WELLINGTON — NZ Rugby chief executive Steve Lancaster is making no excuses for the All Blacks' Rugby's Greatest Rivalry series defeat and insists head coach Dave Rennie will not be assessed on three straight losses to the Springboks. The All Blacks went 1-0 up with victory at Ellis Park before suffering three consecutive defeats, having previously won all of their Nations Championship matches in New Zealand on an unbeaten run that ended with defeat in Cape Town to South Africa.
Lancaster said the break before the Bledisloe Cup Tests against the Wallabies feels like a reset ahead of six remaining fixtures this year, including Nations Championship matches in the northern hemisphere, and set a simple KPI for Rennie and his squad. “I guess coming back from Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry in South Africa and then the final Test in the States – that felt like such a big event on its own, right. Coming back felt like the end of something. The reality is that our season does go on for another six games for the All Blacks,” he told the DSPN podcast with Martin Devlin. “In terms of KPI, it is pretty simple: we want them to win all of those games. The All Blacks’ historical winning record is something that we are acutely aware of, very proud of, and having dropped three Tests, it’s pretty important that we right the ledger over the remainder of the year.”
Asked whether it was time to evaluate Rennie’s performance since taking over from Scott Robertson, Lancaster was clear. “No, not really,” he replied. “We don’t have a set point where we will assess Dave Rennie, so to speak. We have appointed Dave through to the end of the World Cup next year, and everything that we’re doing now is pointing towards the World Cup at the end of next year. So all of the work that Dave and the team are doing, all of the things that we’re doing to support them, are all very much contextualised around the fact that we’ve got a really big prize at the end of next year, and that’s what we’re going after.”
Lancaster confirmed an end-of-season review will be conducted after the November internationals, as it was in 2026 when Robertson was dismissed, but said context matters. He revealed the management team have already completed an internal review after the Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry tour which was “pretty positive”, noting Rennie and his staff had about 10 days’ preparation before the first Nations Championship Test at the start of the year and have been sprinting since. “They had a group of 90 people in South Africa that they had to move around, had to keep engaged and connected, and they did that pretty well, notwithstanding those three Test results,” he said, adding the current pause is a mid-season checkpoint before a full post-season review focused on ensuring the side are in the best possible shape for next year’s World Cup.
While the three losses are a setback, Lancaster said the close margins offer encouragement and that the side are tracking well, but stressed there would be no attempt to hide from the result. “It’s a real balance, but I think what’s most important is that we don’t kid ourselves. Yes, we’re satisfied with the progress that the team has made under the new coaching group; we feel like they’re tracking well, but we got bested,” he said. “We got bested in three consecutive Tests by the best team in the world. So it’s actually really important that we don’t brush that under the carpet, that we don’t blame match officials, we don’t blame travel fatigue or anything else. We actually recognise that we were bettered in those three games, albeit by a close margin, which gives us heart; we know that we are capable of beating South Africa, but the reality is that we lost that series, and so we’re not hiding from that.”