All Blacks captain Scott Barrett will go under the knife by the end of this week and is now ruled out of rugby for as long as five months, knocking him out of the start of Dave Rennie’s tenure as head coach and the rare four-test tour of South Africa later in the year.
The 88-test Crusaders lock has not played a single match in 2026. He took a planned non-playing sabbatical at the start of the Super Rugby Pacific season with a view to returning fresh for the back end of the competition and then leading the All Blacks into the new Nations Championship, with one eye on next year’s World Cup in Australia. A nagging back problem refused to come right, and the only option left is surgery.
Crusaders coach Rob Penney confirmed the news in comments to RNZ, saying his skipper had exhausted every other avenue. “He’s tried every non-invasive trick you can do to get right and it just hasn’t come off so he’ll be in the operating theatre by the end of the week,” Penney said. Asked how Barrett was coping, Penney added that the captain remained “as frustrated as all of us are for him” but had a positive attitude going into the recovery.
A three to five month recovery window puts Barrett out of action for the bulk of the international winter. The All Blacks open their year with three Nations Championship tests in July before flying to South Africa for four tests against the Springboks in August and September, the longest tour to the Republic in more than a generation and the centrepiece of the 2026 calendar. 1News reported the trip as a “pretty special” one that Barrett is going to miss after years of pointing towards it.
There is a sliver of light at the back end of the year. If the recovery runs to the shorter end of the timeline, Barrett could be fit again for the October Bledisloe Cup tests in Australia and the November Nations Championship matches in Europe, when the All Blacks travel to the northern hemisphere for fixtures against England, Ireland and France. Those games will be the final selection window before the Australian World Cup in 2027, and Barrett will be desperate to be back on the park by then.
The bigger story for new All Blacks coach Dave Rennie, who took over the top job at the end of last year after Scott Robertson’s contract was not renewed, is who he hands the armband to in July. With Barrett confirmed out, Rennie has to start his reign with a new captain and the favourite for the role, by some distance, is Hurricanes loose forward Ardie Savea. Savea has captained the side on multiple occasions in the past, holds World Rugby Player of the Year honours and is widely seen inside the game as the obvious leader of the next group.
Hooker Codie Taylor has also been mentioned. The Crusaders rake is the senior forward in the squad and a regular voice in the tight five, although his form last year was less consistent than earlier in his career. Both men have been touted in the NZ Herald as the leading contenders, with growing calls over the past year for fresh leadership at the top of the All Blacks.
Barrett, who took the captaincy from Sam Cane in 2024 and led the side through Robertson’s two seasons in charge, has had a torrid run with his body. He missed chunks of last year with niggles and was unable to play through this Super Rugby campaign even after a four month break. There is now a real question over whether he can win the captaincy back at all under a new head coach who has every reason to lock his own pick into the role with a World Cup looming.
For the Crusaders, the news adds to a difficult run. Will Jordan has also been ruled out for the playoffs, which the side will play without two of its most influential figures. The Christchurch franchise sit inside the top four but face the rest of the regular season and the knockouts without their captain and their fullback.
From Barrett’s perspective, the timing is at least not catastrophic in World Cup terms. A successful surgery and a clean rehab still leaves him a full domestic season in 2027 and a Super Rugby campaign to push back into the side. Rugby fans will hope the operation goes smoothly and that he is on the field again for the spring tour. The All Blacks have plenty of locks in the system, with Tupou Vaa’i, Patrick Tuipulotu and Fabian Holland all in contention to start in his absence, but the leadership question is the one that will dominate Rennie’s first weeks in the job.
What do you make of this latest setback for Scott Barrett, and who would you hand the All Blacks captaincy to in July? Drop a comment below and join the conversation.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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