r/superrugby

Disclaimer- I don’t much about anything. This will annoy a lot of fans

Unfortunately for Super rugby and NZRU, they need a strong tahs and reds to keep super rugby alive. Mere commercial relevance is the biggest factor e.g. more eyeballs and ticket sales = more revenue = bigger tv rights deal = more funding = more competitive salary caps etc.

How do you reach this? The biggest market must be competitive year on year, which is Australia particularly NSW and QLD through shear population. There is a large dormant rugby supporter base in both states however perennial under performance has seen public interest wavering for 10+ years.

What I suggest is Bi partisan support between RA and NZRU for anyone playing in the competition to be eligible for international selection for their home nation. Essentially allowing a currency arbitrage to recruit some top tier NZ talent to AU clubs to bolster squads. Or NZ getting top quality reserves for their squads.

Why would NZRU agree to this? NRL is a real threat to them. The commercial behemoth is expanding rapidly with talent across the ditch becoming much more enticing. The 20th NRL team is almost certainly going to be in Christchurch. The money that will be offered to aspiring All Blacks will be to much to shy away from and there will be a time when top tier union talent from schools etc will be poached into league, as they have done in AUS relentlessly for the last 10+ years. How do you keep them in rugby - more money.

Imagine if Richie Mounga could comeback and sign for the Tahs and still be eligible for the AB’s. That would be of benefit to all involved. Crusaders still develop their talent, NSW foot the bill for a proven star and then their young talent at 10 get to learn from the games best. This could have huge flow on effects for talent attracting talent (maybe Will Skelton wants to play with Ritchie if he signs) etc. You could also see someone like Nathan Cleary be attracted to playing for someone like the crusaders. Proven winners with great culture. It would be a lot more attractive than playing for the tahs and assuring yourself a bottom place finish. He would then be eligible for Aus if he rips.

This also gets a so much more outside chat about rugby happening = more eyeballs. James O’Connor’s signing to Crusaders last year had many peripheral fans back engaging with the sport because it was something different and new and created success for all involved.

Chances are nothing will happen. NZ will keep winning. NRL will keep expanding until super rugby is completely engulfed by it and only the extremely rusted on fan will care about their super rugby team and the other supporters will cheer on the NRL’s 30th new team.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing more that I want than to see a healthy rugby comp but you have to be realistic on ways to change for positive outcomes for both parties.

What if each Super Rugby team took one of their home games and played it in a place that doesn’t usually get Super Rugby?

Like Force vs Crusaders in Darwin.

Not really about expanding the comp, more just opening the game up to different audiences who wouldn’t normally get to see it live.

It feels like it could create some great atmospheres and give different regions a proper taste of top-level rugby, while still keeping most games at home bases.

Worth doing, or does it mess too much with the idea of a “home” game?

does anyone know where I can watch the chiefs doco taniwha unleashed? I’m from aus and google says it’s on stan but I can’t find it anywhere

Max Jorgensen: The making of a ‘generational talent’ hailed as rugby’s future

Rugby’s new hope is a ‘generational talent’ on the pitch and off it. A grass roots star determined to return Australia to the top of the international pile.

Jamie Pandaram

@JamiePandaram

15 min read

Max Jorgensen looks up. The frenzied kaleidoscope of players moving around him slows. The roar of the crowd becomes muted. There’s a tackler, with shoulders primed to thump his ribs, ready to bring him down or bundle him over the touchline a few feet away.

Time stands still as his mind comes to a singular focus. “I back myself against you,” ­Jorgensen tells himself. “I’m better than you. I’m going to beat you.”

The 21-year-old Sydneysider is no trash-talker. You won’t see him conducting elaborate try celebrations on the rugby pitch or baiting his opposition, but deep within he carries the self-belief of a world champion boxer.

“You’ve got to have that mindset, no matter who’s in front of you,” a soft-voiced and steely-eyed Jorgensen tells me over coffee on a crisp morning in May. For him, there’s no wavering from a contest. “You’ve just got to massively back yourself. I get the ball, I look at him, and I go, I’m beating you here, no matter what. I’m ­getting through.”

And so often he does, leaving defenders flat-footed, arms clutching air.

It’s a talent Wallabies coach Joe Schmidt says he’s only seen in a handful of players over his own two-decade-long career, before rattling off a roll-call of rugby royalty. “Will Jordan comes to mind, and Mark Tele’a – they can both beat you in a phone box,” Schmidt says of the All Blacks stars. “Cheslin Kolbe and Kurt-Lee Arendse, the two South Africans.

Immanuel Feyi-Waboso of England, you know, Brian O’Driscoll was a bit like that …”

Brian O’Driscoll. The sixth most-capped player in rugby union history, the highest-scoring centre of all time. A legend.

“Max is working towards some of those things that those guys have been doing for many years,” says Schmidt.

Jorgensen, a physical and fast outside back who can play on the wing or at fullback, carries a rare and strange weight on his young ­shoulders just as the game of rugby union reaches a fascinating juncture. In recent years in this country, where NRL and AFL remain the ­dominant football codes, and cricketers, tennis stars and soccer players attract much of the ­national spotlight, rugby has been battling for attention.

That will all change next year when more than a quarter of a million international tourists descend on Australia for the 2027 Rugby World Cup, the third-largest sporting event on the planet behind the FIFA World Cup and Olympic Games.

After several lean years of results, the Wallabies are now ranked eighth in the world, behind teams like Scotland and Argentina, and only marginally ahead of Fiji, but as with any host nation during a World Cup, support for the home team – and expectations – will be high.

There is an opening for a poster boy. And all signs are that Jorgensen, a second-generation Wallaby from the inner-west suburb of Balmain, a born and bred product of the game they play in heaven, is shaping up to be that face.

Fans know it, and the top brass at Rugby Australia do too. It’s why in January, the governing body tabled a multimillion-dollar five-year contract extension for him to remain in the game until the end of 2031. Only two other players in Australian history – Israel Folau and former Wallabies captain Michael Hooper – have been offered five-year contracts.

“There’s probably a fairly limited number of players that come through the system that are genuine generational talent,” says Rugby Australia chief executive Phil Waugh, acknowledging Jorgensen’s outstanding potential. Waugh doesn’t just mean on the pitch, either. The game’s boss has been looking for a different story to tell the Australian public about rugby union. One where talent is nurtured, harboured and grown in-house, and the sticky fingers of rugby league scouts are kept at bay.

“The story of Max Jorgensen, coming from a junior mini rugby club through to performing on the global stage in a Wallaby jersey, is just a great example of how we’d like to see the game portrayed in the public eye. Generational talent is not just physical attributes and what a player can bring on the field, but also culturally … in terms of elevating rugby in Australia and the connection to the community.”

Jorgensen re-signed on a deal reportedly worth about $900,000 a season; it includes clauses that will allow him to play two stints overseas (and capitalise on the riches of foreign clubs in Europe or Japan), while remaining eligible for the Wallabies right through to the Rugby World Cup in 2031. His journey might be the ­blueprint for rugby to secure its young talent and ensure the game’s future.

So, how did he get here? And how was he not poached – like so many others – by rugby’s rival code? Well, before we consider Max’s journey, fans should be reminded of the path trodden by his father, Peter.

Peter Jorgensen played two Tests on the wing for the Wallabies against Scotland in 1992, in a team that was captained by Nick Farr-Jones and featured legendary names like David Campese, Michael Lynagh, Tim Horan, John Eales, and Phil Kearns. Two years later he switched to rugby league to play with the Sydney Roosters, then the Penrith Panthers.

The rugby old guard weren’t happy – and when he scored eight tries in his first 10 games for the Roosters, rugby league administrators were crowing.

So when young Max Jorgensen burst onto the scene, performing brilliantly in junior representative rugby league before he’d reached his teenage years, the scouts had him on their radar. He would go on to star in the GPS rugby union competition with his school, St Joseph’s College in Hunters Hill, and before the Jorgensens knew it offers were flying in from NRL clubs and Super Rugby.

Peter and his wife Johanna made a pact with Max that he wouldn’t sign a thing. Not until he’d finished his studies. But it didn’t stop the wooing.

In Year 11, he spent six weeks training with the Roosters’ first-grade squad under coach Trent Robinson. The only other student allowed to train with the NRL side was Robert Toia – now a Queensland State of Origin star.

“There are pros and cons, obviously, to be in your last year of school and getting chased by league and union, that’s the dream,” Jorgensen says now of the scrabble over his signature. “I hadn’t even left school, and both codes wanted me. That’s so special in itself. I never took that for granted. Whichever way I went, I wasn’t going to regret it.”

Nevertheless, the pressure was intense. After six months “trying to work out what I wanted to do with my life”, he made the call. Like so many of the current generation, Max Jorgensen was going to look past rugby union and head to rugby league, where traditionally the path to playing professionally was clearer.

Peter was in Paris at a friend’s ­wedding when the call came through. “He told me, ‘I’ve made my decision, I’m going to league’, which I was a bit surprised at, but I was very happy for him. I thought that was it, and that was fine. I rang his manager [Clinton Schifcofske] and we started on the negotiations.”

Only things didn’t end there. Several weeks later, at an unrelated meeting with Rugby Australia, Schifcofske sat talking through the deals of several of his other clients. One of the suits inquired about Jorgensen and was told the young speedster had made up his mind; sorry folks, he was headed to league.

“All of a sudden, Rugby Australia just backflipped, said, ‘OK, we need to fix this’,” Peter says. “It was a sliding doors moment.”

Rugby Australia took the unprecedented step of naming Jorgensen, then still a Year 12 student and the captain of his school’s First XV, in their Australia A squad to tour Japan in October 2022 as a development player. It was all the convincing Jorgensen needed that not only was he already in the national picture, but that with rugby, he could travel the world.

He recalls: “My dad and mum were so ­supportive through it all. They never really put any pressure on me.” But surely Jorgensen Snr had a preference? “Max was really confused throughout the whole process. Towards the end of it, he pinned me down, and he just said, ‘Dad, you’ve been telling me all year, 50-50, that you don’t care where I go, but you do want me slightly to go to rugby, don’t you?’ And I said, ‘Well … it might be 51-49’.”

Sometimes, professional sport is all about the one-percenters.

“I think ‘Mum’, ‘Dad’ and ‘Ball’ were his first three words,” says Jo Jorgensen, Max’s mother, who seems only too happy for her 21-year-old son to still live at home with his parents (alongside older brother Jake and younger sister Zoe).

“He does get very well looked after by my beautiful wife,” Peter says. “There’s a lot of laundry and cooking going on, which is not done by Max. He’ll milk it for as long as he can.”

Jo says she gets a thrill when the doorbell rings and a horde of children awaits wide-eyed outside. “They’ll ring the doorbell and ask, ‘Is this where Max Jorgensen lives?’ You can have 20 kids at your front door,” Jo says. “And Max is so good with them. He will always come out for photos and a chat, give them some signed gear.”

Jake, who recognised early that Max was ­extremely ordered as a child, and would move around figurines on his desk to drive him mad, keeps his younger brother grounded. “I am so proud of him, to see it come to fruition like this,” Jake says. “But obviously it is weird – you don’t really realise that he’s a celebrity of sorts, because he’s not a celebrity to me.

“Someone at the pub will be like, ‘Oh, Max’s brother, how’s Max going?’ You never really get used to people treating your little brother as a celebrity. We’ve got to keep him humble. We’re always into him at the dinner table, ­family gatherings, making sure he doesn’t get ahead of himself, always keeping him honest.”

It doesn’t surprise those closest to him that Jorgensen has now been capped 20 times, with a highlight reel that includes a try in the 84th minute to defeat England at Twickenham in 2024, and his spectacular catch-and-sprint ­effort in the opening Test of the 2025 British & Irish Lions series.

This season, Super Rugby fans were treated to some of Jorgensen’s finest footwork, with brilliant tries for the Waratahs against the Highlanders, Fijian Drua and ACT Brumbies. His form inspired a now infamous quip in ­commentary from Hooper that has since stuck: Jorgensen is “Mr World Class”.

But the signs of his skill and talent were on show early. “I remember him playing under-8s, and there was a game where he did a chip-and-chase and ran through a bunch of defenders, got tackled close to the line and had the timing and sense to put the ball over his head to score,” Peter says. “Sometimes you wondered if he was just good for someone his age, but he kept playing against older kids and kept doing the same things.”

Despite his obvious talent, Jo remembers how he was too embarrassed to be seen at school in his representative rugby kit outside training, preferring to change in the car, out of sight of his peers. “What I can say about Max through this whole journey is he hasn’t changed, he’s remained completely the same person,” Jo says. “Extremely humble – he ­almost avoids the attention.”

The young men who have played alongside him agree.

Jorgensen’s cousin Oscar, a year younger, recalls how selfless young Max was when they began high school together and played at Joey’s. “There were probably a few ­occasions where Max could go on and score tries by himself, but he trusted us to get the ball over the line,” Oscar says.

“That’s just his character, that unselfish nature that he has to set up his teammates. Having someone like Max put confidence into you was huge. He went a long way to building up the footy ability of everyone in the team.”

Patrick Young, son of former Wallaby Bill Young, has known Jorgensen since they were five years old. “No matter how big he’s gotten in such a short span of time, he’s always up for it, and when I say he’s always up for it, he’s always up to go on and grab a bite for dinner or go on and grab a beer, if he’s available,” says Young, who is now contracted to the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs NRL team. “I’ll always cherish how he’s made me feel, although he’s rapidly become this big thing.”

Blessed as Jorgensen is with natural skills, as soon as he and Jake were old enough to develop hand-eye coordination their dad developed a strict backyard routine for them – even after training sessions with their club teams. “He’d make me do 100 passes every day, 50 on each hand – usually a few more on my bad hand to be honest,” Jorgensen says. “We’d go in the backyard. Even days we didn’t have training, which we didn’t love at the time. When I was young, I was like, ‘I’m not doing that, I hate it, I don’t want to do it’. But I’m glad he forced me to do it. It made me a better player.

“You’ve got to go above and beyond to be the best player you can be. And if you want to make it to the highest level, you’ve got to do things by yourself, things that people don’t see.”

Peter, who went on to finish his playing career in the UK (Max was born in Sheffield and holds a British passport), understood the long-term payoff. “It was a fine balance between not getting him to do too much and stifling any enjoyment that he and his brother had for the game, but at the same time, I knew they had lots of ability and needed the additional practice that everyone does,” Peter says.

“It’s just the basics … if you weren’t doing these kinds of repetition, basic skills, then you weren’t going to get there. That’s exactly what first graders do anyway when they get older. So I was trying to get them to focus, but without being too much of a crazy helicopter parent.”

Off the pitch, Jorgensen has needed to ­discover resilience when the highs of ­professional sport gave way to the inevitable lows of injury. He completed his maiden Super Rugby season with NSW in 2023; on the ­surface, his charmed ride continued when he was selected in Eddie Jones’ World Cup squad. But that first year was hardly the smooth ride he’d hoped for.

“First year of Super Rugby, round two for the ‘Tahs, I did my AC joint [where the collarbone connects to the shoulder blade], so I was jabbing my shoulder [with painkillers] for the whole season,” Jorgensen says. “I was an 18-year-old coming out of school. I’ve never jabbed myself before. Then at the end of that first season, I did my knee pretty bad, a grade three MCL, and then partially tore my ACL. In the moment, that was completely devastating. Any athlete knows that.”

He saw four surgeons – two recommended surgery, another two said “back yourself and rehab it”, and he did the latter. It healed in time for World Cup selection, but then came ­another setback: in just the second Wallabies training session in France, Jorgensen jumped to catch a ball and broke his ankle. “I just felt like, ‘Why is it always me?’ There are probably 30 other guys out there. Why am I always getting injured?’ That was pretty much three injuries in a row. I had to miss out playing at that World Cup due to that training injury. It really hurt.”

Through his rehabilitation, Jorgensen began to see things through a new lens. “I switched it to, ‘That’s footy’. It’s part of footy, it’s a contact sport, that’s going to happen. I can’t change that, so how can I bounce back? Shifting that mindset was massive for me.”

Almost a year later, in August 2024, under new coach Schmidt, Jorgensen was picked to make his Test debut against world champions South Africa in Perth. “It was my greatest achievement to date,” Jorgensen says. “Bloody amazing. I was so grateful for the opportunity Joe gave me to put on that gold jersey, play for your country, and represent your loved ones. It’s a very special feeling.”

And one that only two years previously, he’d almost denied himself. In the end, playing for the Wallabies on the world stage was worth it.

“You grow up watching State of Origin, that’s an amazing game, to be out there would be sick,” Jorgensen says. “But then you go down the path of playing for the Wallabies against the British & Irish Lions, or in a World Cup … I think some of those big events were hard to go past. I really wanted to be involved in those types of things.”

When his contract negotiations came around again earlier this year, he says, despite media reports suggesting he was weighing up rugby league offers, the decision “was a lot easier this time around”.

“After playing for the Waratahs and the Wallabies for two or three years leading into that, I was like, ‘I really want to be successful within those two teams’. I want to do something great. Not only as myself, but as a team.

“Something I want to do is be a part of the Waratahs for a long time and win a Super Rugby title. I think that’s made my decision pretty easy. A home World Cup is coming up. To be able to win a World Cup on home soil also makes your decision pretty easy.”

After last year’s spring tour of Europe with the Wallabies, Jorgensen hit the road on a­ ­driving holiday around Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands with his long-term girlfriend Chilli Evans.

The daughter of former TV chef Pete Evans and his first wife, Astrid Ellinger, Evans has ­virtually no knowledge of rugby, Jorgensen says. “She actually doesn’t want to know about it. When I start talking about it, she doesn’t want to hear it – which is good!”

He says Chilli – and travel – have given him the priceless gift of perspective. “Footy’s not the only thing in life,” he says. “There’s so much more to life to enjoy and to love. To experience different cultures and see how they live on that side of the world is pretty cool. You learn things.

“Say, you have a bad game, well, you can’t let that knock you around for the next whole week, and then you’re miserable around your loved ones and your friends. You’re going to drop the ball. You’re going to miss a tackle. That’s just footy.

“You’ve got to review yourself hard and be like, ‘How can I be better in this situation?’ I like to always bring myself back to playing under-12s. Why am I playing this sport? It’s because I’m having fun with my mates and I love the sport. I try to get that outside noise away and just be like, ‘I’m playing footy, I love it, this is what I want to do’.”

Schmidt will be hoping Jorgensen is channelling his love of the game into his finest form when the Wallabies face Ireland in the opening game of the Nations Championship in Sydney on July 4. “Max is one of those understated kids who is very confident, but there’s zero arrogance. It’s almost paradoxical. He just wants the ball, and he wants to play, and he’s got a good instinct for the game,” Schmidt says.

“He’ll want to do well individually because he knows that if he does well individually, that contributes to the team performance, so I’d just love for him to get a little bit of time and space and be able to exploit some of those small spaces.”

The past decade has been tough going for Wallabies fans, who last saw their team lift the Webb Ellis Cup at a World Cup in 1999, and a Bledisloe Cup in 2002. According to Jorgensen, a change is gonna come.

“Just stick with us, keep supporting us, and the results will come,” he says. “It’s been a very similar group for the past two or three years now. The boys are getting more and more Test caps to their name and a lot more experience and learning from their mistakes. The results will come our way, and we’re going to turn into one of the best teams in the world."