WANTED JONAH LOMU

The All Blacks have been on a three-decade search for the next Jonah Lomu. But is it a quest doomed to failure?

- Words CAMPBELL BURNES >> Illustration STANLEY CHOW

THERE WAS, and is, only one Jonah Lomu. It’s now ten years since the premature death of the great man, who transformed the game in 1995 and gave Rupert Murdoch the push to help turn rugby professional.

Lomu, of course, was an unheralded 20-year-old bank teller with just three Tests and not a whole lot of top-level substance to his name when he stormed the world at the 1995 World Cup.

He was not the complete rugby player – he was not fast on the turn and his kidney issues did hold him back on many occasions – while his 37 tries from 63 Tests sits below All Blacks like Will Jordan, Doug Howlett, Joe Rokocoko and Jeff Wilson on strike rate. But he could score tries that many couldn’t even comprehend, as well as setting up many more than he scored.

Since his last Test in 2002, aged just 27, the search has been on for the next Lomu. Some fans like to think that this unique character can be somehow reincarnated in another 1.97m, 120kg behemoth, a “rhinoceros in ballet shoes” as he was famously described when tiptoeing close to the sideline on his way to the winning try in the 2000 Sydney Bledisloe Test.

In fairness to many journalists, who aren’t akin to hyperbole, some raise comparisons in more qualified terms, writing that the next wunderkind was “reminiscent” of Lomu in an aspect of their play or evoked memories of the big man in full flight. It’s the subeditors writing the headline who have tended to run with the dreaded clickbait tag of “Could this be the next Jonah Lomu?” It’s like we have to seize on the next big thing.

That can either crush a player under the weight of expectation, a millstone around their necks, as it were, or make him proud or flattered and can give him the impetus to drive forward.