Auckland’s Cordis Hotel still clings to the frayed threads of old-world tradition.
Here, in the Chandelier Lounge on a Thursday, high teas are being delivered: doughnuts filled with goat’s cream cheese and truffle dust and teriyaki-cured salmon with winter slaw on a walnut cracker; delicate sandwiches and freshly baked scones, accompanied by artisanal jams and cream; pastries piled on petit fours plated on pretension.
Delightful as all this is, there will be none for former All Blacks captain Kieran Read. Coffee will do, thank you.
Read has arrived from the airport. He is in town for a keynote address at an annual rugby lunch for a charitable cause. Inside the Great Room, tables have been laid for the 600 guests.
The stage has been set, big screens adorn the walls, the corporates will soon arrive, ready for the skinful, ready to donate to the cause, ready to have their minds and wallets emptied.
Read will regale them with stories spanning the course of his career. He wears a navy shirt, blue blazer, dress jeans and good shoes.
Leadership. It’s what defined the final years of his All Blacks adventure and now he trades in it, providing insights for corporate clients and executive teams. It’s taking him places, it’s brought him here today.
He’s still physically imposing, but the playing bulk is gone now. His lean face is mostly smile, his curly hair is clipped short, exaggerating ears scarred by seasons spent between the thighs of large men.
Put it this way, he won’t be getting AirPods for Christmas.
He played at three World Cups and won two of them. What did he learn?
“You realise that you have to have a little bit of luck.”
He learned a lot more than that, too. But for all the months and years of preparation, that’s a line that stands out and stands up.
It is easy to look back and say the All Blacks won in 2011 and 2015 but there were times in both tournaments when the margins were razor thin.
No team gets to the top without knowing where the bottom is. This current team certainly understands that, having endured the tumult of the last three seasons. Read believes that experience may well prove crucial.
“This team has gone through a lot, so what they have learned from those times can be implemented when the pressure comes on. It’s very easy to talk about being adaptable in the moment but it’s a lot harder to coach. The only way, I think, you can learn it is through living it.”
Mastery of more than one game plan
Adaptability is as good a quality as any when it comes to successful teams.
The All Blacks are always at their best when they display a mastery of more than one game plan. There will be matches in this tournament during which the style of opposing teams or – heaven forbid - referee rulings will necessitate a change in tactics, and to cope in those moments requires a reclamation of rugby’s intellectual high ground.
“I think the All Blacks should aim to be innovators, to be the team that does things others don’t. That’s our point of difference. New Zealand will never field the biggest team in the world, and maybe not always the fastest. But what we can do is operate in a wider variety of modes, and that is what has served this team so well over many, many seasons. It’s what will serve them well at this World Cup, too."
Read won his first World Cup in 2011. Sir Graham Henry (He was still just Ted then) loves to joke about the final. He will tell you that the All Blacks smashed France 8-7! He’ll also tell you that he would have left the country had the All Blacks not smashed them 8-7. In 2015, with a team Read describes as “probably the greatest I’ve ever been a part of”, he was a world champion again. Four years later he was a World Cup captain, but not a three-time World Cup winner.
The All Blacks did not adapt on the day of the semi-final. They had crushed Ireland the week before and were at short odds to repeat that effort against the English. It was not to be. England dominated from the start and the All Blacks were left to ponder what might have been. In the wake of the match Read wrote: “The ‘what ifs’ come in waves."
"What if I had been able to train with the team that week instead of watching from the side line? What if I had been out there to offer a little more direction or reassurance or assistance? What if we hadn’t started the game so poorly? What if we had held onto the ball more, and not kicked for touch as often as we did? What if we hadn’t got tight on defence? What if we had done more in the game to keep our emotions in check? What if?”
Razor thin margins
As a stream of consciousness, it serves to remind us of those ‘razor thin margins’ within these tournaments. I remember sitting with Read after that loss, in a small corner of a vast hotel lobby in an endless city. He was broken, bloodied. He had stitches around his eye, his knee wouldn’t bend, his calf and abdomen both strained. For all that physical damage, he was numb.
That was his worst day as an All Black.
“You train so hard for these pinnacle events but for all that there are no guarantees, are there? I remember pulling myself together in the changing room after that semi-final and I said to the team, ‘In four years’ time, remember this feeling'.
“That memory can burn very brightly. It can be the driver for those in the team who are lucky enough to get another chance. No All Black ever wants to go through that but there will be some in this current team who remember that moment vividly, and they’ll be doing everything they can not to be in that position in France."
It pays to note that just seven of the 33 players chosen for this World Cup know what it’s like to win the title: Dane Coles, Codie Taylor, Sam Whitelock, Brodie Retallick, Sam Cane, Aaron Smith and Beauden Barrett.
Nine more only know what it feels like not too. The rest are each in uncharted territory.
“When you think about a World Cup campaign you first must think about how you keep the entire team committed to what the mission is. This team will never spend more time together away from home so I know they will have thought very deeply about how they can have fun as a team and how they can stay connected without the need to manufacture anything artificial.
“Then you must be ready to embrace the fact that each part of this tournament will be different. Once you reach the knock-out stages you will prepare for that quarterfinal differently than you would have during the pool phase, then the same will be true of the semi-final and final if the team is good enough to get there.”
Leadership matters. Read had been promoted to captain after the retirement of Richie McCaw and now Sam Cane fills the role. Read played with Cane at two World Cups and says of all his attributes, being genuine is the most important. On the field, he believes Cane’s ability to be physically imposing for as long as he stays in a game is a critical ingredient in the All Blacks' formula for success in matches against bigger teams. And this side will have to face those teams and win, if they are any hope of a fourth title.
'Another layer of pressure'
“The captaincy no doubt adds another layer of pressure,” he says. I tell him about the fact Sam Cane’s leadership meeting seemed to go an hour over the allotted time last week. He laughs at that, his eyes light up. I’m sure the memories of those days are still very fresh for him.
“That does not surprise me! There is definitely a lot to consider as the captain of the side, and I know having been to World Cups as a player and then as a captain they were very different experiences. You have to think about your preparation individually but you are also on the lookout for anything that can get in the way of the mission – whether that is an external distraction or an individual in the team who isn’t quite singing off the same song sheet. You have to act decisively and in the best interests of the team. I know Sam will do that because he has good experience around him, and he’s a high trust leader.”
We finish our coffees. The concierge had taken one look at Kieran Read and offered them on the house. It pays to know people in high places. I resist the urge to push for predictions. I know him well enough to know he’ll be backing the All Blacks to win the damn thing. What else would he say? I have no idea what he’s going to say in that room full of Auckland businessmen, but I bet he’ll make a prediction for them. He’ll say New Zealand are going to win and there will be a collective cheer and probably an Australian heckle.
He's thinking about adaptability again, charting an imaginary course through a World Cup he’ll play no part in, steering a team he no longer leads. Once a captain, always a captain. He doesn’t want waves of ‘what ifs’ crashing on this team’s golden shore. He wouldn’t want any rocks under the beach towels, either, as his former coach and Australia’s favourite New Zealander Sir Steve Hansen would say. He has a habit of pausing and searching for words, which always seem to appear to him from the left. He’s looking there now, summoning a Parisienne vision.
“I’m just thinking how you might play if you made it through to a final against a brutal and big defensive team and it was a cold and wet night at the end of October. That would certainly test a side’s ability to adapt.”
Yes, I believe that would.
With that, we are done. Across the other side of the Chandelier Lounge, Eden Park supremo Nick Sauntner is hosting a meeting. He’s fresh from a World Cup of his own, bursting with ideas for the upcoming events. He notices the blazer Read is wearing. It’s made by Eden Park, the French clothing brand.
“Obviously you’re a fan of Eden Park!”
Read says he is. He won a World Cup there when New Zealand smashed France 8-7. And there’s more.
“I love it so much I named my daughter after it.”
Kieran Read turned 34 on the day the All Blacks were knocked out of the 2019 Rugby World Cup. He got cards from his three children. On Eden Read’s, these words:
“You should have got me to play Daddy because I am sneaky and would have scored tries.”
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