Chiefs superstar Damian McKenzie joints Sky Sport’s The Breakdown ahead of his clash with the Highlanders. Video / Sky Sport
OPINION:
Rugby can seem like a terrifying business where super-sized athletes knock the living daylights out of each other and then Damian McKenzie comes along and makes the game appear to be one for everyone again.
He's the best thing in Super Rugby at the moment – not just becausehe's rekindled his best form after struggling to recover from major knee surgery last year.
He is brilliant entertainment when he buzzes about, fearless and frenetic as he did in the final 25 minutes against the Blues in Hamilton.
Who didn't know, honestly, that he would eventually find a way to score the try the Chiefs needed to win? It felt inevitable that McKenzie would somehow unpick the Blues as he did when he ricocheted out of a few tackles and spun over at the death.
Damian McKenzie scores the winning try against the Blues. Photo / Photosport
Inevitable because for the final quarter he was tormenting the Blues – pulling them this way and that and sneaking under and past the procession of giants who were trying to take his head off.
McKenzie is sensational when he's in that mood - when he's at first receiver, hungry to get his hands on the ball, perpetual motion and a hundred miles an hour.
Many thoughts will have run though All Blacks coach Ian Foster's head watching in the first round of Super Rugby but one in particular will be taking hold – which is that McKenzie is now a genuine weapon to unleash in the final quarter of a test.
He hasn't always been. He's previously come with a danger warning that he's prone to moments of madness – properly malfunctioning at the most inopportune times.
Until now, he'd never quite managed to inject the requisite self-control and patience to balance his game.
It was all-or-nothing rugby from him as if he was a slave to his instincts which could see him strip a defence one minute, throw an intercept pass the next.
He was as infuriating as he was intoxicating: a maddening assembly of sublime and ridiculous.
Damian McKenzie. Photo / Photosport
But he's endured two tough years in succession, and that seems to have fixed him. Missing the World Cup in 2019 and then never quite finding himself last year at the Chiefs where he was a lost soul in Warren Gatland's confused vision, forced him to rethink his approach in 2021.
He appears to have had a spring clean in his own head, chucked out all the mental clutter and replaced it with a few simple thoughts that are enabling him to retain his attacking sharpness without being so liable to cutting himself on it.
It feels like an age now since he ran down a dead end, threw a wild pass or kicked to nowhere in particular. It would be foolish to imagine that he's eradicated his propensity to make mistakes, but he's greatly reduced his unforced error count and exponentially increased his influence as a result.
McKenzie feels like a player who can now be trusted to inject himself into a test and produce a sustained blast of creative but controlled rugby. The odds of him making a game-winning play are now significantly higher than they are of him making a game-losing mistake and in McKenzie, rugby has a champion it should be holding up to the world as proof that a lack of size is not detrimental to success.
Damian McKenzie saves a Mark Telea try. Photo / Photosport
McKenzie's ability to run through traffic is sensational and it's also genuinely heart-stopping at times watching him skip and hop and as the human missiles fire past him, unable to locate such a small target.
And it's also heartwarming to see that an athlete who looks like he could snap in a stiff breeze can cast such an influence in Super Rugby.
Rugby has forever claimed to be a sport for all shapes and sizes, but hasn't actually been that for the better part of a decade.
There used to be room for the slightly built but we would be kidding ourselves to say that's still the case. No one makes it into the midfield these days unless they are somewhere close to 100kg.
Few outside backs can make it to the professional scene if they aren't about the same size as most loose forwards. The likes of Caleb Clarke and Leicester Fainga'unuku play at 110kg as if they are two Terry Wrights glued together.
It makes for a high-impact sport and comes with a level of almost ghoulish fascination to see the collisions, but rugby is a better game for having a player such as McKenzie thriving the way he is.
