Brodie Retallick of the Chiefs looks on during a Chiefs Super Rugby Pacific training session at Ruakura Training Field. Photo / Photosport.co.nz
OPINION:
It was bittersweet seeing Brodie Retallick knocking the air out of a handful of Waratahs ball-carriers on Saturday afternoon, knowing that he's tracking towards being the player of old yet is adamant that he'll retire from test rugby later next year.
Retallick, all 2.04m and 123kg, with his collection of broken bones, snapped tendons and torn muscles, stands as an unmissable testament to the failed strategy to stamp the Southern Hemisphere's footprint across the globe.
His is a career that fell victim to the era of administrative excess that bloated Super Rugby to a farce, and he's been so plagued by injury in the last five years that it has been impossible to determine what he has left to offer the international game.
For the last five years, there has barely been a period when he's not been making his way back from some kind of serious injury and just as it has seemed safe to pronounce that he's back to his brilliant best, another injury catastrophe has struck and rendered everyone, most likely Retallick included, uncertain all over again.
The pattern has been consistent since 2017 – he plays a handful of games and then something breaks and it has been a six-to-eight week stretch in rehab before he makes it back and the next injury occurs.
He's right in the thick of that sequence now, having played a few games at the start of the season before a badly broken thumb saw him miss nine weeks.
There he was in Hamilton, however, marauding in the middle of the field, picking off stray Waratahs runners who had veered into his considerable air space and in doing so he engendered hope, confidence even, that despite all the start-stop and the accumulated collateral damage, he remains a uniquely gifted force of nature who can still deliver the particular brand of carnage the All Blacks desperately need.
Retallick hurt the Waratahs. He got inside their heads with his presence and impact, pulling off two memorably good tackles where the full force of his enormous frame thundered into rib cages.
Waratahs fullback Ben Donaldson will still be feeling the impact of Retallick's shoulder later this week and tackles of that nature produce the little-moment victories that turn games and build a deeper sense of intimidation.
There were a few timely lineout steals and hefty ruck cleanouts from Retallick, too, and his 80-minute shift provided both an optimistic nod to his future and a sad reminder that his immediate past has been so dogged by injury as to have denied him the chance to be the player he might have been.
The All Blacks are a different proposition when he's at or close to his best and so a nation must hope that the rugby gods finally smile kindly and say he's endured enough and grant him a safe passage through to the World Cup in 2023.
Even should such a near miraculous, trouble-free path open for Retallick, it won't be enough to persuade him to reconsider his plan to quit test rugby after the World Cup and maybe even all rugby.
The disrupted nature of his career will forever carry a tinge of sadness and a sense of what might have been.
Retallick was unbreakable and unstoppable when he emerged in Super Rugby in 2012 as a 21-year-old and for the next five years was clatter, bang, wallop and easily the best lock in world rugby.
But in 2017 the combination of his cataclysmic intensity and a schedule that had him traipsing all over the world and spending too much time playing and flying and not enough recovering, saw his body suddenly and dramatically become vulnerable to injury.
The think-big economic strategy of Super Rugby will end up cutting his career short, but what everyone must hope, and what his performance on the weekend alluded to, is that there will at least be the consolation of him finishing the last 18 months of his career with the same impact with which he started 10 years ago.
Next weekend will provide the best indication yet of what Retallick can still offer. He and his impressive Chiefs locking partner Tupou Vaa'i will go head-to-head with Sam Whitelock and Scott Barrett and give the All Blacks selectors the perfect chance to gauge the pecking order of their four best second-rowers.
Whatever they were thinking three weeks ago may have changed on the back of Retallick's high-impact performance against the Waratahs and will most likely change again after the Christchurch semifinal.
Another crunching 80 minutes from Retallick and he'll be back in the number four shirt to play Ireland and the whole balance of the series will shift, because his presence, ferocity and physicality are the bedrock on which the All Blacks' success the last decade has been built.