Some yarns are just worth repeating – as Marika Koroibete would tell you.
For as was first reported by Iain Payten in The Sydney Morning Herald, there were nine minutes to play in the first Rugby Championship Test match against Argentina and Koroibete was asked by Wallabies coaching staff to remind replacement scrum half Jake Gordon that Gordon was captain.
Read the Official Wallabies v Springboks Test Program here!
It had been discussed pre-match. Gordon knew that when James Slipper and Nic White came off, he’d be the skipper. Len Ikitau had already reminded him as much.
Koroibete, though, decided to mix things up.
He approached Gordon and said: “Jakey Gordon. I am captain. You vice-captain.”
Then he turned and jogged away to his wing, grinning with mischief, knowing that Gordon was staring at his back, mouth open, bewildered.
“Just only me knew about it,” Koroibete told Payten. “Jake didn’t know what to think.”
The Wallabies would go on to win 41-26 and there were enjoyable beers in a team-room post-match. And it was there the Koroibete ‘captain’ yarn spread – and it was Koroibete who spread it.
“After the game we’re having a beer and I told the story to one of the boys,” Koroibete says. “Then he told someone else and it got around.
“Pretty soon I had to stand up and tell the whole team.It was pretty funny.”
Indeed it was. Indeed it brought the house down.
I ask Koroibete, only half-joking, if he covets the ‘c’ or ‘vc’ next to his name. And the man goes from wicked-grinning story-teller to humble Fijian bushman.
“I’m far from that, mate,” he says.
Yet Koroibete is a leader within Australian Rugby by word and by deed. He’s 30 years old and has played 42 Test matches. He’s been a professional footballer for over a decade.
Koroibete has been coached by the likes of Tim Sheens, Craig Bellamy, Robbie Deans, Michael Cheika and Dave Rennie.
Yet he says the best advice he received was from his high school coach in Fiji, Dan Vakamoce aka ‘Master Dan’, who told him to believe in himself.
“When I was playing Under 17s in high school, Coach said I should play up in Under 19s. He could see potential; he could see what I can do.
“And I believed in that and it actually worked. He made me come over to Australia. He’s been a mentor to me.
“He always said: ‘Get the details right and work hard, you can achieve good things’.”
Koroibete turned 30 in July but doesn’t appear to be slowing down nor to have lost any of the fast-twitch footwork that’s made him among the best wingers in world Rugby.
His robust, dynamic carries are as hard in the 80th minute as the first.
Not bad for a kid from a farm in the highlands of Fiji. On his Facebook page he lists his occupation as “Farmer”.
Each morning he would plant cassava, taro and kava with his dad before walking six kilometres to primary school barefoot across hilly, gravel roads. Then he’d walk 6km back. If he was lucky a mate had a pair thongs which they’d share, one thong each. Halfway along the journey they’d swap thongs.
The house where the Koroibetes lived was one room divided by a curtain where mum and dad slept. There was no electricity. No oven.
They cooked on an open fire. They didn’t have matches, making fire with flint and coconut husks.
At boarding school, a six-hour drive away on the other side of Suva, he’d wake at 4am to plough soil with a bullock.
Then it was study (5am-6am), breakfast (7am) and school (9am-4pm). After school they’d till more soil, eat dinner, do homework, go to sleep. They did it every day.
“It was pretty much like prison,” Koroibete told the website Athletes Voice.
He thought of being a police officer at one stage. Rugby league came calling instead.
It’s now 10 years since Koroibete debuted on the wing for Wests Tigers, catching public transport to training with his mate and fellow Fijian Taqele Naiyaravoro (who’d play no games for Wests Tigers but 50 for the Waratahs before a career in Europe and Japan).
There followed three brilliant seasons at Melbourne Storm alongside his fellow Fijian and Wallabies man Suliasi Vunivalu. Storm coach Bellamy pleaded with the NRL to bend salary cap rules (something that probably wasn’t going to wash given that club’s history) but Koroibete was gone, lured to the dreaded Rah-Rahs by Cheika and Melbourne Rebels.
And then, three weeks after being last man tackled in the Cronulla Sharks’ grand final win, he was on the plane for the Wallabies Spring tour. He didn’t play a Test. But he was away.
Since his debut in 2017 against Argentina in Canberra, replacing Henry Speight from the bench with 30 minutes to play, Koroibete’s been just about the Wallabies’ first picked.
The 2019 John Eales Medallist is a pin-balling dynamo who has almost re-written what’s considered possible for a winger. The man will turn up anywhere. And run at anybody.
Could he play elsewhere? The centres, perhaps? As a kid he played fullback and he’s filled in at inside and outside centre at the end of games with the Wild Knights in Japan.
Yet just as he insists he doesn’t covet the captain’s armband, Koroibete says he’s happy on the wing – or wherever Rennie wants him.
“I’ll play wherever to help. Whatever coach wants me to do, whatever is best for the team, I’ll do,” Koroibete says.
Then he says deadpan but you can almost hear him grinning over the phone: “Though maybe if coach says I move to the centres it’s because I’m getting old and lost a bit of speed! Maybe then coach says ‘You! You have to play seven!’ And maybe then I’ll be back in club footy!”
And then he laughs and you laugh with him. Because it is of course preposterous.
The man is a beauty. He’s worth bending the Giteau Law for today just as the NRL should’ve fit him in a cap.
It’s a yarn worth repeating.
