Back then, Henry sold the board the value of him continuing to work in combination with assistants Wayne Smith and Steve Hansen – both of whom had experience as international head coaches – while Deans just pitched himself and the possibility he may be able to bring Auckland coach Pat Lam with him.

It’s a definitive case of confirmation bias to say it was the right call, as the All Blacks went on to win the 2011 World Cup, and retain it in 2015 after Hansen was promoted along much the same lines where he pitched for the job with a ready-made team of assistants committed to join him.

But as NZR’s incumbent board and executive begin deliberations about what process to implement in their quest to replace the departed Scott Robertson, the search for answers about the right pathway to follow should begin with a review of what happened in 2019.

NZR remained convinced that best practice remained asking prospective head coaches to pitch their respective wider teams.

The job would go not to the best head coach per se, but to what the board deemed to be the best coaching package.

Ian Foster won the role, but as he lamented in his autobiography, the process ended up in playground politics where prospective assistants were being forced to align with a prospective head coach and the loser was the All Blacks.

“To be frank, the talent pool of available coaches was not deep enough in 2019 to run the process in this way,” he wrote in Leading Under Pressure.

“It ended up being a little like kids picking teams in the playground, with potential head coaches talking to the same people about taking similar roles.

“It got to the point where one coach was told that if he joined my ticket, he wouldn’t get put on the other ticket.

“Those sorts of games didn’t interest me, and in any case I wasn’t confident that this process would deliver the right outcome for the All Blacks.”

The vindication that Foster was probably right, or at least had validity to his argument, came midway through 2022 when he replaced John Plumtree with Jason Ryan as the forwards coach – the latter making instant improvements having been off-limits in 2019 because he’d been on rival candidate Scott Robertson’s ticket.

The process to appoint Robertson was equally flawed in much the same way. Although Robertson was appointed without pitching his likely team, he was able to handpick his assistants and effectively have NZR approve his choices rather than have any meaningful hand in making them.

This idea that head coaches need to work with people they know and trust is perhaps being mis-sold, and it is really code for wanting to work with people they know they can control.

But the bigger issue was the timing – as the decision was made to begin the process for the “next” All Blacks coach eight months before the World Cup and with eight months still to run on Foster’s contract.

Those with detailed knowledge of why events played out the way they did, say the process was geared by the collapse of the relationship between Foster and then chief executive Mark Robinson, and the board’s fear that Robertson, having been Super Rugby’s most successful coach in history, was going to head offshore.

Speaking with the Herald’s Shayne Currie in Chicago late last year, NZR chair David Kirk – who was not in his role at the time – said: “It’s generally accepted by most people that that was an unfortunate process, and that it was sub-optimal for everyone – actually for Scott as well as for Ian.

“We’re not in the business of having sub-optimal processes. We would certainly seek to avoid that type of process in the future. I would very much hope not, certainly when I’m the chair.”

The last two appointment processes serve as a kind of anti-guide to how things should play out in 2026, and the evidence is there to say that the process needs to be initially restricted to finding the right head coach.

Determining that is a case of being swayed by the candidate’s vision – their blueprint of what brand of rugby they want to play, what sort of team culture they want to build, what kind of leadership style they intend to adopt, and what level of confidence/evidence there is to believe they can deliver on their pitch.

The right head coach should also be prepared to work with assistants they don’t necessarily know but who have been identified by an independent interview process to be the best candidates.

Inevitably, there could be some overlap in this where the best assistant candidate or candidates is/are also the incoming head coach’s preferred choice(s), too, but the point is, Robertson’s replacement can’t be allowed to dictate terms on who they will and won’t work with.

The whole point of the All Blacks is that the collective is bigger than any individual – head coach included and they, like the players and everyone else, have to be prepared to be challenged by their peers.