Ardie Savea of the All Blacks looks on during the Bledisloe Cup match between the New Zealand All Blacks and the Australian Wallabies. Photo / Getty Images.
Ardie Savea of the All Blacks looks on during the Bledisloe Cup match between the New Zealand All Blacks and the Australian Wallabies. Photo / Getty Images.
OPINION:
Ardie Savea is a difficult man to pin down. He's evasive, he's powerful and he's determined to plough his own furrow.
He's much the same on the field as well, which is why New Zealand Rugby are particularly keen to keep him in the country beyond next year, butknow that it will be a long and tricky negotiation to persuade such a determined force to commit through to the next World Cup.
There's not really any other player remotely like Savea on the planet. That leg drive of his and ability to plough through tackles that appear to have been made is a trick that never ceases to provoke the gasp which all magicians are hoping to induce.
He was, at times, a lone figure in Brisbane last week, the only man charging in direct lines, going through, over and sometimes around Wallaby defenders to spark some kind of forward momentum.
He's got footwork, he's got speed and swerve, his pass and catch is sharp and he has enough explosive power to knock over heavyweight forwards.
Eddie Jones has been talking recently about trying to build hybrid rugby players who can flit between the backs and forwards and probably, in his mind, Savea is the prototype.
There's a long, long list of reasons why Savea is such a critical player for New Zealand to keep, but the bullet points are that he's a role model and inspiration who connects with a diverse range of communities; he's fighting to stamp out toxic masculinity and on a less noble, but highly practical level, he's a world class player who gives the All Blacks two distinct ways in which they can set up their loose trio.
Ardie Savea in action during the All Blacks V Wallabies rugby match held at Eden Park. 18 October 2020 New Zealand Herald photograph by Dean Purcell.
Lose Savea and the All Blacks will lose a lot more than just his dynamic ball carrying and capacity to brilliantly snaffle turnovers.
What they have at the moment is choice and flexibility. Such is Savea's range of skills and almost unique ability to simultaneously operate as a ball-winning, support-running openside and bruising, ball-carrying No 8, that Ian Foster can mix and match the athletes around him.
This hasn't seemed such an important point this year playing Australia four times and Argentina twice, but it will start to matter next year and beyond when, presumably, the All Blacks start playing the likes of South Africa, England, Ireland, France and Wales again.
The ability to have a ball carrier and ball winner wrapped in one athlete means the All Blacks can play fast and wide, or grind it out as needs dictate without needing to set-up their personnel having made a predetermined choice to do one or the other.
That sort of versatility is invaluable and so NZR needs to find a way to persuade Savea to stay until 2023.
That's not going to be easy as NZR is operating with depleted cash reserves and will be conscious that it will also be looking to lock in Sam Cane and Aaron Smith next year.
Making it trickier yet is that Savea has previously looked hard at offshore markets and was on the verge of committing to Pau in France at the end of 2018.
Ardie Savea of the All Blacks celebrates scoring a try with Beauden Barrett and Shannon Frizell of the All Blacks during the Bledisloe Cup. Photo / Getty Images.
He was just about over the line with them, only changing his mind after Cane's broken neck opened the door to him starting regularly which was the foundation he needed to suddenly and quite dramatically transform into a world class openside.
Earlier this year he said he was keen on trying to play in the NRL and liked the idea of being able to play international rugby league for Samoa.
No one really knows whether he was just thinking aloud during a podcast, genuinely considering it or hoping to make NZR a little twitchy so they come at him with the sort of pay deal he'll find hard to refuse.
NZR have to hope it was just posturing and that the wildly different landscape that exists now as compared with when he mentioned the NRL, has swung the pendulum back in favour of Savea staying for two more years.
Clubs across Europe are crippled with financial pain at the moment and the Covid situation doesn't engender much confidence that it would be wise to relocate a young family to that part of the world.
And Savea's young family has expanded in recent weeks with the birth of his second child, while it's also a significant factor that older brother Julian is back in New Zealand and has signed with the Hurricanes.
These are the cards NZR has to play in its bid to do what not many manage to do and pin down Savea.
