Dave Rennie says that the All Blacks backroom staff are looking into the team’s growing injury list, with the head coach admitting that there are too many setbacks that haven’t been caused by collisions.

The injuries have piled up for New Zealand throughout the international season and while that is expected in a collision sport, the number of calf injuries is of concern for the coaching team.

All Blacks’ injury concerns

Ardie Savea, Billy Proctor, Caleb Clarke and Leroy Carter don’t fit into this bracket, with the quartet all sustaining injuries in matches and through collisions.

“A lot of the collision-type injuries, you can’t do much about. You look at Ardie and Billy Proctor’s situations; they all had shoulder injuries, and that’s just part of the nature of the game,” Rennie admitted after naming his squad for the second leg of the Nations Championship this November.

All Blacks selector Sir Graham Henry recently stated that he didn’t think the current squad was used to the intensity of the training sessions and that needed to change.

Rennie’s comments on the length of the unavailability list suggests that may well be the case. While he wants the team to play a high-intensity, up-tempo style of play, he states that tweaks need to be made to how they prepare during the week, considering the sheer number of lower limb injuries caused by overexertion.

Jordie Barrett’s withdrawal from the second Bledisloe Cup Test match was because of a calf injury while hooker Samisoni Taukei’aho misses out because of a similar setback.

“We had a few calves over the last couple of weeks, so we’ve looked carefully at our loading while the guys were away from us for a couple of weeks and then coming back in, and we need to train at an intensity to play at the intensity we want to play at, and we’re just looking carefully at that,” he said.

“All the guys who are away from us had GPS. So we got an idea of exactly what these programs are supposed to do, and the boys nailed those programs. We just got to make sure that we get our loading right too.

“Not all were necessarily just dealt to us; we’re just trying to work out why we had five or six calves.”

Rennie was also asked whether he looked into the hits on Savea and Proctor that caused the injuries and whether he thought that they were dodgy, notions he rejected.

“It’s the brutality part of the game, it was guys who are trying to get underneath players who are competing post-tackle. So there’s nothing illegal about it but yeah, look, players are susceptible.”

Patrick Tuipulotu’s omission

Lock Patrick Tuipulotu is one of the players who has sustained a calf injury and whilst he has returned to fitness to be available for selection, he has not been included in the squad.

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“Patty was phenomenal against Ireland,” Rennie said, explaining his omission.

“He played a fair bit of footy for us in South Africa and had a little calf injury but is back running fully now. He hasn’t done any contact or full contact yet, but he’s technically available for selection, but as we’ve talked about the quality of the players we’ve got there at the moment.”