[Source: Rugbypass]
A smile as bright as the brightest summer’s day lit up the face of Wallace Sititi on Sunday night in Monaco when he briefly reflected on his rapid five-month journey from nowhere to becoming World Rugby men’s 15s breakthrough player of the year for 2024.
The 22-year-old North Harbour hopeful had set himself the modest target of just a single Super Rugby Pacific appearance with the Chiefs. Instead, after featuring 13 times in the run to an Auckland final against the Blues, Scott Robertson wanted a look and the rest is now inspiring history.
A 25-minute debut off the bench in California versus Fiji was followed by four Rugby Championship caps, but the best was yet to come – five successive weekends of smashing out 80-minute performances to help the All Blacks win four of their five tour matches.
It was Saturday night in Turin when that heavy-duty shift ended, Sititi packing down at blindside in the tour-ending victory over Italy. A day and 260 kilometres later, he was then left blown away on the Monte Carlo stage after learning he had got the jump on fellow award nominees Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu of South Africa, England’s Immanuel Feyi-Waboso and Ireland’s Jamie Osborne.
Had he ever imagined his year could spectacularly turn out like this? “No, not in a million years,” he chuckled with RugbyPass when trying to understand it all. “I would have been happy with one game with the Chiefs in the Super Rugby season and to be able to be here is definitely unexpected. Just crazy to say.”
If Monaco was an unlikely place for Sititi’s breakthrough year to end, San Diego was just as unlikely a place for it to get started. Robertson’s All Blacks era had got off to a spluttering home Test series victory over England and he wanted to cast the net for the friendly in America to see what might be trawled.
That living included the phone call to back home which even now ‘gets’ him. “Emotional,” he said, recalling what it was like telling his family he was going to be an All Black.
