It’s sunny side up for in-form Blues forward
Tom Robinson knows all about timing. Bad timing is when your sun protection product gets cleared for market from mandatory testing at the, er, end of summer.
Good timing is what is playing out right now at the Blues.
The 27-year-old flame-haired forward from Northland, and parttime entrepreneur, is a key figure in what might just be the hottest rugby team on the planet right now. He plays blindside flanker, and sometimes lock, for a Blues team that has won its last 11 matches on the trot, and sits seven points clear at the top of the Super Rugby Pacific standings.
And he has a theory about why now, after the best part of two decades of ineptitude and inconsistency, the Blues have finally morphed into the team they’ve always believed they could be.
‘‘There’s no miracle thing that’s happened,’’ Robinson tells Stuff ahead of today’s trip across the Tasman for the penultimate regular season clash against the Brumbies. ‘‘It’s what’s been building over the last few years ... a lot of it is belief and confidence. It’s not that we know we’re going to win, but we know how to win, and we know what winning looks like and it’s becoming part of our culture.’’
Personalities help, adds the man they call Sauce. ‘‘The characters, the culture ... that’s built from the players and the players are picked by the coaches. There’s something special here – we’re playing hard, we’re playing for each other and we’re having fun doing it.’’
You can say that again. The Blues dropped their season opener to a miracle finish from the Hurricanes in Dunedin, and have won everything since. A win on Saturday night at GIO Stadium will clinch the 11-1 Blues the No1 spot with still a round remaining in the regular season. They understand the importance of home advantage – they’ve just tabbed 124 points and 19 tries in their last two matches at Eden Park – but Robinson is adamant the blinkers are affixed.
‘‘It is cool, but there’s a feeling that the job is nowhere near done,’’ he said of the storylines revolving. ‘‘We’re not looking at win totals or thinking about playoffs. It’s the Brumbies, 1 v 2, we want to finish top, and we’re not going to button off now. It’s going to be our biggest challenge yet, I reckon.’’
For Robinson the first Chiefs game, where he conceded back-toback penalties late in the piece and handed the visitors a chance to snatch victory at the death, was a ‘‘big learning curve’’.
‘‘At different moments in games you need different things. At that moment what I did wasn’t the right thing. It was getting to that set piece thinking, ‘all right, what’s the time on the clock, what do we need, and this is what I need to do’.’’
But for a turning point in the Blues’ season, Robinson nominates the second Chiefs clash, won 25-0 in Hamilton: ‘‘That showed what we’re capable of, and set a line in the sand – all right, that’s the standard now.’’
It’s not all rugby either for one of the raconteurs of this Blues squad. Robinson and fellow
Northlander Josh Goodhue have formed a startup producing a sunprotection product called Zinc or Swim.
‘‘We were sick of getting sunburnt in pre-season training ... the sunblock was sweating off. We needed something stronger, we think of ourselves as colourful types [the product comes in white, pink, blue or yellow], so Zinc or Swim was formed. It’s available on our website, we’re slowly getting into retail stores, and it’s going well.
‘‘Unfortunately we didn’t have ideal timing, launching at the end of summer. We had to get it SPF tested in Australia, got held up by Covid, so we’re ready seven months ahead of next summer.’’