Sopoaga comes through for Highlanders
The departing All Black was the difference in Dunedin.
This was the sort of fierce, daring, exciting rugby a local derby brings, with an intensity that rests just a notch beneath a test match.
No wonder the clash in Dunedin between the Highlanders and the Crusaders felt like a battle of brothers. In one coaching box sat former Crusader Scott Robertson. In the other, two of his former Crusader team-mates, Aaron Mauger and Mark Hammett.
As players all three had the benefit of seeing how Wayne Smith and Robbie Deans in Christchurch developed winning teams, piece by piece. ‘‘There is no big secret,’’ Deans once said to me, ‘‘just a lot of smaller things done well.’’
For the Crusaders success was always going to depend on making sure that the poor execution (knocking on, not throwing in straight) that cost them so dearly in the game last weekend with the Hurricanes was cleaned up. They were better this week, but not by quite enough.
At first glance it’s one of life’s mysteries that Robertson, the most exuberant coach in New Zealand, last year produced the most measured, precise side in Super Rugby.
Don’t be fooled. The extroverted side of Robertson’s character tends to dominate the public face.
But he’s also such a stickler for fine detail he sometimes has to work hard at getting to sleep, or he finds himself ‘‘up in the middle of the night making notes.’’
As for Aaron Mauger, in his days as an All Black midfielder he was always the calm, thoughtful voice, able when it mattered to stay icy cool, and take the right option. There are those, and I’m one, who still sometimes wonder what might have happened if he’d come off the bench to guide the All Blacks in the last heart-breaking 20 minutes of the World Cup quarterfinal with France in Cardiff. Instead, in the squad but not the reserves, he watched, like every Kiwi in the ground, in agony from the stand.
In the end it was the Highlanders who stayed staunch enough to hold onto a game both sides had the potential to crack wide open .
As physical as every forward clash was, staying controlled would be the difference, and that contest went to the Highlanders.
Step forward as a prime example Elliot Dixon, the rugged Highlanders’ loose forward, who runs like a man with a grudge. But when he was delivered the ball early in the second half with the goal-line 20 or so metres away, his rugby smarts told him not to bash, but to run an acute angle into space, and he powered on for a vital try.
Mauger-like calm was certainly shown by Lima Sopoaga, playing