‘When I was over 20st, I would do one run and fade’
Naiyaravoro will make Saints bow as league’s heaviest back – but this is slimmed-down version ‘When I try to eat healthily, my wife goes and cheats. It is really not fair’
Premiership backs everywhere outside Franklin’s Gardens must have shuddered when Northampton announced that they had signed Australia wing Taqele Naiyaravoro. At 6ft 4½in and 19st 5lb, he is not just the biggest back in the league but the heaviest player in the Northampton squad.
Whoever first opined that rugby is a game for all shapes and sizes probably did not envisage wings eventually becoming the size of dump-trucks. Somewhat scarily, this is the slimmed-down version of Naiyaravoro, who is set to be unleashed for the first time against Saracens on Saturday. When he entered pre-season with the Waratahs 12 months ago, he tipped the scales at 21st 10lb (or around two Peter Stringers).
The 26-year-old still grimaces at the memory of the conditioning regime that he was put through: “That three weeks was torture.” He was banned from the gym and forced to do cardio every day apart from Sundays. The endless running was not even half the battle. “It wasn’t so much the training, but the diet – 20 per cent was the training and 80 per cent was the food I ate,” Naiyaravoro said. “On training days, I will eat five to seven times, but small things. Days off are strictly no carbs, just light meals. There are a lot of snacks and coffee. It does my head in, whenever I try to eat healthily, my wife just goes and cheats. It is really not fair.”
His discipline paid off. Naiyaravoro ended up shedding more than two stone and subsequently enjoyed his best campaign. He equalled the Super Rugby record for tries in a season (15) and was in the top three in the charts of metres made (1,766), line-breaks (28) and tackle-busts (75).
“That was a true testament to hard work and what you can do if you put your head down,” Naiyaravoro said.
“The coaches just said I would be a lot more effective if I got my weight down, so I could move around a bit more to help the team. That motivated me to try to get into it, the coach had to do a lot of persuading, though.
“I have noticed I can do repeat efforts. When I was 130-plus kilos [20st 7lb-plus], I could do one run and after a couple of minutes would die down. The past season, I can do more repeat efforts, catch the ball, down, up, and support and stuff like that. That is my main goal, getting my body in shape.”
As with a boulder rolling down the hill, a defender’s best chance is to stop Naiyaravoro before he gets moving. Once he has momentum, it is game over. British audiences have already had a glimpse of Naiyaravoro’s destructive power. In
2016, he tore South
Africa apart representing the Barbarians at
Wembley
– “I was overweight then”, he recalls – and prior to that he turned out for Glasgow Warriors, which included a devastating Champions Cup hat-trick against the Scarlets. Naiyaravoro was then persuaded to activate a break clause in his Glasgow contract to return to Australia in June 2016 and came off the bench to score against England in the Wallabies’ 44-40 defeat in Sydney. And that is where his international career ended.
There are legitimate concerns around certain aspects of Naiyaravoro’s game. An 80-minute work-rate winger he is not. Defensively, he can be suspect and the opposition will look to kick behind him – think of his turning circle like that of a supertanker. Yet such was his form this season that there was talk of Rugby Australia attempting to buy out his Northampton contract. That ship, however, has sailed and so, too, any chance of representing his native Fiji after two fleeting replacement appearances for Australia.
“There was no point making the Wallabies because they were not really into me any more,” Naiyaravoro said. “Even though I played twice for them, I have no regrets whatsoever playing for the Wallabies. For now, I will see what happens in the Premiership.”
Indeed, it will be fascinating to see how Naiyaravoro fares outside Super Rugby, particularly when the weather turns. So, too, how Chris Boyd, who previously coached Julian Savea during his prime years at the Hurricanes, integrates him into his new-look Northampton side. Key to everything will be keeping the pounds off. “Now I’m here, I’m trying to implement the same thing, having had a taste of what I can do if my weight goes down,” Naiyaravoro said.
Still, weight loss is far from the most daunting challenge that Naiyaravoro has faced. When he was playing for West Tigers in Sydney, his wife, Ethel, went into labour. They were turned away from hospital but by the time they returned to their 15th-floor apartment the contractions quickened and Naiyaravoro was forced to deliver his own child.
“I was like, ‘Man, what do I do?’,” Naiyaravoro said. “I went to get her stuff but she was saying, ‘I can’t hold it any more. I am going to have to push’. So, I put the towels down on the bed and called the ambulance. She probably pushed once or twice and the baby was out. We had a first-aid class back in Fiji and we saw that when you give birth you have to wipe the mouth and smack it to make it cry. If anyone needs a midwife in Northampton, then I am here!”