CROSSING THE divide

Rugby Australia scrapped hard to attract Joseph Sua'ali'i from the NRL over to union. Is the 19-year-old talent worth the fight? We find out

- JOSH GRAHAM

EVERYONE WANTS a piece of the next big thing. Yet few have gone to the same lengths as the photographers that crawled through the school bushes just to get a single snap of a teenage superstar named Joseph Sua’ali’i.

Such was the esteem with which the Penrith-born prodigy was held that Sua’ali’i didn’t even have to be playing. His mere presence at the side of the pitch was enough to summon the press to a rugby union game at The King’s School, Parramatta amid the pandemic.

“You’ve got to understand these kids don’t come around often,” explains Stuart Woodhouse, the director of rugby at Sua’ali’i’s alma mater. “There’s a lot of external pressure and I think the school handled it really well to give him a normal life. They were crazy times.

“Press creeping into the school and all that kind of stuff. That’s how silly it was. Covid played a big part. He’d be at games watching when he was injured and they were trying to get photos of him and he had to deal with that.”

Why all the fuss? Well, Sua’ali’i excelled at the 15-a-side game from the day he joined on a character scholarship aged 13. “He was over 6ft and it was a man playing against children,” Woodhouse says, of the first time he saw him play.

“It was not a mismatch necessarily by size as he wasn’t a big man at around 70kg back then. But just his skill level and his thinking was way above other boys. His training age would have been at least ten years above his cohort.”

You could be forgiven for thinking that a boy so supremely talented might have become disengaged among his far less capable peers. Not Sua’ali’i.