Ma’a Nonu will run out against the All Blacks on Wednesday morning New Zealand time, eleven years after he last pulled on the jersey himself.
The Durban-based Sharks have named the 44-year-old on the bench in the number 23 jersey for the second fixture of New Zealand’s tour of South Africa, at Kings Park on Tuesday evening local time. Kick-off is 7pm in Durban, which is 5am on Wednesday 12 August in New Zealand. English referee Matthew Carley has the whistle.
Nonu played 103 tests for the All Blacks between 2003 and 2015 and won the Rugby World Cup twice, in 2011 at Eden Park and in 2015 at Twickenham. He scored a try in the second of those finals. He has not played for New Zealand since. Now he will line up in black and white against the team he gave twelve years to.
The selection is the second surprise in a fortnight. Nonu only joined the Sharks in late July, and not as a player. The club announced on 25 July that he was coming in on a high-performance mentorship arrangement, working alongside head coach JP Pietersen and the coaching staff to develop a young group of outside backs. He remained eligible to play, but nobody outside the club appeared to expect that he would.
“The Sharks are one of the world’s most iconic rugby clubs and Durban has always been a special place for me,” Nonu said in the club’s announcement. “I have immense respect for JP. We competed against each other for many years, and I’m looking forward to working with him and the team.”
“This is a great opportunity to give back to the game,” he added. “Working alongside the future stars of our sport is exciting.”
Pietersen and Nonu have plenty of shared history. The Springbok wing faced Nonu repeatedly through the years when New Zealand and South Africa met, and the two later played together at Toulon. “The best players don’t just leave memories, they leave standards. That’s what Ma’a brings,” Pietersen said when the signing was confirmed.
Sharks chief executive Shaun Bryans framed it as a rare chance for the club. “Opportunities for someone of Ma’a’s calibre to spend time in our environment don’t come around often,” he said. “As we continue to build for the future, exposing our environment to world-class performers who have achieved sustained success is invaluable.”
The side Nonu will join from the bench is a young one. Pietersen has picked a starting fifteen thinned out by Springbok call-ups and by the ongoing Currie Cup, and filled it with players in their early twenties. Zekhethelo Siyaya starts at fullback, Vusi Moyo at first five-eighth, and Jurenzo Julius and Murray Koster form the midfield. Loose forward Nick Hatton captains the team from number eight. Springbok prop Vincent Koch, a World Cup winner, packs down at tighthead, and Vincent Tshituka is among the replacements alongside former Springbok halfback Ivan van Zyl.
For a group of that age, sharing a changing room with Nonu before a match against the All Blacks is a fair introduction to professional rugby.
Nonu’s own career has run far longer than anyone predicted when he debuted for the Hurricanes in the early 2000s. He has since played for the Blues, the Highlanders, Black Rams Tokyo in Japan, San Diego Legion in the United States and Toulon in France across two separate stints. Planet Rugby reported that during his most recent spell at Toulon he became the oldest player to appear in the Top 14 and in the Champions Cup, in a professional career now stretching past 24 years and seven clubs.
The match itself is part of a tour New Zealand rugby has waited three decades for. The All Blacks are in South Africa for eight matches, four against the country’s United Rugby Championship franchises and four tests against the Springboks. It is the first full-scale New Zealand tour of South Africa since 1996, and it has been packaged by the organisers as Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry.
The tour began in Cape Town on Friday, where the All Blacks came from behind to beat the Stormers 38-21, scoring four tries in the closing quarter after a scratchy opening hour. Coach Dave Rennie praised his side’s character afterwards, while the players themselves were blunt about the number of errors.
After Durban the All Blacks head to Pretoria to play the Bulls on 15 August, then to Ellis Park in Johannesburg for the first test on 22 August. The Lions follow on 25 August, with the second test in Cape Town on 29 August, the third back in Johannesburg on 5 September and a fourth on 12 September.
Reuters reporter Nick Said confirmed the selection on Friday, noting Nonu had joined the Durban squad in a player-mentor capacity.
How much rugby he actually plays is another question. A bench spot for a 44-year-old in a mentorship role could mean a token ten minutes late in the match, or it could mean nothing at all if the game gets away from the Sharks. But the sight of Nonu jogging onto Kings Park against the All Blacks would be one of the odder moments in a long rivalry, and one worth setting an alarm for.
Nonu remains one of the most successful midfielders New Zealand has produced. He played through the 2007 quarter-final defeat in Cardiff, was central to the 2011 side that finally ended the drought, and finished as a two-time world champion. Very few players in the professional era have carried a career this far, and fewer still have found a way to face their old team more than a decade after leaving it.
Will you be up at 5am to watch it, and does a bench appearance at 44 still count as a comeback? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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