Paul Lewis: The key decision that doomed Roger Tuivasa-Sheck’s rugby stint

Roger Tuivasa-Sheck during a Blues training session. Photo / Photosport

OPINION

Rugby hasn’t been kind to Roger Tuivasa-Sheck. His early removal from a drab performance by a makeshift Blues team against Moana Pasifika may not be his last moments in the 15-a-side game - but they were symbolic.

If Tuivasa-Sheck will forgive me, I’m going to compare him to Yanick Etienne. You likely won’t have heard the name. She was the backing singer to Bryan Ferry on an old Roxy Music classic - Avalon - in which Etienne’s soaring vocals at the end of the song produced a piece of music which still raises the hairs on the back of the neck many years later.

The story goes that Ferry was recording the song when he heard Etienne on a neighbouring sound stage and invited her to sing back-up with him. That’s the link to Tuivasa-Sheck. He too was performing well on a different stage when he made the switch to rugby.

The point is that in music and rugby, utterly disparate fields, talent often isn’t enough. Etienne, who died last year, had a voice like a bell, a singer-songwriter who made two albums, neither of which much grazed the public consciousness. Tuivasa-Sheck also has immense talent but will be regarded as a failure in rugby.

In both fields, you need talent, yes, but also good timing, a point of difference and a lucky break. Tuivasa-Sheck had the first two but not the second pair. Music and rugby often leave people with genuine, admirable ability in their wake, beaten not by a lack of talent but the unconscious cruelty of a profession in which it is so difficult to make a mark.

For some reason, someone decreed Tuivasa-Sheck’s entry point to rugby would be at second five-eighth. So we imported an Aston Martin and put it to work as a tractor. Even without Tuivasa-Sheck, the midfield has eight or nine candidates for the All Blacks’ World Cup squad this year. He should have been tried as a winger-fullback, where his trademark stepping and mazy running would be applied in more open spaces.

We don’t have many of those at the top level - Shaun Stevenson and Will Jordan are about it. The latter’s return to the Crusaders on Saturday after a long absence may have been the original reason for Tuivasa-Sheck being shoehorned into the midfield, where his elusiveness is usually buried under rugby’s smothering defences.

League and union might look like they are highly similar games, but they aren’t. League’s structured patterns are more predictable and have the ball in play more; league centres generally have a little more space and time than rugby’s midfielders, particularly second-fives.

In the midfield, rugby coaches often employ forwards, particularly loose forwards, in the traditional second-receiver role, using brute strength to try to create a bust. The backs carry too but often look to run off the forwards in the early phases of possession, seeking an offload or a gap to be created.

Against Moana Pasifika, it took nearly 10 minutes for Tuivasa-Sheck to handle the ball for the first time, at a stage of the game when the Blues were dominating possession. When Caleb Clarke scored, it was a perfect example of Tuivasa-Sheck’s struggles.

He’d tried his dodge-and-dart shimmies to little effect before blindside flanker Akira Ioane (one of the few to enhance his reputation on Saturday) did the crash-ball thing, spearing between the shoulders of two defenders and hooking up perfectly with Clarke for a try under the posts.

That was it. Tuivasa-Sheck couldn’t do the same thing as Ioane; even more, he probably shouldn’t have been asked to. After a Moana Pasifika try which exposed the Blues’ defence and which was scored in Tuivasa-Sheck’s too-late tackle, the highly decorated NRL and Kiwis rugby league kingpin was taken off, 47 minutes in.

Goodness knows what Tuivasa-Sheck thinks of rugby’s messy rucks and mauls, endless penalties and games like the one against Moana Pasifika, won in the last second with a penalty try in a moment of depressing anti-climax. This year’s World Cup Super Rugby is the worst I’ve seen; everyone is resting their World Cup players - producing an unattractive and often uninteresting series of clashes outside the New Zealand derbies.

Tuivasa-Sheck may well feel he’s better off heading back to the Warriors. It’s just a shame he was never tried in the positions he could have added a lot more and, who knows, made his way to the World Cup. He could have done what Jordan, Stevenson and Damian McKenzie do - and should have been given the chance.

Unlike Etienne, his is a name that has achieved widespread recognition. But, in rugby, he will only be remembered as a back-up singer, never the lead.