Ardie Savea (L) and Julian Savea enjoy a laugh during a Hurricanes Super Rugby Aotearoa training session at Rugby League Park. Photo / Getty Images.
Ardie Savea (L) and Julian Savea enjoy a laugh during a Hurricanes Super Rugby Aotearoa training session at Rugby League Park. Photo / Getty Images.
OPINION:
Covid-19 has produced a number of crazy stories, but none more uplifting or heartwarming in a sporting sense than the rebirth of Julian Savea.
He's been named on the Hurricanes left wing to play the Blues, a selection that between 2012 and 2015 was absolutely regulation.
A selection thatfor four years just happened because Savea was the most dominant power wing in the world game.
No one wanted to play against him then. No defender enjoyed seeing him come at them, all 107kg of him in full flow, ambivalent about whether he would change direction if an obstacle presented itself.
But his selection to play the Hurricanes' first game of Super Rugby Aotearoa 2021 is anything but regulation.
Ardie Savea (L) and Julian Savea enjoy a laugh during a Hurricanes Super Rugby Aotearoa training session at Rugby League Park. Photo / Getty Images.
To have made it back into a jersey that was once undeniably his has taken Savea to the depths of himself. He's playing tomorrow because he has found the strength of character and determination that everyone likes to think they have, but so few actually do.
And while he could, justifiably, decide that in earning his starting spot, he has indeed conquered his personal Everest, hopefully he doesn't see it that way.
Hopefully, having shown incredible resilience and fortitude to resurrect a career that was all but dead, he decides that playing for the Hurricanes needn't be his summit.
He's only 30 and while that may seem positively ancient for an explosive outside back, it's not by any means a barrier or reason for him to believe he can't once again find his way into the test arena.
After all, why not? He's managed to redefine himself in the last few years, lose the excess weight, sharpen his attitude and rise to every challenge that has been set.
Even in his prime his game was built more on power than it was speed and he doesn't appear to have lost any of his ability to smash over the top of defenders.
Julian Savea trains during a Hurricanes media and training session. Photo / www.photosport.nz
And, given the way international rugby is at the moment – where there is little space as a result of the near obsession with defensive line speed – athletes who have out and out power have strong currency.
Coaches all love to talk about building clever ploys to manipulate defences but it's sometimes easier, handy certainly, to have someone the size of a small truck who can blast through a few tackles and build momentum by a more direct and simple means. Why make six passes and several decoy runs when you can make one pass to one big bloke who makes one effective run?
The weaknesses in Savea's game back in his prime were his workrate and desire to get off his wing to look for the ball.
But he's seen off younger challengers at the Hurricanes to start this week, with coach Jason Holland hinting it is because Savea now has a better appreciation of how to get more involved.
Savea was never in the same league as the likes of Ben Smith and Israel Dagg when it came to getting up in the air and diffusing high kicks, but nor was it a skill at which he was hapless.
It was neither a strength nor an obvious weakness in his game, but it's hard not to believe it's something he could get better at given his hands have always been reliable.
Let's not forget that in 2014 Steve Hansen proclaimed Savea to be a better wing than the great Jonah Lomu.
New Zealand All Black Wing Julian Savea in the final test at Eden Park, Auckland of the 2017 British and Irish Lions Tour. Photo / Greg Bowker.
Hansen, not one to make bold and brass statements about players while they were mid-career, happily told the world in October 2014 that Savea had more to his game than Lomu, and that's what set him apart.
Maybe it is ridiculous to believe that Savea could add to his 54 tests. It's possibly just daft to imagine that having scored 46 test tries, he'll find a way to get back in the team and nudge that number past Doug Howlett's record of 49.
Savea, after all, regressed far and fast after the 2015 World Cup. He couldn't stay on top of his conditioning, his form was wild and everything about him was volatile and unreliable from 2016 through to 2018 when he decided to leave New Zealand with 18 months left on a four-year contract.
But that's what makes his story so compelling. He's fought back from the pits of despair and against all the odds – when everyone said he was finished and had nothing left to offer – here he is back in his Hurricanes No 11 jersey a different person and maybe a different player.
