Mark Robinson addresses the public criticism of NZR's decision making

In his near six years at the helm of New Zealand Rugby, he’s copped his fair share of criticism for various reasons, but as his tenure ends at the end of this year, departing CEO Mark Robinson responds to what has been a challenging time for the organisation.

His interview with Jason Pine on Newstalk ZB’s Weekend Sport radio show covered a range of topics, including how the 51-year-old dealt with the constant public criticism, and the changing environment of the role over the years.

Robinson, who was appointed back in 2020, went through a huge changing period with Covid-19, as well as a number of different challenges in the role.

When asked about how he personally dealt with the criticism, he explains that early on in the role it was probably more challenging than it is nowadays.

“I think early on it’s something that you find quite challenging at times, but I think in the last sort of four years, maybe four to five years, even, probably first one or two years. It took me a while to work this out, and then I became really clear with our team on where we’ve made a genuine error or got something wrong,” Robinson told Pine on Sunday.

“We had to accept that and own it and learn from it quickly and move on, so then there are a whole lot of tiny things that I just knew we were on the right path or knew the right decisions, they either lined up with strategy or they lined up with a lot of the information we were receiving or seeing that allowed us to make the decisions.

“A lot of the times unfortunately, we can’t share that information publicly in certain circumstances. So you just have to accept that if something goes wrong and you’ve got the wrong judgment or whatever it may be that you deserve some criticism and scrutiny.

“That’s the power by the role and people have a huge amount of ownership and investment in New Zealand. There were a lot of occasions where I was really comfortable with decisions we were making and just had to keep going with them.”

Over his time in the role, despite Robinson feeling satisfied with most of what he’s done, he also understands that some of his processes during Covid-19 could have been better at times.

“There wouldn’t be too many circumstances at the time and what we were dealing with in terms of major strategic decisions, I think we got a lot of those things right. There were certainly things in processes when you’re dealing with the scrutiny we are under and really complex stakeholder terms that you might do things differently around processes, and we had a lot of learnings, especially in covid.

“But when I step back and I look at like, I say, the re-growth I believe we’ve invested so much more in the whole range of areas important to the game, we’ve clearly got some things right there. There’s some things that were highly scrutinised at the time.”

One of the biggest moments in his tenure, at least from a public perspective, was when Ian Foster was head coach of the All Blacks, and Robinson and New Zealand Rugby were in charge of a situation which still gets talked about to this day.

When questioned on this exact event, Robinson believes that in terms of the actual scenario, he feels comfortable with how they dealt with that situation.

“Now I’ve been asked about this recently, I reflect on a really transformational time of the game in some regards. So it’s been a privilege being part of that. But the All Blacks coach change, no, as I said, it’s one of the situations where we’ve got all the information coming to us.

“We were across the campaign to campaign review from players and management. We knew exactly what we were dealing with. We knew what we’re dealing with in terms of scenarios of post Rugby World Cup in 2023 so I’m very comfortable with that,” Robinson said.”