Vunibaka excels in language of rugby

By Michael Field

It used to be grunt and sweat and pain but now its concepts, an elusive thing called space and intellect.

Marika Vunibaka, 25, a son of the island of Gau, Canterbury Crusader and professional rugby player, is one of those rare athletes who has those qualities.

By some ridiculous mistake though, he is perceived by many as being dim to the point of stupid.

He is no poet, that is true, and would struggle perhaps with academia, but Vunibaka knows better than most that rugby union these days is a mind game.

He plays it better than most.

Take this simple routine for example.

Each time he comes out on the park ahead of a game he is repeating one word in his head, over and over. It is no mantra though, no magic charm, no prayer. It just focuses his game, brings a sharp discipline to his head.

Canada, Canada, Canada.

That’s what he says to himself.

It’s a pointed remind of his darkest moment in rugby which came last year at the World Cup during a pool game in Bordeaux, France, on October 10. Fiji won 38-22.

He was sent off for head-butting a player; a moment of indiscipline which cost him deeply and left his colleagues short of his talent.

The rivals that day were Canada.

He told PIM he still remembers the moment, cannot understand why he did it and how he now uses it to keep his game plan unblemished. Not a solitary warning since, not a yellow card and, he believes, he will never be sent off from a game of rugby again.

Talk to the Canterbury Crusaders coach Robbie Deans and this business of discipline draws the tetchy counter question “what is your point?”

The defensiveness is an interesting problem. Just before I set out to interview the two men a public relations disaster had hit Canterbury rugby.

After a game in which Vunibaka had

scored a hat-trick against the hapless Northern Bulls, management took him to his first press conference.

Its subsequent stories were really an indictment of the primitive nature of the New Zealand rugby press; sniggering at his inadequate English for starters. As if they could give a press conference in Fijian - after 80 minutes of rugby.

Team management were sensitive to the idea that they had set Vunibaka up as a brainless dolt and they didn’t want to do it again. Thus Deans’ touchiness about any discussion of the thinking side of

rugby.

Vunibaka, like the only other Fijian in Super 12, Auckland Blues Joeli Vidiri, is from the countryside. They are not fluent English speakers and they are not media savvy. Both do their speaking with a ball in hand and pounding down wings;Vidiri has the added touch of a smile. Vidiri has billboards around Auckland; Vunibaka has no advertising yet but he does have, already, a cult following among Crusader

fans: Deans remembers first seeing Vunibaka playing for Fiji against New Zealand in the Hong Kong Sevens.

“I saw a real talent there. I see the sevens game and said to myself, crickey that guy can go a long way.”

In time he was signed onto the Crusaders, headquartered at Lancaster Park in Christchurch, that most English of cities in New Zealand’s South Island.

Deans and the Crusaders will not talk about the contract that got Vunibaka playing.

The relationship between Vunibaka and the Crusaders was not based on a piece of paper.

“If a player is happy and is playing well and likes it, he will stay,” Deans says. “If they are not, then I don’t believe there is any point in keeping them anyway.”

The Crusaders like his approach, calling it total discipline.

“He has taken to his work very well.

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He listens, practices and puts into action the moves he is told. He practices very carefully and he is very keen to learn. He had that aberration at the World Cup.”

Lots of wingers from many countries have, over the years, been compared to the great Australian David Campese.

Deans believes that in the case of Vunibaka the comparison is apt.

“He is a good thinker about the game, and he has a good instinct for it.”

Deans points to the concept of space, a variable, fluid thing on a rugby field.

Some of it is instinct, of course, as one rugby player knows a rival will move this way or that onto a ball, leaving space behind him.

But Vunibaka, focused and primed on the field, does what Campese did and that is to intellectualise the situation, turning rugby into chess.

“To do it well you need to process a lot of information about what really is happening on the field and Marika does that very well,” Deans says.

What’s interesting is that Vunibaka comes to rugby almost devoid of school boy rugby experience. At Marist he was doing athletics. These days the science of the sporting body is profound, particularly with people like Vunibaka.

“Marika certainly

has more than his fair share of fast twitch muscles,” observes Deans.

One time All Black fitness trainer Jim Blair has explained

previously that people

like Vunibaka andVidiri are mesomorphic -

tending to be big

boned, muscular and of average height, wide shoulders and thin waist.

Vunibaka at 97 kg and 187 cm tall is nowhere near the biggest man on the field, but he is the fastest.

“They have a higher proportion of fast twitch muscle fibre which is the source of their

explosive style and the reason they are fast over short distances and the reason you don’t see Polynesian marathon runners,” Blair said.

Deans agrees the Fijian is explosive over 100 metres, but the trick, he says, is in the first 10 metres.

“It is getting rolling that needs work and we can do that over the summer when the real work is done.”

Vunibaka doesn’t say much; not least in English and I cannot speak Fijian.

His English, when he gets going, is

peppered with the frequent Fiji-

English interjection “man”.

“Hey, I don’t know man.”

It’s contagious.

It had been a tough night the day before. His side had been beaten in the last round robin game by the Crusaders. The difference was a try Vunibaka should have got, but didn’t.

It is tough at the top, everybody telling you what you did wrong.

“Yeah,” he says, but without any bitterness.

“It wasn’t a bad game, but I made some mistakes.”

His dad is a farmer on Gau. The/ cannot see the rugby coverage out there, so an uncle tapes it Friday night in Suva

and by the following Thursday the

Vunibaka family is gathering around the video to watch their famous son in action.

“They are so proud of me.”

On the Super 12 website Vunibaka is quoted saying he wants to be a farmer and return to Gau. In life, it’s a little different. He loves travel, likes the lifestyle and finds himself well looked after in Christchurch.

“The people here are really looking

after me, they encourage me all the time,” he says, adding that the weather was “not too cold.”

He gets together with the small Fijian community now and again, sharing kava although he admits that while the odd grog doesn’t affect his rugby, he doesn’t think it is too good for his body over time. Vidiri is, he says, a big hero. You wonder though whether he is teasing.

“I respect him, he is older than me ...”

Joeli gave up Fiji glory for an All Black jersey, albeit briefly.Vunibaka will not.

“No, I like to play for Fiji, man, its my home country.” ■