ANALYSIS
Over a lifetime of covering rugby, Phil Gifford has seen many of the greatest players to don the black jersey – and the biggest change in that time has been the arrival of professionalism in 1996. Today, in a series rating the best All Blacks of the professional era, he looks at locks and the front row.
Locks
Norm Maxwell
(1999-2004, 36 tests)
Norm Maxwell, who would become Northland’s gift to Canterbury, and then New Zealand, rugby, was introduced to the game as a 13-year-old by a teacher in Whangārei, Te Wai Piripi. Years later, Piripi would say, “Norm was already six foot tall. His problem was that he was only about six inches wide. But I knew very quickly I had a future All Black on my hands. He flew into everything at a million miles an hour.” Scott Robertson summed up his teammate by saying: “When he played Norm gave himself the nickname, The Janitor, because he cleaned everything up. He cleared rucks and breakdowns with no regard for his body. Completely fearless, Normy gave a lot of white, skinny boys hope.”
Chris Jack
(2001-2007, 67 tests)
Chris Jack played football at primary school, but by the time he left Shirley Boys’ High School he was a lock in the First XV. His coach Glen Fyall would say that above everything at school, Jack had the right mental attitude to succeed in rugby. “I recall often the boys talking after the weekend about the party they’d had in the weekend, how much they’d drunk and so on. Chris often either wouldn’t attend, or, if he did, he wasn’t a big drinker. He got on very well with the rest of the guys, but he knew very well what he wanted to do with his rugby. He just wanted to get on with it.” Jack would follow his older brother Graham into the Crusaders, and in the All Blacks came to be rated as one of the premier locks in world rugby, his lineout skills matched by his crashing runs.
Robin Brooke
(1992-1999, 62 tests)
A hard-nosed, tough-as-nails grafter, Robin Brooke formed a perfect middle-row partnership with Ian Jones that hit its peak in the great 1996 All Blacks team that became the first to win a series in South Africa. Although he actually had a wide range of skills, Brooke was, in many ways, a throwback to the playing days of Sir Colin Meads, when locks were mostly prized for their physical presence. World Cup-winning All Blacks coach Sir Brian Lochore would say of Brooke: “There are some players you look across at in the first lineout, and think, ‘I’m in for a hell of a tough time today’.”
Scott Barrett
(2016-2023, 69 tests)
The third of his remarkably gifted family to make the best 60 list, Scott Barrett has described playing with his brothers in the All Blacks as a dream come true. Their father, Kevin, an unforgiving lock for Taranaki (167 games) and the Hurricanes, famously joked after he played his last provincial game in 1999 that he and his wife Robyn would head out to their farm and “breed some All Blacks”. Scott, after two World Cups, looks likely to now be a key man as the All Blacks enter the era of Razor Robertson.
Ian Jones
(1989-1999, 79 tests)
Hugely athletic around the field, Ian Jones was the king of the lineout. The Kamo Kid has said he was fortunate that rugby’s rules changed as he started his test career. “Before the metre gap down the centre of lineouts became law, lineouts were a shambles and a lottery.” It took a while for him to win over conservative selectors and media critics. “I was considered skinny and boyish.” But when given the chance to lock a test scrum in 1990, Jones showed, as he did for the next nine seasons, that he could handle anything international opponents could throw at him.
Brad Thorn
(2003-2011, 59 tests)
Brad Thorn was born in Mosgiel, but grew up in Queensland, turning his back on what had been a stellar league career to return to New Zealand in 2001 for a shot at being an All Black. He was selected at the end of that year to tour Europe with the All Blacks, but turned down the jersey because he wasn’t sure that his future was in rugby. Some castigated him as a mercenary, using rugby to pump up his value as a league player, but Crusaders teammates knew it as actually a case of bedrock honesty from a man of unshakeable integrity. He took a year out from sport, returned to rugby in Christchurch and settled into his role as a fierce, committed tight forward, a man who left his mark on anyone who clashed with him on the field.
His coaches loved the guy. “He’s so easy to coach,” said Sir Steve Hansen. “Just give him something to push, give him something to tackle, give him something to catch, and he’s happy. And give him three feeds a day. Just make sure they’re big ones.”
Brodie Retallick
(2012-2023, 109 tests)
Brodie Retallick is a giant of a man, at 2.04m (nearly 6ft 9in) and 120kg. Off the field, in his rimless glasses, Retallick, who when he was first at the Chiefs in Hamilton amused everyone by riding to training on a tiny 50cc scooter, doesn’t present as ruthless, more like a genial high school chemistry teacher who accidently drank the growth serum. However, what makes him so special on the rugby field is how he uses that size and strength with devastating effect when cleaning out a breakdown or making a tackle.
In the lineout, Retallick quickly reached a point in his career where his presence alone made opposing jumpers uneasy. The huge tweak in Retallick’s game is the amazing range of skills he brings to the party. As the hugely gifted Springboks lock Victor Matfield said before he played against Retallick in a 2014 Super game: “He’s all over the park and he makes a lot of passes, he doesn’t just always do the obvious thing and take the contact. He’s a very talented player.” At the end of that year, Retallick was voted world player of the year.
Sam Whitelock
(2010-2023, 153 tests)
Sam Whitelock comes from one of the great Kiwi rugby families. Two of his brothers, George and Luke, were also All Blacks. Another, Adam, was a Crusader. Their father, Braeden, was a Junior All Black and their maternal grandfather, Nelson Dalzell, was an All Blacks lock in 1953-54.
In 2018, Scott Robertson outlined what Whitelock offered to a team. “He’s a great, balanced, player, mentally very strong. He’s as tough as you can get, and he has the physical ability to get through 80 minutes every week and play a whole season without injury, which just shows how good his conditioning is. Really, he’s the ultimate professional as a rugby player and an athlete.” And there’s more to Whitelock than just his rugby career. “You’ve got to have other interests,” he’s said. “Otherwise, you can overcook yourself.” In his case, as well as marriage and parenthood, he’s a Bachelor of Science graduate of Lincoln University.
Props
Greg Somerville
(2000-2008, 66 tests)
In 2003, Greg Somerville noted that “I don’t have the size or the weight to help me if I get into trouble, so I have to try to get the technique perfect every time I go into a scrum.” Somerville was brilliant at the hand-to-hand combat at breakdowns. A hugely modest man, he swore his balance and agility didn’t come from a martial arts background. “I’ve never done anything like that. When we’ve done judo with the boys at the Crusaders, I’ve been just... terribly useless. Maybe the way I grew up on a farm, having to throw haybales round, that sort of thing, helped me. Maybe it’s just a mentality.”
Tyrel Lomax
(2018-2023, 32 tests)
Having been born in Canberra, with a father, John, who was a league hardman for the Raiders, Tyrel Lomax has one of the more unlikely back stories in All Blacks rugby. At high school in Canberra, Tyrel switched from junior league to rugby, played for the Australian schoolboy rugby team, and at 19 was signed as a development player by the Brumbies. He entered Super Rugby for the Melbourne Rebels, but has found his happy places at the Hurricanes and the All Blacks, where he’s the tighthead anchor of their scrums. As a teenager he told an Australian journalist, “There comes a time when you want to make a name for yourself.” Opposing props at the highest level would vouch for the fact Lomax has certainly done that.
Craig Dowd
(1993-2000, 60 tests)
England propping legend Jason Leonard has said that the toughest front row he ever faced was the All Blacks trio of Craig Dowd, Sean Fitzpatrick and Olo Brown. A teammate with first hand knowledge of Dowd’s abilities, All Blacks lock Ian Jones, says that Dowd was “fiercely competitive, never letting standards drop”. It’s a measure of Dowd’s application that when injury forced Olo Brown out of the game at the end of 1998, Dowd was able to shift from loosehead to tighthead, and play four tests in his new position at the 1999 World Cup.
Olo Brown
(1990-1998, 56 tests)
During his three seasons as a professional player, Olo Brown didn’t give up his day job as a chartered accountant for a major New Zealand company. As a tighthead prop you could, as one of his club coaches at Ponsonby would say, “have used his back for a spirit level, it was so straight in the scrum”. There was not much else known about Brown because he decided early he wouldn’t do interviews, and he didn’t. As they say, his actions on the field spoke louder than words.
Owen Franks
(2009-2019, 108 tests)
“A tighthead prop,” Jason Ryan (now the All Blacks forward coach) said in 2018, “is probably the most demanding position on the rugby field. You can be half an inch off, and everything can go wrong pretty quick.” Owen Franks was a perfectionist. “He takes pride in every set-up,” said Ryan. “An analogy to his attitude to a scrum would be a Tiger Woods putt for a million dollars.” Franks’ resilience and courage were spotted early when, as an 11-year-old, he was coached in a Lyttleton club team by his father, Ken. “Before a game, Dad would look for the biggest player in the opposition team, who was usually a Pacific Island kid with a moustache. He’d say, ‘I want you to put a big tackle on him.’ Most times I would.”
Tony Woodcock
(2002-2015, 118 tests)
Tony Woodcock was a man so quiet there’s a story at his Helensville club, possibly apocryphal, that his own family never quizzed him about games, because all he ever said was, “It went okay.” Woodcock didn’t enjoy the limelight, and on the field was usually buried at the heart of mauls.
His level of performance saw him play at three World Cups, and the golden moment came when he scored the only New Zealand try in their 8-7 victory over France in the 2011 final at Eden Park. In a move called “Teabag” they’d used once against Australia in 2008 and stashed away, Woodcock dashed through a gap in the lineout to score. In the coaches’ box, Sir Graham Henry flung his arms in the air. On the field, ecstatic teammates hugged Woodcock, patted him on the head, and jumped around him with delight. Woodcock just smiled, kept his head down, and jogged back for the restart.
Carl Hayman
(2001-2007, 45 tests)
Props come in many forms. What they don’t usually come equipped with is a long back and height. Carl Hayman, at 1.93m the same height as Sir Colin Meads, or, more recently, Kieran Read, was a sensationally good tighthead prop. “He’s just very, very strong,” a Crusaders front-rower who packed against Hayman would once say, “and he’s able somehow to keep his back straight, no matter what.” Hayman’s gifts at scrumtime were matched by his truly remarkable ability to make hoisting a 120kg lock into the air look easy. Sadly, as anyone with a passing interest in New Zealand rugby knows, there is no happy ending to the Hayman story, suffering as he now does from dementia and a degenerative brain condition.
Hookers
Codie Taylor
(2015-2023, 85 tests)
The tradition – first established by Sean Fitzpatrick – of a hooker running with the ball has been kept very much alive by Codie Taylor. When he coached Taylor at the Crusaders, Scott Robertson said, “You could put Codie pretty much anywhere on the field and he would perform his roles brilliantly.” Taylor has scored 20 tries in tests, a testament not only to the control he can maintain at the back of a rolling maul, but also to his ability to step or barge his way past defenders.
Keven Mealamu
(2002-2015, 132 tests)
Keven Mealamu was a fourth-former when his family moved from Tokoroa to Papatoetoe. At Aorere College, he was supposed to just watch his brother Luke, who would later play for Manu Samoa, trial for the First XV. In bare feet, Keven somehow managed to get on the field, and – as a flanker – he made such an impact that by the time he was 17, he was in the 1996 New Zealand secondary school team. As he filled out, he made the switch to hooker and his path to becoming a great of the game was sealed. Mealamu’s gifts extend to illustrating several children’s books. During the 2011 World Cup, he was finishing work on Superhero Pukeko. “I know things are quite different on the field and you have your game face on,” he said at the time, “but this is something I really enjoy doing.”
Dane Coles
(2012-2023, 90 tests)
It’s probably no surprise Dane Coles’ rugby hero when he was a kid wasn’t a beefy front-rower. His idol was the sensationally fast fullback Christian Cullen, who, like Coles, was from the west coast north of Wellington. “It’s always nice to get your hands on the pill,” was how Coles perfectly summed up his own playing style. He grew up in Paraparaumu. “We didn’t have things like PlayStations then,” he said. Instead he gave every sport, from softball to league to cricket, “a crack” until settling on rugby.
His secret weapon at international level was genuine pace. The most stunning example came in 2015 at Eden Park in the All Blacks’ 41-13 win against Australia. Fed the ball by Dan Carter 40 metres from the tryline, Coles wrong-footed Wallabies wing Adam Ashley-Cooper and outpaced three other Australian backs to score.
Sean Fitzpatrick
(1986-1997, 92 tests)
Every time he stepped up in rugby, it was as if Sean Fitzpatrick was born for the position. From the Baby Blacks in 1986, to the ′87 World Cup team, to All Blacks captaincy in ′92, everything felt as natural as night following day. The mantra he lived his rugby by was brief but telling. “I HATE losing.” He worked endlessly on his skills. Fitzpatrick was so determined to get his throwing to the lineout right that his wife, Bronwyn, recalls she developed “a very reasonable two-handed take” from the hours of backyard practice she was forced to endure as a jumper for her husband’s throwing sessions. Throughout his remarkable career, Fitzpatrick was living proof that attitude, as much as physical gifts, is what makes a rugby legend.
Greatest All Blacks of the professional era series
Part 1: The best fullbacks and wingers
Part 2: The best midfielders and first fives
Part 3: The best halfbacks and loose forwards
Phil Gifford has twice been judged New Zealand sportswriter of the year, has won nine New Zealand and two Australasian radio awards, and been judged New Zealand Sports Columnist of the year three times. In 2010 he was honoured with the SPARC lifetime achievement award for services to sports journalism.