OPINION: It's official - For the first time ever, we know who the next All Black coach will be almost a year before he officially starts work.
Scott Robertson has unsurprisingly been given the job despite an intriguing challenge from Jamie Joseph.
The former has had years of waiting in the wings and winning enough trophies for the Crusaders to have a silver reserve that would rival most first world nations.
So that's the end of the discussion? No, not by a long shot. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, it's merely the end of the beginning in what is already a dramatic year for the All Blacks, that will culminate in a World Cup campaign on the battlefields of France.
Firstly, congratulations to Robertson, who has shown a degree of patience that is getting increasingly rare in professional coaching ranks. At one point last year, he could have dangled his line out to almost any number of countries and wrote as many zeroes as he felt like on the line where it says 'salary'.
To stay in New Zealand, honour his contract with the Crusaders and be confident that 2024 would be the dawn of his era is laudable, especially after the debacle that saw Ian Foster retained as coach last August.
It does beg the question of the NZ Rugby board as to how their minds have been changed so significantly since then, though. Remember, the now-infamous situation that saw Foster endorsed by Mark Robinson after it was almost certain that the All Black coach's three loss and two win start to the year wasn't good enough.
Since then, though, the team has improved - aside from a shocking loss to Argentina in Christchurch, the Bledisloe Cup was (albeit luckily) retained, then an end-of-year tour reaped solid results before they fell asleep in the last 10 minutes at Twickenham.
It's hard to see what the board learned from that run of results that they didn't already know. But at least they deserve some credit this time around for reading the room and just getting on with it, even though they'd well and truly painted themselves into the corner of said room.
What now for the All Blacks themselves, especially the senior players rumoured to have pulled Robinson aside in Johannesburg and given the NZR chief executive an impassioned endorsement of the status quo?
Putting aside the results, conjecture and scrutiny, it's just a natural human reaction to keep your loyalty with a boss who has shown faith and nurtured your talent. It would be foolhardy to think this issue isn't going to be brought up from now until whatever the outcome is at the World Cup.
Then, what happens if the All Blacks win in France? Player power is one thing, it becomes something entirely different if it's gold-plated. Robertson will be inheriting a team whose systems and capabilities would have been proven at the highest level.
Fair to say from what we've seen from Ireland and France over the course of the Six Nations, though, that's more possible than probable.
But back to Robertson. What is probable is that he's not going to wait until November to get his feet under the desk, which raises some interesting situations around who will be his staff, and who won't. At least one of the current management setup has seen the writing on the wall, it's unlikely Gilbert Enoka will be the last to signal their intentions to finish up at the same time Foster does.
Really though, this is the breath of fresh air that not just the All Blacks, but NZ Rugby as a whole has been gasping so audibly for. Robertson might not be everyone's cup of tea but he is different, someone who signals a fresh way of thinking in one of the most steadfast bastions of conservatism this country has.
RNZ
