Foster to remain in charge of All Blacks

The saga surrounding Ian Foster appears to finally be at an end as New Zealand Rugby have announced that he will remain in his post as Head Coach of the All Blacks, seeing out his contract through to the World Cup in France. 

It has been a tumultuous few weeks for Foster as calls for him to be replaced gathered swift momentum in New Zealand after the All Blacks lost their first home series to Ireland and then travelled to South Africa where they were soundly beaten in the first Test. However, they dug deep in Johannesburg and managed to turn out a fine performance to beat the Boks by 12 points in the second Test – a performance which may have saved their coach. 

New Zealand Rugby chairman Stewart Mitchell said: 

“Yesterday, Mark and Chris Lendrum met with Ian to finalise conversations around where things sat after the first five tests of the year,” Mitchell said. 

“Ian has provided management with his own recommendations, and these have in turn been recommended to the board who have unanimously agreed they have absolute confidence that Ian and this coaching group are the right people to lead the All Blacks through to the World Cup. 

“This has been privately and publicly validated by our players and in various conversations with our high performance team. 

“I want to absolutely emphasise going forward that both Ian as head coach and Mark as chief executive have the board's absolute backing and support.” 

Another significant development sees Joe Schmidt taking on a formalised coaching role alongside the other assistants, Jason Ryan, Greg Feek and Scott McLeod. 

Foster appeared to be in much higher spirits at the recent press conference. 

“I’m delighted to get the strong support from both Robbo and the board for us going forward,” he said. 

“Clearly it’s been a difficult time. At the start of this campaign, we didn't get what we wanted against Ireland and that created a lot of performance stress. 

“That's part of my job, and I expect to be grilled in that space. And so through the last month I've had a number of conversations about how we can grow our organisation and make sure that we get the performance that we want on the park. 

"I feel good about the confidence that I've got from Mark and Stewart in terms of supporting both myself and the group,” he continued. “I think we've got our leadership and our senior players at a point that is probably as strong as I've seen them in recent years, and they want to own it. That's a massive part of where we need to go, so they're pretty good foundation points." 

CEO Mark Robinson expressed that, after a difficult chapter, New Zealand Rugby was looking forward, not back. 

“We believe in this group and we're backing them through to the World Cup,” he said. ”We believe from board level, myself and the executive, our player group, which are absolutely critical here, are all right in behind us and we can't wait to get going. 

“We feel it as a new dawn for the team even though there's obviously a lot of continuity in it.” 

When asked to give comment on Scott “Razor” Robinson who was the frontrunner to replace Foster in the event of the latter’s sacking, Robinson said: 

"We have a huge regard for Razor as a key part of the coaching landscape in this country and we hope he has a great future in the game here. But today's not really about Razor. Today's about Ian and his team into this new era."