Savea could be back bymarch
Ardie Savea could be back playing in a Hurricanes jersey as early asmarch.
The All Blacks and Hurricanes star took to social media on Monday to say he would be out for five to six months after he undergoes knee surgery next week.
But Hurricanes chief executive Avan Lee said yesterday the prognosis could be better than that.
‘‘There’s an issue with his cartilage and there is a bit of speculation about how long he will be out for, but you never really know until the surgeon has operated and seen the real extent of the issue.
‘‘The prognosis at this stage is best-case scenario he’s back playing in three months, but it could be five or six months.’’
While Savea is one of the world’s premier players, the Hurricanes are not without talented loose forwards in the form of fringe All Blacks Vaea Fifita and Gareth Evans, while Du’plessis Kirifi has looked every bit a Savea clone when leading Wellington at provincial level and in his limited Super Rugby opportunities.
Lee has a few headaches at the moment, with head coach John Plumtree being tipped to join Ian Foster’s coaching staff if the latter is successful in his application for the All Blacks head coaching role next week.
Lee said they had a contingency plan in place should Plumtree move to the national team setup.
‘‘We don’t know for sure who will be successful, but we do need to plan for if Plum is in the mix and he is chosen in the successful coaching group.
‘‘For us it is still full steam ahead with Plum, but should we find out that he has been selected in that group then we’ll deal with it from there.’’
It would seem unlikely that the Hurricanes would bring in a new head coach this close to the start of the season.
Most of the campaign has been mapped out by the coaching staff, so promoting assistant coach Jason Holland into the top job would seem the smart option to maintain continuity.
Holland joined the Hurricanes in 2016, one year after Plumtree arrived with head coach Chris Boyd. Before that he had spent three years as an assistant coach at Canterbury under Tabai Matson and Scott Robertson, and four seasons as an assistant at Irish club Munster – a team he played more than 100 games for.
Fellow assistant Carlos Spencer has said in the past head coaching is not for him, while new assistant Chris Gibbes does have head coaching experience at Wellington and Waikato, but has only just got his feet on the ground as he replaces Richard Watt as forwards coach.