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Watch: Slick Rhys Patchell offload sets up Highlanders try
By Josh Raisey
After two rounds of action, former Wales fly-half Rhys Patchell has made a superb start to his Super Rugby Pacific career with the Highlanders.
A week after the 30-year-old produced a pinpoint long-range miss pass to create a try in his new side's opening win over Moana Pasifika, he was at it again in round two.
This time it was a Sonny Bill Williams-esque offload to his winger Jona Nareki to set up a try for Jacob Ratumaitavuki-Kneepkens against the Blues.
This silky piece of handling and a try of his own was not enough to bring the Highlanders the win, however, as they fell to their New Zealand rivals 37-29 in Melbourne.
Take a look at the try:
The 22-cap Wales international has made a great start to his Super Rugby career, which is a challenge he recently said he had long wanted to undertake.
“It came as a bit of a surprise to me when I got a phone call saying, ‘do you fancy it?’ As soon as it came across the desk it was something I was pretty keen on, spins my wheels,” Patchell told RugbyPass.
“The opportunity to come down here, challenge myself in a completely different environment. I knew absolutely nobody at the club, wouldn’t know much about the crop of players that the Highlanders had coming through.
“It’s one of those things that wouldn’t have come again. I’ve said to other people before, I didn’t want to get to the end of my career and have lots of great opportunities but didn’t make the most of any of them or hadn’t taken any of them.
“(I) felt this was something that I absolutely wanted to do and fortunately I have a very supportive fiancé who was on board with the idea as well.
“It was pretty quick from going, ‘what do you reckon’ to making a decision around it, and then a long wait after that to actually get your feet on the ground and get going.”
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Latest Comments
They would improve a lot of such a scheme were allowed though JD, win win :p
Go to commentsI rated Lowe well enough to be an AB. Remember we were picking the likes of George Bridge above such players so theres no disputing a lot of bad decisions have been made by those last two coaches. Does a team like the ABs need a finicky winger who you have to adapt and change a lot of your style with to get benefit from? No, not really. But he still would have been a basic improvement on players like even Savea at the tail of his career, Bridge, and could even have converted into the answer of replacing Beauden at the back. Instead we persisted with NMS, Naholo, Havili, Reece, all players we would have cared even less about losing and all because Rieko had Lowe's number 11 jersey nailed down.
He was of course only 23 when he decided to leave, it was back in the beggining of the period they had started retaining players (from 2018 onwards I think, they came out saying theyre going to be more aggressive at some point). So he might, all of them, only just missed out.
The main point that Ed made is that situations like Lowe's, Aki's, JGP's, aren't going to happen in future. That's a bit of a "NZ" only problem, because those players need to reach such a high standard to be chosen by the All Blacks, were as a country like Ireland wants them a lot earlier like that. This is basically the 'ready in 3 years' concept Ireland relied on, versus the '5 years and they've left' concept' were that player is now ready to be chosen by the All Blacks (given a contract to play Super, ala SBW, and hopefully Manu).
The 'mercenary' thing that will take longer to expire, and which I was referring to, is the grandparents rule. The new kids coming through now aren't going to have as many gp born overseas, so the amount of players that can leave with a prospect of International rugby offer are going to drop dramatically at some point. All these kiwi fellas playing for a PI, is going to stop sadly.
The new era problem that will replace those old concerns is now French and Japanese clubs (doing the same as NRL teams have done for decades by) picking kids out of school. The problem here is not so much a national identity one, than it is a farm system where 9 in 10 players are left with nothing. A stunted education and no support in a foreign country (well they'll get kicked out of those countries were they don't in Australia).
It's the same sort of situation were NZ would be the big guy, but there weren't many downsides with it. The only one I can think was brought up but a poster on this site, I can't recall who it was, but he seemed to know a lot of kids coming from the Islands weren't really given the capability to fly back home during school xms holidays etc. That is probably something that should be fixed by the union. Otherwise getting someone like Fakatava over here for his last year of school definitely results in NZ being able to pick the cherries off the top but it also allows that player to develop and be able to represent Tonga and under age and possibly even later in his career. Where as a kid being taken from NZ is arguably going to be worse off in every respect other than perhaps money. Not going to develop as a person, not going to develop as a player as much, so I have a lotof sympathy for NZs case that I don't include them in that group but I certainly see where you're coming from and it encourages other countries to think they can do the same while not realising they're making a much worse experience/situation.
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