From modest goals grew stellar career
Aaron Smith’s name is now forever linked with the Highlanders but he could easily have been with the Blues or (gasp) the Crusaders. In part two of our chat with the departing great, sports editor asks Smith to reflect on his career in the South.
HCOtago Daily Times
IS greatness seems obvious now but there was a time when few realised Aaron Luke Smith was something special.
He had made his debut for Manawatu¯ as a 19yearold in 2008, and been included in the Blues wider training squad two years later, but a fulltime Super Rugby gig was not immediately on the table.
Then along came Jamie
Joseph.
The former Otago loose forward, a year before he joined the Highlanders, had been appointed New Zealand Ma¯ori coach for three home games in the June window.
‘‘I knew I was in the running for maybe making the Ma¯ori squad but I’d heard it was all about whether Piri Weepu would be picked, and at the time he was fluctuating with his weight,’’ Smith (34) recalled.
‘‘Piri made the All Blacks, and 10 minutes later I got the call from Jamie saying I was coming on the Ma¯ori tour. That’s how our connection started.’’
Smith expected to back up Chris Smylie, the former Otago halfback who had lots of toplevel experience.
Smylie lasted 10 minutes against the Barbarians before getting injured, and Smith got to play the rest of that game and against both Ireland A and England A.
‘‘A month later, Jamie Joe rings me and says, ‘I’ve just got the Highlanders coaching job. I’ve got a list of players and you’re on it. Do you want to come down south?’
‘‘I was with the Blues the year before, so I rang them out of respect to say, ‘hey, I’d like to come back to the Blues because you gave me a chance, but I’ve got an offer of a full contract from the Highlanders’. I asked if they were willing to give me a contract.
They said, ‘oh, we’ll wait till the end of the NPC’.
‘‘I said, ‘I’m taking what I can. This is my dream’. I rang Jamie back and said, ‘I’m coming.’ And he’s like, ‘Sweet.’
‘‘I think I signed the next day. And Jamie is a very stringent negotiator. He’d only given me two days.’’
The Crusaders, perish the thought, had also been sniffing around. But they, like the Blues, wanted Smith to prove his worth in another NPC campaign.
Joseph knew the wee fellow was good enough already.
Moving from Feilding to Dunedin was a big call for Smith.
‘‘I remember a conversation I had with Mum and Dad about how it was time to leave the nest. I’d been in Palmy, went to Auckland for six months, and I’d really enjoyed getting away.
‘‘You come back to Palmy and Feilding, and maybe you go back to some old habits, and you socialise a bit more. I quite enjoyed the uncomfortable feeling of being away, and kind of thrived in that environment and thinking, I’m here to do something.’’
onfidence is no issue for Smith now. He knows he belongs at the top level — though he takes nothing for granted, and trains every week like he is preparing for his Highlanders debut. All those years ago, however, he thought
Special memories . . . (clockwise from above) Highlanders halfback Aaron Smith is honoured for becoming the team’s mostcapped player in 2021; celebrating victory in the 2015 Super Rugby final in Wellington; one final press conference at Forsyth Barr Stadium this week; training with the Highlanders on Monday; preparing for a fun night against the Reds.
Super Rugby would be his peak, and the thought of playing 114 tests for the All Blacks would have been hilarious.
Even when he arrived in Dunedin, he kept his targets moderately low as the Highlanders had an established senior halfback in Jimmy Cowan.
‘‘He was the starting halfback for the All Blacks. He went to the World Cup. So I was learning off him and just came into that season with the opportunity to cement a bit of my future and have a crack.
‘‘I just wanted to compete. Actually my first goal was literally just trying to beat Sean Romans to be on the bench behind Jimmy.
‘‘Sean was pretty sharp, and he’d played a couple of years for the Highlanders. But all I was thinking about was trying to beat one guy, and it wasn’t Jimmy. It was just Sean Romans.’’
Smith spent most of 2011 on the bench, but by 2012 he had usurped Cowan and played his way into the All Blacks.
Then came 2013. A season that will live in infamy.
It was all very exciting at the time. The Highlanders attracted All Blacks stars Andrew Hore, Tony Woodcock and Ma’a Nonu to join the likes of Smith and namesake Ben, Hosea Gear, Tamati Ellison, Brad Thorn, Jarrad Hoeata, Mose Tuiali’i and Colin Slade.
The superstar squad misfired badly, losing its first eight games and finishing a dismal 14th in the 15team competition.
Smith felt the Highlanders had made good progress in 201112 but got the recipe badly wrong in 2013.
‘‘We kind of threw out what we’d built in that two years around hard work and going deep into games and battling away.
‘‘Looking at our roster, with 10 All Blacks, we were thinking,
‘s . . ., yeah, it might just happen’. But nothing just happened. Nothing ever just happens.
‘‘You can say what you want about that season. It wasn’t
through lack of trying. And you had to get excited. We had a rockstar backline and four or five pretty good All Blacks in the forwards.
‘‘It was just . . . yeah. We chucked a team together and hoped it would work, and it didn’t. That’s just the facts.
‘‘Maybe the coaches got it wrong. When the Highlanders have been good, it’s been around the collective. Getting one guy over the line — not about the star getting the ball.
‘‘I’d never say those All Blacks that came were there for the wrong reasons. But if you’re not here and fully committed, you don’t buy in as well. You won’t work that extra yard to cover your mate. You won’t die for the team, you know.
‘‘There were levels in the team to how people were getting treated. And that’s not the Highlanders way.
‘‘The feeling was wrong because we were talking about championships before we even got to a playoff.’’
Two years later, the Highlanders were not just talking about a championship.
They still had some established or rising stars — the Smiths,
Sopoaga, Waisake Naholo, Malakai Fekitoa, Liam Coltman, Nasi Manu — but there were also lots of grafters, and the overall picture was a of a champion team, not a team of champions.
The Highlanders had to get to the top the hard way. They finished fourth after the regular season before beating the Chiefs in a Dunedin quarterfinal.
‘‘That was like our final,’’ Smith recalled.
‘‘We played so well. The whole week was a buzz, and Dunedin was pumping. When that whistle blew, I was like, man, this is amazing. We’ve won a playoff game at home.’’
Then it was off to Sydney, where the Highlanders beat the Waratahs in the semifinal to earn a final date with the redhot Hurricanes in Wellington.
Most favoured the Hurricanes, who had won 14 of 16 games during the season and were loaded with star talent, but the Highlanders ground them down, won 2114 and celebrated a fairy tale.
‘‘When I kicked it out, it was just that the joy of, ‘bugger all of you, we won’.
‘‘We got it right. And we were dominant the whole game. We defended well. We knew our plan, and we had great tacklers.
‘‘You look back and think, we were perfect once. We won a title. That was very special. To be honest, that 2015 final is my greatest rugby achievement.
‘‘Winning that trophy, in that comp, with our team that had been totally written off, was so special and so sweet, and still makes me smile every time I see a memory of it.
‘‘We had built a team, and a game plan, and we were buying into what our strengths were as a team. We were innovative, fast, we kicked more than people would think, we would create turnovers, and we could play unstructured football.’’