After a remarkably tepid debate, Dave Rennie pips Jamie Joseph for the job.

The fumata bianca is billowing from the New Zealand Rugby chimney: Dave Rennie is the new All Blacks coach and will take up the role – sometimes regarded only half-jokingly as the second-most important job in the country – in June. 

This afternoon’s news lets NZR flip the script. After the Year of the Long Knives, it is announcing a big arrival rather than a departure.

And it’s hard to imagine Rennie’s appointment landing badly. The recruitment process appears to have only thrown up two viable names — Rennie and Jamie Joseph.

This was no Alex Wyllie vs John Hart; no Laurie Mains vs Hart. It was not John Mitchell vs Ted Henry, and it sure as hell wasn’t the latter vs Robbie Deans. It had none of the frisson of the Fozzie vs Razor debate, which awkwardly took place while Ian Foster was mid-campaign.

Joseph and Rennie were hardly milquetoast candidates, but it was nevertheless a remarkably tepid debate for a Job of National Significance.

In a brutal period that has seen the departures of chief executive Mark Robinson, coach Scott Robertson, assistant coach Jason Holland, head of high performance Mike Anthony, GM of professional rugby and performance Chris Lendrum, resident genius Wayne Smith and, most recently, head of performance Nic Gill, perhaps we were just happy that someone, anyone, wanted the job. 

Still, I don’t envy NZR trying to choose between Rennie and Joseph.

An NZR delegation* spent time observing Joseph at the Highlanders and Rennie at Japan’s Kobe Steel. The differences in standards between the Japan Top League and Super Rugby allied to the different stages the seasons are at would have made for a largely pointless comparison, but for the record, Kobe are on a nine-match winning streak including a 78-19 win over Urayasu D-Rocks in their last match, while the Highlanders were thrashed 31-14 by the Reds to drop their second of three matches this season.

NZR would also have been looking to the past.

Did Rennie’s two Super Rugby championships with the Chiefs, the only two in the club’s history, count for twice as much as Joseph’s stunning underdog win with the 2015 Highlanders? Did Rennie’s NPC win with Wellington nudge him ahead of Joseph’s back-to-back finals?

They would have had to consider Joseph’s achievements in lifting Japan’s Brave Blossoms to unprecedented heights, including beating Ireland and winning Pool A at the 2019 World Cup, give him the edge when compared to Rennie’s lacklustre record with the Wallabies.

We could go on and, in different circumstances, maybe would find time to mention Rennie’s stint at Glasgow Warriors, which gave him the opportunity to pit his wits against the best in Europe. But if this was a decision based purely on strength of CV, we could throw them into Copilot and get AI to spit out an answer.

What about their characters and coaching personas?

Both are guarded and economical with their words in that way rugby’s guardians seem to approve of, though Rennie, a guitar-playing Cook Islander, is possibly more gregarious in a social setting.

Both are said to have the necessary relatable-mongrel quotient that was perhaps missing from the previous regime (certainly, the relatable part of the equation), and have an ability to connect across the different cultures that make up a modern rugby squad.

Joseph has been criticised by some for overworking players but is understood to chafe against that characterisation, pointing to the fact that with Japan and the Highlanders he is more often than not working with squads that have a talent deficit to their opponents and their one available superpower is to be fitter and work harder than the rest.

So with little discernible difference in the CV or character stakes, there is little risk for NZR today announcing Rennie the victor.   

* This delegation is reported to have included NZR’s interim CEO Steve Lancaster who, during his time at Netball New Zealand, led the process that decided that Janine Southby was a better Silver Ferns head coach option than Noeline Taurua – just saying…