The Chiefs have shown determination this season, driven by past Super Rugby final losses.
They’ve demonstrated focus and resilience, especially after defeats, emphasising learning and maintaining high standards.
Coach Clayton McMillan’s final season adds urgency, with hopes to secure a title before his departure.
There has been, from the opening game of the season, a palpable sense of determination about the Chiefs – one that has been fostered by the pain of losing the last two Super Rugby Pacific finals.
Since they beat the Blues at Eden Park to start their 2025 campaign, theyhave looked in a different class to everyone else: smarter, faster in thought and movement, crisper in execution and more certain in how they want to play.
It’s not just been, however, the flow and imagination of their attack, the solidity, accuracy and consistency of their grunt work, or the way they have seamlessly rotated their squad without losing any cohesion or potency that has set them apart.
It has been that simmering internal fire which has given them the air of champions-elect, that impossible-to-ignore focus to turn up each week with the right game plan and the right attitude to systematically dismantle opponents.
And so too have they revealed everything about their mindset and underlying desire to be crowned champions by the way they have reacted to the three defeats they have suffered this season.
After their most recent loss – to the Hurricanes in early May – the Chiefs sat in silence to listen to their opponents enjoy the moment and wallowed in the misery of defeat.
Other teams would likely have shrugged it off as a blip – a bad night at the office to be flushed and forgotten. But not the Chiefs.
They wanted a lasting reminder of what happens when they fail to meet their own standards – a refresher almost to top up the hurt that remains from producing an insipid performance in last year’s final – and from not managing to deal with the Crusaders’ rolling maul in the 2023 final.
This is a team that have learned the hard way that there is a stark and memorable difference between playing in a final and winning a final, and so it is unlikely there was even a tiny appreciation or acknowledgement among the playing group that they are coming into the playoffs, having topped the round-robin.
Chiefs players celebrate after Damian McKenzie scored a try against the Crusaders. Photo / Photosport
Just as it’s unlikely there will be any talk within the camp that having finished as minor premiership winners, they effectively have a free hit this weekend, knowing they can lose to the Blues in their quarter-final clash and still progress as a lucky loser.
The Chiefs haven’t presented at any stage in 2025 as a team that would wear the tag of lucky loser overly well.
The thought of needing luck or a second go to get the job done clashes with the central premise of what this year has been all about – one in which the Chiefs prove that they have learned every lesson imaginable about the importance of retaining their focus, drive and desire all the way to the last game of the competition.
McMillan is off to Munster at the end of this campaign, and the players and other coaches obviously want him to head to Ireland as a Super Rugby Pacific champion.
This is a man who lifted the club off the canvas in 2021 when they were reeling from the shock of failing to win a game in the shortened New Zealand-only Covid-era Super Rugby Aotearoa competition of 2020.
McMillan rebuilt the Chiefs’ identity and instilled a previously missing sense of purpose, and here they are now, chasing a title that will define his tenure – but perhaps more significantly, it’s a title, should it be won, that will potentially set the club up to dominate Super Rugby Pacific for the foreseeable future.
A win will chase off a few demons for a handful of legacy players, such as Damian McKenzie, Tupou Vaa’i, Samisoni Taukei’aho and Luke Jacobson, who have committed their futures to the club.
And a win will also give incoming head coach Jono Gibbes a platform from which to refine and advance a playing group that is starting to have the feel of one that have the depth, experience, balance and raw talent to build a dynasty much as the Crusaders did between 2017 and 2023.
He’s cut from similar cloth to McMillan in that he’s measured, calm and certain about what it takes to succeed and so it seems that these next few weeks are not just about the Chiefs exorcising the demons of 2023 and 2024, but taking the opportunity to set the club up for the next decade as New Zealand’s most powerful and successful.
Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He has won multiple awards for journalism and has written several books about sport.
