Four seasons into Super Rugby Pacific, and the Highlanders own a statistic nobody on the south coast wants to read. Of their 47 losses since the competition's 2022 reset, 42 per cent - or roughly 20 of them - have been by seven points or fewer. Aotearoa Rugby Pod's Brenner Newton and Ross Karl walked into that number on this week's show and ended up with a verdict: the Highlanders are Super Rugby's most frustrating team.
The immediate prompt was the loss to the Fijian Drua in Lautoka, which left the Highlanders seven points outside the playoff cut with the Waratahs at home, the Chiefs away and the Hurricanes away still to come. Newton, who picked the Drua to win the match, said the Drua's home conditions punish error-prone teams in a way nothing else in the competition does.
"I think with what was on the line, and considering how the competition was going with teams losing, it was a good opportunity for them to be able to try and get some points for the playoffs. But I just think their turnovers, Ross. There's a stat - 24 turnovers within our emails - in some of that last 20 minutes. I think from the 52nd minute to maybe the 77th minute, they were 10 or 14 turnovers within that time."
Karl - a former All Blacks centre with sevens experience in Fiji - reached for personal memory to explain the conditions. "Playing in Fiji is difficult. You can't prepare for it. You don't get the time to acclimatise. You're flying out on a Wednesday or a Tuesday and it's just hard. We were talking about going to South Africa - the high altitude, that's really difficult, but sometimes you were able to acclimatise. Playing in Fiji is tough. I remember playing - we played the Fiji team when I was with New Zealand Maori - and we just couldn't move."
The stat Karl returned to was the cumulative one. "42 per cent of their 47 losses are by seven or less. It's just so close all the time."
Newton's diagnosis is a bench-and-game-management problem rather than a roster one. He pointed to the Highlanders' tendency to break down between the 45th and 60th minute - the period when the opposition's forwards lift, the bench is not yet on, and the team's connection blurs.
"It's not in the last 10. You can actually go back to the moments around 45 to 60 minutes. That's where they normally just have that button-off period, where the tails get up of the opposition. The opposition just sort of look like they come home strong towards 80, but actually the damage and the psychological damage was done in that 45 to 60."
The parallel he reached for was the Blues' leaky bench earlier this season, when the team conceded 38 points per game across three rounds. "Last night - the difference between me coming on the field and going, 'I'm going to get Ross,' and not telling Ross - then I fly out, but I haven't communicated. I'm trying to make an imprint, trying to bring the energy. That's an easy fix. That's for the starters. But they conceded the most of those 38 points in the last 20."
Karl, who played in a Blues team he openly described as plagued by the same syndrome, said the cycle is psychological as much as tactical. "When you try so hard for that victory and it comes close, you start stuttering a little bit. Confidence issues, particularly in game drivers. Being able to put a team in the right parts of the field. That stat is heavily revealing."
The Highlanders sit in unhappy company. Of every Super Rugby Pacific franchise, only Moana Pasifika - with 49 losses - have lost more matches across the competition's four seasons. By contrast, the Brumbies' record of 17 losses gives them the second-fewest in the era; the Chiefs sit on 15.
Newton signed off with a defence rather than a piling-on. "I don't want to appear to be picking on the Highlanders, because it's not what it is. I sympathise with them. There'll be no shortage of wanting to solve that problem. Just at the moment, they're trying to solve it as IOU groups - individual operating groups."
