Billy Proctor's Rugby's Greatest Rivalry tour is over before the Test series has even started.
The All Blacks confirmed on Sunday that scans on the outside centre's shoulder, hurt early in the second half of Friday's 38-21 win over the Stormers in Cape Town, had found a fracture. Proctor, 27, was replaced by Caleb Clarke with New Zealand leading 14-7 at the DHL Stadium.
"Scans have revealed Billy Proctor has a shoulder blade fracture," the team's statement read. "This will not require surgery but will take approximately 10 to 12 weeks of recovery, meaning Billy has been ruled out of the remainder of the tour. He will return home to NZ later this week."
Head coach Dave Rennie had been guarded immediately after the match, before the scans came back.
"It looks like a shoulder injury," Rennie said. "There are some other guys with bumps and bruises too. We will have to see."
Friday was Proctor's first non-Test outing for the All Blacks after 13 international appearances since his debut against Fiji in San Diego in 2024. His most recent Test was against Italy in a Nations Championship match in Wellington last month.
He is the second player to leave the 44-man touring squad inside a fortnight. Crusaders hooker George Bell strained a calf in a training session in Cape Town and flew home with a four-to-six week recovery window, with Taranaki and Blues hooker Bradley Slater called in as cover.
"We are all gutted for George, to be ruled out of the tour so early," Rennie said at the time. "He's had a frustrating past few months with injury so it's a real blow for him to have injured his calf again. We look forward to seeing him return via the NPC and put himself in a position to push for All Blacks selection later in the year."
No replacement for Proctor has been named. The two names being pushed hardest in New Zealand are Richie Mo'unga and Du'Plessis Kirifi, and that is where the row starts.
Mo'unga, the fly-half who started the 2023 Rugby World Cup final, could not be picked for this tour because New Zealand Rugby required him to play an NPC match before becoming eligible again. The wider training group was named before Canterbury's clash with Auckland, so he missed the cut by days. He then scored the match-winning try in Canterbury's 38-31 win over Auckland and helped them reclaim the Ranfurly Shield with a 19-15 victory over Otago in Dunedin.
Former All Blacks halfback Justin Marshall, speaking on the Boks Unpacked podcast, has not let it go.
"I don't know what we're up to there, honestly," Marshall said, before co-host and Springboks legend Schalk Burger put it to him: "There's got to be a way that you can use him on this tour, surely?"
Marshall's objection is that Mo'unga had already played twice at club level before the NPC fixture that finally unlocked him.
"The irony of it is he played two club games before he played the NPC game, so what they are then saying is no club rugby player can get picked for the All Blacks because you obviously have to go through the NPC," he said. "How wrong is that? You should be a club player out there that if you're good enough, you should [be able to play for the All Blacks]."
New Zealand, England and Ireland all require players to be based at home to be eligible. NZ Rugby is stricter than most about exactly when a returning player becomes available.
"It's just bizarre how we've managed to manufacture a law within our own governing body; this is not a World Rugby thing," Marshall said. "Why do we not want one of the greatest 10s to have ever played for the All Blacks playing in a series that hasn't happened for 30 years? Why is he not here?"
There is a loophole, of sorts, and Marshall named it after Rassie Erasmus, who famously replaced injured hooker Malcolm Marx with fly-half Handre Pollard at the last World Cup.
"The fact that he might not still get here, we will just invent the Rassie rule," Marshall said.
Burger spelled out the mechanics with a grin: "For that to happen, one of your hookers has got to get injured, you've got to lose one of your hookers to bring Richie Mo'unga across."
Proctor is a centre, not a hooker or a 10, which leaves Rennie with an awkward choice: call in a like-for-like midfielder, or contradict his own stated position on Mo'unga's availability. The All Blacks play the Sharks in Durban on Tuesday, the Bulls four days later, and the first Test against the Springboks at Ellis Park on 22 August.
