Nation radio station. “If they turn up in the right mindset, the behaviour’s really awesome in terms of professional athlete behaviours. I reckon that’s a really inspiring way to lead.

“You don’t want to be a leader that’s going to pick everybody up; you want to be the leader that’s taking everybody with you.

“I quite often talk about this with (Richie) McCaw; he was always the first player on the training pitch, ready to go. He was like, ‘Come on, are you guys ready? Let’s get going.’ And so, those kinds of behaviours really matter.

“I think the other thing to think about in that, and coaches need to think about this, is where do you put the line in the sand between how much you let them lead and how much you lead as a management group.

“In these moments, you’ve got to make that decision: Do I give it all to them, or do we need to provide a bit more here? You face that every week as a management group.

“I’d probably say in my experience, when the leadership group took ownership of a lot of that, we did better than when we tried to drive it ourselves.”

Turning his attention to Barrett, Shand had some real concerns over how the 31-year-old has responded to the role.

“Firstly, I always found the captains around our time, the relationship with the head coach was critical and strong, and demanded a high degree of trust for each other. So, that worked well,” he said.

“I think what we also did well was the amount of contact we had together, the amount of time we spent with them to build a week, set a week up, give them ownership of all sorts of areas of the game, became really important.

“Looking from the outside, the captaincy looks heavy on Scott for me. I think that’s one thing they’ve got to think about.

“Sometimes captaincy lifts you and sometimes it crushes you, and it looks more of the latter for me at the moment.

“Ardie (Savea) is very similar to Tana [Umaga], his actions, his personal mana, he’s shown that he can take people with him, so it’s an interesting situation for Razor with both of those. Let’s use the best of both of them to get the best out of both of them.

“I don’t actually think it matters that much who wears the armband when you’ve got a leadership group, you need all of them, and you need all of them functioning at a really high level.”

With Barrett and the All Blacks under pressure following their worst-ever defeat in round four of The Rugby Championship, the team is in need of a dominant performance against the Wallabies in round five.

They’ve had a rest week to help prepare for that contest and fix any shortcomings in their game. Shand outlined his problem-solving process as an insight into what the current All Blacks management might have been talking through over the past 11 days.

“When the heat comes on, there are only three things you want to look at: one is your structures, two is your mindset, and three is the skillset.

“I think when you’re in this situation, you really want to pick just one of those and go, ‘that’s where we’ve really got to put everything in’.

“Structures and skillsets, you really rely on those, and you really work hard on the mindset piece. Because if you’ve got a structure, it’s what you do within that that matters, not so much the structure. So, you go to our training session, that’s a black canvas. You can decide, on that canvas, what you do.

“But I think you’ve got to give a lot of certainty as a leader when things aren’t working the way you want them to, and I think having a structure that people are used to becomes important. I think it’s how you set up within that structure that matters more than the structure. And so what time you allocate to particular things with that becomes more critical than the actual structure itself.”