This trip to South Africa, dubbed Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry, has been two years in the making and sits as the showpiece event of the All Blacks 2026 calendar.

The optics of the skipper not travelling with everyone else – and not being on the ground – don’t look good to fans and stakeholders on multiple fronts.

There is the symbolic side of it. To some extent, the All Blacks are pilgrims in an unholy land and to be there without Savea – the team’s talismanic figurehead – creates a contrary narrative to this being a tour where the visitors will utilise the power of unity.

Rennie met former All Blacks coach John Hart recently to hear how Hart masterminded a series victory in 1996.

“We had coffee for about an hour and he shared a lot of his learnings and that was really valuable,” Rennie said.

“John talked a lot about being one team and that was a strong thought of ours too. We don’t want half the team flying off to the next venue in preparation.

“We need to be all there. If you are not playing, you are on the field helping [with the] warm-up or you are in the stands sitting cheering your mates on. I think that was essential for us.”

There is a practical impact, too: Savea training on his own in Wellington means he won’t be visible and present – able to talk with teammates, coaches and management.

There is the sense, too, of Savea’s situation undermining the marketing narrative – that sponsors are being told this tour means everything to both countries but the All Blacks skipper is coming later after he’s spent a couple of weeks training on his own.

Rennie is not the architect of this situation but the hired troubleshooter. He has inherited a situation where the All Blacks captain has been sanctioned to take two sabbaticals in one World Cup cycle and effectively run himself into the ground 18 months out from the tournament.

If Savea had been well-managed, he’d have arrived at this point of the cycle physically and mentally fizzing.

Instead, on the eve of the tour that will have the most profound impact on the All Blacks’ direction of travel through to the World Cup, he’s been playing and training non-stop since January 2025 and has only had one genuine off-season since the end of 2022.

There is no escaping that this is remiss, bordering on reckless for New Zealand Rugby (NZR) to have let their best player play so much rugby in the last three years that Rennie was left with no choice but to find a window somewhere in this year’s bulging All Blacks calendar in which Savea could recuperate and recondition.

“I think it is a decision we have made for what we think is best for him, as Ardie would plug on,” Rennie said.

“But I think it comes to a head at some stage and it is such a big series, so freshening him up before those four tests is essential. What we could have done is leave him out of the last three and freshen him up that way, but it was important for us and important for him to play and we think this is a really good compromise.

“He could have come on tour and we might have only played him in one of those games but we felt letting him get his head out of footy and letting him get away a little bit [was best].

“We trust him to do the work and he’ll turn up in good nick. He’ll arrive 10 days before the first test – so plenty of time, we think.”

No one doubts that Rennie will be proven right and that Savea will be back to his brilliant best after his rest period, but that can’t be used to deflect from the question of whether NZR has been handling its best players as well as it should.

Savea is complicit in his own fate, as he negotiated the two sabbatical deals with Kobe in 2024 and 2026 and is perhaps guilty of overestimating his ability to be able to handle the non-stop training and playing schedule he signed up for.

But there is a salient lesson too for NZR to take on board about the potential pitfalls of its so-called sabbatical concept, in which it grants players with 70-plus test caps the right to either play abroad or not play at all for six months, on the condition they sign a four-year contract.

The sabbatical programme was designed as a player-retention tool – and it still works on that front, as NZR rarely loses top talent in its prime.

But it does seem to have morphed into a money-making exercise for the best players, who can earn as much as $2 million for one season in Japan, while still earning around $1m from NZR (the only pay hit players take on sabbatical is the loss of their $195,000 Super Rugby Pacific earnings).

NZR has taken to playing up the developmental and growth elements these offshore stints provide, as well as being able to mentally rejuvenate senior players.

There is truth to that argument, but what’s glossed over is that these sabbaticals lead to the best talent playing for the better part of 24 months without a recognised off-season.

High-performance reset to go next level

Savea’s situation is illustrative of both a high-performance system that is in desperate need of a major reset, stronger oversight and greater alignment and cohesion, and of an eligibility framework that needs a few small but critical adjustments.

The reset is coming – former All Black Conrad Smith has recently been appointed as head of the men’s high-performance programme and former Chiefs prop Michael Collins will soon be stepping into the new role of chief rugby officer.

They will be joined in November by Don Tricker, who will command the new position of high-performance director, and the three of them are expected to improve talent identification, developmental pathways and career planning and management.

The arrival of Rennie and his coaching team has led, so the Herald has been told, to vastly improved communication between the national team and the professional playing base.

How messy things have been previously can be seen in microcosm with some of the anomalies within the 44-man All Blacks squad.

Fehi Fineanganofo has committed to join Newcastle in November, but Rennie has the discretion to determine whether he wants to pick him for the South African tour or not. Meanwhile, Richie Mo’unga, who has signed an 18-month contract with NZR, is off-limits to Rennie.

Two things strike about this: the player who has made the commitment to NZR is not eligible to play in South Africa but the player who is ending his commitment is.

And in one case, Rennie has the discretionary power to determine whether to pick the player, but in the other, he doesn’t.

There is no appetite within the rugby fraternity to change the core premise of having to be in New Zealand to play for the All Blacks. That foundation principle has been instrumental in NZR’s success in retaining its top talent.

But the Herald understands that there is now universal appetite – including within NZR’s executive – for the new high-performance team to review the entire framework around player retention strategies and to try to iron out eligibility anomalies to make the whole business easier for fans to understand and accept.

This may lead to a simplification of the rules around players returning to New Zealand after being overseas and making them instantly eligible for the All Blacks, regardless of the length of contractual commitment they have made.

It may also lead to changes around the sabbatical policy – broadening the qualification from caps won to years served and working more collaboratively with players to determine whether they should play abroad or rest.

Full-contract footy

One further anomaly in the All Blacks squad is new cap Semisi Tupou Ta’eiloa, who has a contract with NZR but no agreement with any Super Rugby Pacific franchise.

This curious state of affairs has arisen because Ta’eiloa had been contracted to Moana Pasifika, and when they collapsed, NZR was concerned that the big No 8, who Rennie had signalled an interest in, would head offshore.

NZR signed Tupou Ta’eiloa on a two-year deal and now has to see if any Super Rugby Pacific franchise has any room for him in their 38-man squads.

His plight to find a club is not being helped by the fact that Savea also doesn’t currently have a Super Rugby contract, as he too was locked in to Moana.

The situation is not unprecedented. In 2012, there was genuine concern Ma’a Nonu was not going to find a franchise who wanted him after he left the Hurricanes in 2011, and in 2005, Isaia Toeava was picked by the All Blacks as an unknown 19-year-old but wasn’t contracted to any Super Rugby side.

The longest haul

Having highlighted increased travel costs amid the ongoing oil crisis as the chief driver of rising expenditure, NZR was hit with another unexpected bill after it was forced to cancel and rebook the All Blacks’ flights to South Africa.

The team had been booked to fly to South Africa on Emirates through Dubai, but given the re-escalation of the US-Iran conflict, the decision was taken a few months back to cancel those tickets and re-book the squad through a “safer” route.

To find enough business-class seats, the squad had to be booked on three different flights – with one group going through Singapore, one through Hong Kong and another via Perth.

Two of those flights land in Johannesburg – which required NZR to organise additional flights to Cape Town, where the team will be based ahead of the first game against the Stormers.

These tricky logistics meant that Rennie and his fellow selectors had to do an inordinate amount of team selection so that they could then work out who should be flying on which flight.

“We were due to go through Dubai, but obviously with what’s happening over there, flights got changed two or three months ago,” Rennie said.

“We are now on multiple flights – one through Singapore, one through Perth and one through Hong Kong – and we are going at different stages.

“We have 30 people travelling on Thursday, so we decided to keep 23 people with seven staff and those guys will play the Stormers.

“To pick that side, we had to pick the first test team and then try to work back to make sure we were sharing the load to come up with a 23 that would stay. Complicated probably, but it allows that group to have one extra day of training and preparation and to arrive in Cape Town on the Friday and to have a full week to prepare for the Stormers.”

A captain to face the Stormers

One of the other reasons Rennie was confident in making the decision to leave Savea behind was his faith in his leadership group.

Rennie, almost as soon as he had the job in March, worked on a plan to shrink the leadership group from 10 players to five or six and focus hard on empowering them.

He brought back former mental skills coach Gilbert Enoka, primarily to grow the leadership qualities of the team and build a tight unit that would mean the All Blacks could function even if Savea was injured or unavailable.

Rennie has been clear that he sees the non-availability of Savea as an opportunity to develop others. Codie Taylor is the interim tour captain, while the likes of Jordie Barrett and Will Jordan will be expected to play significant leadership roles.

But what’s not clear yet is who will captain the team in the first game against the Stormers and, by extension, whether there will effectively be a midweek skipper as there used to be in tours of old.

Rennie has confirmed that Beauden Barrett will be starting at first five-eighths against the Stormers and he is an option to lead the team, although it has been argued in the past that he doesn’t need to be the captain to do that.

Patrick Tuipulotu, who hasn’t played much rugby in recent weeks, would also be a strong candidate as he has captained the All Blacks before, against Japan in 2024.

Other potential options would be Sam Darry, the young Blues lock who has played superbly this year and captained his Super Rugby Rugby side on occasion. He’s also likely to be involved against the Stormers as he didn’t make the match-day 23 against Ireland.

A left-field – literally – option could be Rieko Ioane. The utility back has been an All Black since 2016 and is one of the most experienced players in the tour party.

Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He has won multiple awards for journalism and written several books about sport.