In fact, looking at Hoskins Sotutu, and some of his Blues’ teammates – Dalton Papali’i most readily springs to mind and Akira Ioane (although he has moved to Japan) – labels have become their enemy.
In the case of Sotutu, he was labelled in his breakout season in 2020 as “flamboyant”, as a natural athlete with soft skills.
As he continued to develop, the idea stuck that he was a loose forward who was trading off his creativity – his natural flair for making an offload, for seeing space others couldn’t.
None of it was meant to sell him as a player with limitations – it was just impossible to ignore that he had a skill-set that other loose forwards didn’t: that he was a player who came with a high-entertainment value because he could make plays that opened the game and brought a wow factor.
But that label has been misinterpreted and left him battling perception more than fact. It’s built this idea that he and some of his Blues teammates lack the toughness and hard edges of some of their peers who play for other teams. Some of those players have landed more beneficial labels, terms such as “hard working” (Ethan Blackadder), “rugged” (Luke Jacobson) and “explosive” (Samipeni Finau) – playing and character traits that are more favourably aligned with test rugby.
These labels can be persuasive: they influence the questions coaches are asked by the media about certain players, and sway narratives to accentuate assumptions as fact.
It creates incomplete pictures about the extent of what players offer and a binary impression that someone such as Sotutu has sacrificed defensive grunt on the altar of creativity.
The comments sections are full of thinly veiled tropes that suggest Sotutu is lazy, too busy scoring tries to make tackles.
But there is something deeper that has pervaded this whole business around Sotutu’s non-selection for the All Blacks, and indeed the unexplained fall from grace suffered by Papali’i, who began last year as a test starter only to disappear almost entirely.
It’s almost as if unconscious bias has slipped into the rugby debate – that inadvertently or perhaps not – the perception of Auckland held by those outside the City of Sails have subliminally been attributed to the Blues players.
Dislike and resentment of Auckland and Aucklanders is alive and real in provincial New Zealand and however much the city may disappoint its inhabitants at times, it will always disappoint those who don’t live there more.
To many it is overpriced – a city of style not substance – where there is an illusion of wealth and prosperity, but really everyone is driving around in Porsche Cayennes on tick that they can barely pay as they are mortgaged to the eyeballs.
It’s a city that flatters to deceive and while Aucklanders may think that the greatest aspiration anyone could have is enjoying a $7 latte on Ponsonby Road, while wearing Lulu Lemon yoga gear, the rest of the country thinks they are vapid.
Does this metaphor apply to Sotutu, and is he, therefore, doomed by association? When speaking to the Herald this week, he certainly gave the impression that he’s had enough of trying to figure out what he did wrong and why he wasn’t picked by the All Blacks last year.
Maybe he has come to accept that labels are difficult to peel off once they have been stuck on.
The Blues literally beat up every team in the competition in 2024. They dominated physically from start to finish, but only three of their forwards made the All Blacks squad.
Sotutu was told that the All Blacks wanted loose forwards who could operate effectively on both sides of the ball – the implication being that he didn’t deliver the same dominant tackling as others.
This, of course, could have been astute and accurate selection by the All Blacks: a sign they were doing deep-drill analysis that told them different things than Joe Public and the media were seeing.
But you do have to wonder how the player who was judged to have been the best in Super Rugby wasn’t deemed to be in New Zealand’s top six loose forwards last year, and how it was that a coach of Vern Cotter’s standing tolerated a supposedly low-impact defensive offering from Sotutu for so long.
And nor was it necessarily a fair presentation of facts to suggest that Sotutu missed out to Wallace Sititi, as the argument is there to suggest that there was room for both given the dynamic, fluid nature of the game the All Blacks wanted to play.
Sotutu, though, seems to have made peace with it all and seems happy with his new label of former All Black, as by November this year, that will mean he can switch his allegiance to either Fiji or England.
