All-timer

Super Rugby Aotearoa: preseason week 8

Feb 24, 2021

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Tip-On!

If you want to take time to appreciate Dan Carter’s excellence in the week of his retirement, you can watch highlights of his performance in one of the most enjoyable Super Rugby games of the last decade — during one of the Crusaders’ most tragic and memorable seasons — here.

All in-game data per ESPNScrum unless otherwise stated.

Long road back

One notable absence from the Highlanders’ first matchday squad of 2021 is Nehe Milner-Skudder.

Despite the former All Black playing the first half of last weekend’s preseason game against the Hurricanes at 15, Tony Brown has opted for Solomon Alaimalo as his starting fullback in Round 1.

Alaimalo — recently recruited to the Deep South from the Chiefs — is obviously a dangerous strike runner and a player worthy of a starting spot in Super Rugby, but as a player whose arrival brought much excitement to Dunedin in its own right it’s likely that Milner-Skudder will at least get a chance in that role in weeks to come.

With that in mind, it’s worth pausing at the outset of a new season to take a look at his performances in recent years, and consider what he’s likely to bring to the Highlanders when he does get on the field.

Milner-Skudder’s breakthrough for the national side in 2015 came off the back of a season in which he started 13 games and played 908 minutes of rugby for the Hurricanes. However, over the next 4 Super Rugby campaigns he was able to mark only 18 starts and 1,310 minutes in total — and added only 5 appearances for the All Blacks to the 8 tests that he played in his debut year.

In that debut year, he was untouchable on the right wing: against Tier 1 opponents, he beat a defender once every 2.5 carries and made a clean break approximately every 4 carries. (Across the 4-year cycle between 2012 and 2015, the average All Blacks starter in the outside backs beat a defender once every 3.8 carries, and made a clean break approximately every 8 carries.)

But the injuries that robbed him of many on-field opportunities over the last 5 years also appear to extinguish some of the magic in those fast feet. Fast forward to last year’s Mitre 10 Cup — when Milner-Skudder made his return for the Manawatū Turbos after 22 months out of the game — and even at a lower level of competition he was no longer a standout by either measure:

What hasn’t been affected is his ability to handle the ball. During his 10 starts for his province last year, he made 0.7 carries for every pass he completed — making him comfortably the most pass-focused of any of the players in the group shown above, and putting him in the company of natural first-fives Jayson Potroz (0.8) and Kaleb Trask (0.9).

These skills were also on show during his preseason appearance in Alexandra. During one delightful kick-return sequence, Milner-Skudder exchanged a few passes with Mitchell Hunt, Shannon Frizell and Marino Mikaele-Tu'u in the backfield before getting to an edge, squaring his shoulders to fix the final defender and releasing Jona Nareki up the left wing with a slick one-handed flip.

While he may no longer bring the same degree of devastating footwork to the party, the ability to spark this kind of interplay can help knit a team’s attack together in all facets of the game. It might not be in the way that their casual fans would have expected when they signed a World-Cup-winning winger, but — even on the other side of 30 — Nehe Milner-Skudder will still be able to add value to the Highlanders in 2021.

Foreign fields

Last weekend, there were 119 Kiwis playing in top-level competition overseas:

Loose threads

In case you missed it on Twitter this week

Quinn Tupaea finishing strongly for the Chiefs after combining with a former Hamilton BHS teammate
Beauden Barrett getting creative on his Suntory Sungoliath debut

Quick hits

While both teams’ 2021 schedules remain uncertain, the All Blacks Sevens and Black Ferns Sevens each took part in an intrasquad tournament (with guest appearances from some Barbarian sides) at Blake Park in Mount Maunganui over the weekend. As well as the outfits’ newly contracted players, there were a number of other young prospects on show: Fehi Fineanganofo and Caleb Tangitau both played in the men’s tournament fresh out of school, while on the women’s side Maia Joseph and Jorja Miller took part. (All four were involved in the Red Bull Ignite7 programme which took place before Christmas.)
Last Wednesday, Andrea Jackson was named as the Manawatū Rugby Union’s new chief executive officer — becoming the first woman to be appointed to such a position by a major provincial union in the process. (Heartland provinces East Coast and Wanganui are led by Cushla Tangaere-Manuel and Bridget Belsham respectively.) New Zealand Rugby’s Executive team remains predominantly male, and their board composition still falls short of government representation targets; however, Farah Palmer is being touted as a viable candidate for the position of chair that will become vacant when Brent Impey steps down in the near future.
Kicking off this coming weekend is the inaugural edition of New Zealand Rugby League’s National 20s Competition, which has been set up in order to bolster the 13-a-side code’s talent development systems. With lots of talent in the Auckland region growing up playing both league and union, some alarm bells might be ringing at Blues HQ: from the franchise’s U17 and U18 groups last year, Ali Leiataua, Zyon Maiu'u and Tony Tafa have all been named in either the Auckland Blue or Auckland White squads for the upcoming competition. (Tafa also made last year’s NZ Barbarians Schools team.)
The Black Ferns held another training camp in Tauranga this past week, and the most notable attendee was not a player but a coach. Former All Blacks forwards coach Mike Cron — whose contract with New Zealand Rugby as a roving resource coach was reported to have been terminated in May last year — was present with the team in the Bay, helping out Glenn Moore’s front-rowers with their scrummaging.
More details of Silver Lake’s proposed investment into New Zealand Rugby’s commercial assets were revealed by Stuff this week: according to reporting by Paul Cully, “Silver Lake can exit its investment after a minimum of five years” and “NZ Rugby has strong safeguards in place with regards to future buyers of the 15 per cent stake”. On a recent episode of The Detail, RNZ’s Emile Donovan also got into the context of the possible deal with journalist Liam Napier and Simon Porter of Halo Sport.
They’re not short of depth in the front row, but one of the props who has been involved in the Blues’ wider training group this preseason will soon be disappearing offshore: Auckland player Marco Fepulea'i — who has played in the Major League Rugby competition in the USA in both 2019 and 2020 — has been signed up by the LA Giltinis for 2021. (He had previously agreed a contract with the Dallas Jackals, an expansion team, but their competition entry date was pushed back in January.)
In a surprise sighting, Liam Messam was seen at Chiefs training this week. It’s not clear whether his appearance is related to a report that loose forward Pita Gus Sowakula has picked up a knock, but Messam did indicate last month in an article for The XV that it was his intention to play NPC rugby again for Waikato later this year — and that he might be only a phone call away if his former Super Rugby team needed him:
"In my last few years with the Chiefs, I was part of the All Blacks too, so I didn’t have to go into the pre-season quite as early as some of the other boys. I didn’t put my hand up to play Super Rugby this year though, so I’ve actually got the longest pre-season of them all before Mitre 10 kicks off again…I never let myself get too unfit, even during the breaks between seasons. You never know, maybe the Chiefs will be hit by injuries again and they might need a 36-year-old to come in and show them how it’s done.”
The defending champion Crusaders have lost an important member of their backroom staff, with Head of Physical Performance Simon Thomas moving to Major League Rugby’s Austin Gilgronis — who presented him a “once in a lifetime” offer — to take up a similar role. According to the Crusaders’ official website, Gareth Duder, who’s been on staff for four years as a strength & conditioning coach, has been promoted to Thomas’ role.
Highlanders’ head coach Tony Brown spoke to Charlie Morgan of The Telegraph this week for a piece about England’s developing attacking shape. In that interview, he provided good insight into his own thinking on the relationship between structure and success with ball in hand:
“I think people get too caught up in shape and forget about space and opportunity – how to create space and how to attack it. You need people understanding their job, which is shape, but not at the expense of space and opportunity. Ultimately, you need the players understanding what they need to do but you need them willing to attack at all times.”
After dotting down a pair of first-half tries in his return to preseason action at the weekend, Hurricanes fullback Jordie Barrett passed on some interesting thoughts about the goal-line drop-out law variation which has been introduced this season:
“It’s an interesting dimension especially for fullbacks, a bit of decision-making when the ball is near the goal-line and where to position yourself and what is the best outcome. I think teams will be pretty green in that area and if people can cotton on to what works best early there are some opportunities there.”
In Stuff’s preview of the franchise’s 2021 season, Barrett was named as a back-up option for Jason Holland at fly-half — a position in which they lack depth after Simon Hickey’s season-ending injury — but the thought of moving Ruben Love there might also intrigue the head coach; the young utility played multiple games at 10 for his club side Wainuiomata last year.