Jordie Barrett’s all-round game and versatility make him the cornerstone of
the All Blacks backline, writes CAMPBELL BURNES in SA Rugby magazine.
You can bet the Springboks will have some plan in place to shut down or at least dull the effectiveness of Jordie Barrett during the Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry series.
The 29-year-old is very much what they these days call a “triple threat”. He can hurt you with either his running, passing or kicking game. The latter includes his goal-kicking from long distance, if perhaps not quite in the Frans Steyn category for long bombs off the tee.
Barrett is one of just three certainties when naming an All Blacks backline, along with scrumhalf Cam Roigard and fullback Will Jordan. That is as much a reflection of the uncertainty and lack of fluency shown by the All Blacks backs through much of 2024-25 in the troubled Scott Robertson tenure as it is about Barrett’s status in the team. New assistant coach Mike Blair, along with new head coach Dave Rennie, will be tasked with sorting this out and helping the All Blacks back division regain its mojo.
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They needn’t worry about Barrett, though. We know he has played fullback, wing and No 10 for the All Blacks, so his versatility is palpable,but he’s coming off a superb season at No 12 for the Super Rugby Pacific-winning Hurricanes, where he was the fulcrum of everything good that their backline produced, be it firing cutout passes off either hand, carting the ball up in the midfield or banging away long touch-finders.
Funnily enough, the competition MVP was Quinn Tupaea, a man who occupies the same inside centre position as Barrett. But it’s a measure of the latter’s standing (from 78 Tests at the start of the international season) that any attempt to start Tupaea will have to involve shoehorning him into outside centre or coming in if Barrett goes down injured.
We spoke on Barrett’s first day in All Blacks camp in late June, having just come down off the high of the Hurricanes’ triumph, his first in nine seasons with his club.
“I’m really proud of the season we had with the Hurricanes,” he says. “Winning a Super Rugby title is no easy feat and I feel like I was playing some of the best rugby of my career, which is nice. So hopefully I can recapture some of my form if given the opportunity with the All Blacks.”
Those last seven words are redundant, of course. He will be given every opportunity in black.
Jordie Barrett’s mother Robyn was pregnant with him when the All Blacks last undertook a full-scale tour of South Africa in 1996, playing eight matches and winning a series (2-1) for the first time there. But Jordie did partake in the time-honoured Kiwi rugby ritual of rising in the early hours of the morning, invariably with his father Kevin and four other brothers, including Beauden and Scott, to watch on TV as the All Blacks locked horns with the Boks through the 2000s and 2010s.
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“They were probably my earliest rugby memories, getting woken up at three or four in the morning and watching the Tests in South Africa,” says Barrett. “Personally, they were the best ones to watch. Even in Beaudy’s early days of Super Rugby, we’d watch him playing in South Africa for the Hurricanes and it was special to get the opportunity to do that before the South Africans went north.”
Barrett would have to check old clips on YouTube of how former All Blacks No 12s performed in South Africa: Joe Morgan’s slashing solo try in Bloemfontein in 1976 or Walter Little’s solidity on the 1996 tour, for example.
This tour, when first mooted, elicited a positive response by Barrett, so used to the endless treadmill of international rugby where you tend to play the same opponents on the same type of tour.
“When they floated the idea of going to South Africa for six to seven weeks, it was pretty exciting and one you wanted to be part of as a player.”
Barrett debuted for the All Blacks in 2017, but was injured when they infamously blanked the Boks 57-0 in Albany. South Africa were going through a difficult period under Allister Coetzee as head coach.
Times have changed, and how. The Boks are now two-time defending World Cup champions and hold the world No 1 ranking.
“They were probably going through a transition period at that time, but they’re an unbelievable side now with a lot of depth. So it’ll be a great challenge for us when we face the Springboks,” Barrett says. “It’ll be one that fans from both nations and around the world will be watching with a keen eye.”
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His own record against the Boks is mixed, just four wins from 12 Tests.
In his first, at fullback in Wellington in 2018, he famously threw the loose pass that gave the Boks momentum to win a tight one, 36-34.
In the lockdown era of 2021, in the neutral venues of Townsville and the Gold Coast, the two Tests were split 1-1, Barrett again at the back.
It was the same in 2022 in South Africa, the All Blacks saving Ian Foster’s bacon with a determined victory at Ellis Park.
In 2023, with the No 12 jersey on his back, Barrett had a win and two losses in three Tests, the second loss being the World Cup final, a 12-11 cliffhanger in which he missed a late long-range penalty goal, while Handré Pollard was unerring off the tee.
In 2024, despite losing both Tests in South Africa, the All Blacks did not feel far away from the Boks. Then in 2025 we saw contrasting displays by the All Blacks, a brutal, gritty 24-17 win at Eden Park (to extend the unbeaten streak there to 50 at the time) when the Boks were not on song, and then a 43-10 second-spell capitulation in Wellington, the worst defeat, in more ways than one, in All Blacks Test history.
Understandably, Barrett was not keen to dwell on the Wellington result.
“It was hard to take, but a week earlier we beat them at Eden Park and that was one of my greatest memories as an All Black,” he says. “It’s easy to look at losses, and they are ones that do stay with you in your career, but also keenly reflect on some of the good wins I’ve had against the Springboks. It shows that it is possible.”
Barrett used to mark the gifted counter-attacker Willie le Roux earlier in his career when he was cast as a fullback.
In more recent times he has come up against the seasoned and highly effective midfield duo of Damian de Allende and Jesse Kriel. Another option now is the hybrid, André Esterhuizen. None of that trio will freely give Barrett a moment’s peace on the field.
“Damian de Allende, in particular, has been outstanding for a long time, Jesse Kriel has been there for a number of years, André Esterhuizen too. They are guys I have marked for a good part of my career and I have a lot of respect for,” he says.
Barrett agrees that Test rugby against the Springboks is the hardest physical match-up that he faces. It has been that way for 105 years. This versatile performer, who could raise the 100 Test mark at next year’s World Cup, looms as a key figure in the latest chapter of this storied rivalry.
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Jordie Barrett’s all-round game and versatility make him the cornerstone of the All Blacks backline.
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