All Blacks hooker Samisoni Taukei’aho to miss start of Chiefs’ Super Rugby Pacific season
Sunday, 21 December 2025
For a second year in a row, All Blacks hooker Samisoni Taukei’aho will miss the start of the Super Rugby Pacific season. But this time it’s not through injury.
Instead, the 28-year-old Chiefs centurion will sit out the first two rounds of next year’s competition as part of a late-start clause in his New Zealand Rugby contract.
While such deals (and sabbaticals), have become commonplace for the country’s premier players, they are typically for much longer stints. All Blacks captain Scott Barrett will freshen up for a big 2026 by sitting out the majority of the Super season, while fellow Crusader Codie Taylor did likewise in 2024.
However, Taukei’aho will instead spend just a couple of weeks on the sidelines, which will see him skip the Chiefs’ February 14 opener against the Blues in Auckland and the clash with the Highlanders in Dunedin seven days later, before getting set to return in the round-three final re-match against the Crusaders in Hamilton.
It’s a mini rest period that had been agreed with the national body back when he re-signed a year early in 2023 and became the first All Black to commit through to the 2027 World Cup.
“It just gives him an extra little bit of time, that’s what he needs to be at his best, and that’s what he’s negotiated with New Zealand [Rugby],” Chiefs coach Jono Gibbes told the Sunday Star-Times.
“And once he gets started and gets into the season, he can have a good run at things, and it’s going to be a big year again next year, obviously.”
That is highlighted by a whopping 17-game (13 tests) All Blacks schedule, thanks to the much-anticipated tour of South Africa, as well as the launch of the Nations Championship.
Taukei’aho this year re-cemented his status as the No 2 hooker in the country, behind Taylor, playing all 13 tests, providing plenty of his power-punch off the pine with his 1.83m, 115kg frame, after having missed the 2024 international season with an Achilles tendon rupture.
That was the injury which kept him out of the first two Chiefs games this year, before he then went on to play all 15 remaining ones for the eventual runners-up, rotated between starting and bench roles with the newly-recruited Brodie McAlister, who went on to join him in the All Blacks.
Taukei’aho, who has now played 43 tests for the All Blacks and amassed 107 caps for the Chiefs, had spoken late in the 2024 Super regular season about his more slow-and-steady-type approach when it came to starting the new year.
“The last few years for me has been about coming out guns blazing in the first few rounds, and sometimes I just can’t manage to hold on for the whole year,” he had admitted to the Waikato Times.
“So I’m trying [something] a bit different, try build into the season, and this time of the year is when you really want to be playing your best footy… I aspire to play my best when it really matters, when there’s a bit more on the line.”
Taukei’aho’s early-season absence is part of the reason the Chiefs took the unusual step of contracting four hookers in their 38-man squad, opting to carry one less loose forward for next year and instead welcome back Tyrone Thompson from the NRL, to join McAlister and rookie Taine Kolose.
The Chiefs squad finished up their first block of training on Friday, and will resume after their Christmas/New Year break on January 5, when the All Blacks XV squad members will also be back on deck.
All Blacks players will then be back from leave on January 26 ‒ not playing in the first pre-season game against the Fijian Drua at Tauranga’s Blake Park on January 30, before likely featuring in the second against the Hurricanes in Porirua on February 7 ‒ with Taukei’aho then linking up to train with the squad the week of the season-opener.