If you go out onto a rugby pitch looking like Daniel Day Lewis in Last of the Mohicans, you better have the skills, and stones, to back it up.
Rene Ranger has been our favourite Super Rugby player of the past decade. There, we’ve said it.
Sure, Nehe Milner Skudder is scandalously good and Nemani Nadolo in full flight makes us giddy, but nobody mixes jaw-dropping grace with beastly beat-downs like Ranger.
The Auckland Blues winger has returned to New Zealand from a two-year stint with Montpellier in the Top 14.
He produced plenty of highlight reel moments in France but he simply functions better in the wet n’ wild Super Rugby. When the game gets loose a crazy, he’s there. When a tight contest requires some brutish fizz, he’s there.
When you think of retreating from the edge of your seat, Ranger steps up.
So it proved at Eden Park as the Whangeri boy done good defied all sense of gravitational logic for this sweet score in the corner.
https://youtu.be/KDsgDUmEXms
Unfortunately for the Blues, they played like the Blues thereafter and had their docket punched ‘L’ by the Hurricanes.
