Rookie hooker Millennium Sanerivi on tenterhooks for Chiefs’ Super Rugby Pacific final
Monday, 17 June 2024
Rookie hooker Millennium (Mills) Sanerivi will wait on tenterhooks, with the 24-year-old Aucklander on the verge of being thrust into a dramatic Super Rugby Pacific debut with the banged-up Chiefs in Saturday night’s final against the Blues at Eden Park.
Clayton McMillan’s side progressed to a second successive decider with a 30-19 semifinal victory over the Hurricanes in Wellington on Saturday evening, but their gutsy win over the top seeds has come at plenty of cost, with a bulging casualty ward to assess after arriving back in Hamilton.
Speaking to the Waikato Times on Sunday, McMillan not only confirmed All Blacks hooker Samisoni Taukei’aho’s Achilles injury was “certainly looking fairly significant” and a likely rupture that will see him miss at least some of the international season, but that there are “four to five guys who have got a serious question mark over them”… “just niggly ones that could come right overnight or could put somebody out of action for two or three weeks”.
And one of those, of course, is fellow hooker Bradley Slater, who had replaced Taukei’aho and then manfully hobbled around Sky Stadium for some time, before leaving the park for an HIA (which he failed), then passing his HIA2 later.
“He got a bit of a bang to his knee, maybe an MCL injury, but not sure the extent, so hopeful that he’ll still be OK, put a couple of bandages on him and he might be alright,” McMillan said.
“If he isn’t, we’ve still got Tyrone [Thompson] there, and we’ll probably bring somebody else in from out in Never-Never Land,” he further quipped.
Thompson, the third and only remaining hooker in the Chiefs’ contracted squad, has played 21 games across the past three seasons, but started just two (both last year), and has featured in only six this season. He has been held back from club rugby the past three weeks to avoid any injury, for this very situation.
Should the Chiefs need to dig further into their hooking stocks, though?
“I’ll be getting home and jumping on the phone and seeing who we’ve got,” McMillan reckoned, though all but confirming it would be Sanerivi who they’d turn to.
The 1.81m, 113kg Taranaki rep has been one of five wider training group members with the Chiefs this season (Josh Jacomb and Hamilton Burr others in that quintet who had got game-time during the campaign), and having also featured during the pre-season fixtures.
“We’d be going left-field if we went anywhere other than Mills,” McMillan said. “And he’s been awesome for us, trained hard, been playing regular rugby, and he’s only really left our environment two weeks ago. So I’d say if we need to bring a person in, then he’d be our man.”
It could make for quite the introduction to Super footy for the former King’s College 1st XV captain, who moved to Taranaki out of school in 2019, has played 19 NPC games (2021-2023) there, mostly behind, ironically, Blues man Ricky Riccitelli, either side of representing the New England Free Jacks in the MLR, and has been back in Auckland recently turning out for his club side.
Meanwhile, further amongst the injury dramas, fullback Shaun Stevenson is a possible returnee for the final, the one-test All Black having been scratched from the semifinal late in the week by his troublesome hamstring, which was injured against the Waratahs on April 26.
It all makes for something of a light training week for the Chiefs, who already have one day’s less turnaround than the Blues, and have been rated $2.45 outsiders at the TAB for the decider, with the home side installed as $1.50 favourites.
“We’ve come out of an extremely tough game with a number of dings, and for us it’s really just going to be about rest, recovery, and just making sure that we hang our hat on turning up on Saturday night with some real energy,” McMillan said.
“We run the risk of not doing that if we don’t get the balance in our week right, particularly at the front-end.”