All Black suffers injury setback and faces eight-week recovery

By Christopher Reive

With the end of the Super Rugby Pacific season in sight and the first All Blacks test of the year looming just beyond the horizon, an injury setback looks set to leave lock Josh Lord watching both from the sidelines.

The 23-year-old, who has been out of action since an ankle injury saw him leave the Chiefs’ sixth-round match against the Crusaders early, is expected to miss the next eight weeks due to a knee injury.

“We’re just going through a process with Josh at the moment,” Chiefs coach Clayton McMillan said.

“We’re a little concerned that some of the injuries around his leg were taking a little longer to heal than we anticipated.”

It’s the latest in a growing list of injury issues for the four-test All Black, who has made just three appearances for the Chiefs this season as an ankle injury meant he was unavailable to make his season debut until round four, before his campaign was again brought to a halt in round six.

In the past 52 Chiefs matches, Lord has been able to feature in just 22 of them. He made his Super Rugby debut in 2021 and was called up for his All Blacks debut later that year. However, a rupture of the anterior cruciate ligament [ACL] in his left knee in May of 2022 saw him miss almost a year of rugby.

He didn’t return until round nine of the 2023′s Super Rugby Pacific season and was limited to four appearances in the campaign - two from the bench and two in a starting role - before returning to the test environment for the Rugby Championship. He started in the All Blacks’ opening-round win over Argentina and was named on the bench for the side’s test against South Africa at Twickenham in the lead-up to the Rugby World Cup but was not included in the World Cup squad.

With Brodie Retallick and Sam Whitelock leaving their posts in the All Blacks engine room following the World Cup, Lord was seen as a potential contender to try to fill one of those voids as part of Scott Robertson’s first squad of the season. But the season has not been kind to Lord and he has been unable to stay on the pitch long enough to genuinely make his case to the new selection panel.

With the expected eight-week timeline on Lord’s recovery from this latest setback, that would see him be available again around the first week of July. The All Blacks play their first test of the season when they meet England in Dunedin on July 6.

It was better news for blindside flanker Samipeni Finau after he was helped from the field early in the Chiefs’ win over the Western Force in Hamilton last week. Finau was hurt after some heavy shoulder-to-shoulder contact while taking a carry, and while he sustained an injury to his acromioclavicular (AC) joint, McMillan said he had avoided a break or dislocation and was expected back in time for the playoffs.

“He’s just got to follow a pretty diligent return to play plan and we anticipate that that’ll probably be anywhere between three and four weeks – so even right up until the playoffs.”

This article was first published on nzherald.co.nz and is republished here with permission