Ruahei Demant on Bristol, Whitney Hansen & the Blues’ loaded Aupiki squad
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What insights did Ruahei Demant gain from playing in Bristol?
Well, it's a great pleasure to welcome back to the Aotearoa Rugby Pod, Ruahe Dement. Ruahe, you've been on a bit of an adventure.
I have.
At the end of last season, you know, you had the World Cup and then you chose to go and play for Bristol. So what was that like to go over to the UK and play your footy?
It was so different. Firstly, I was really grateful to have the opportunity to go over and experience rugby in the UK, especially because we had no rugby here in Aotearoa, and that was the main reason why myself and the rest of the players who were fortunate enough to go up and play, that was the reason why we wanted to go away. We just wanted to have game time. The rest of the girls were here at home in pre-season from November through to... April when they played, which I wasn't really keen on that. Anyone who's been in pre-season knows it's not the most fun time of the season. So the opportunity came to go to Bristol. One of their players got injured, unfortunately. And so I was able to go up and experience what UK footy is like.
Yeah, and it's different.
Where were the big changes?
Well, I know from the rest of the girls that went out that were forwards, set piece obviously, like it's a massive part of their game. And I think it's a massive part of their game during that time of the year because it's so cold.
How did playing overseas challenge and improve Ruahei's game?
Like what else are you going to do? You can't really play free flowing rugby for 80 minutes for the entire time from November through to their season still going. It'll finish after their Six Nations. So there was massive growth in that area of the field. And for me, understanding different defensive pictures and taking pictures off of different types of set pieces, why we would do certain things in different areas. We don't really do that here at home. I think we kind of like our set pieces more to shape the fences, to open up different opportunities. You know, you do like a more to narrow up the pack to go through the seam at the back of the line out or then you'd do that and it'd open up something else around the front but it's a little bit different up there so just learning how they think around that was new to me and obviously their kicking game as well I probably went to the club that kicked the least which I didn't realise that at the time I was very excited to go to grow my kicking game so I felt like I was playing under loss again for a little bit
But regardless of that, I was still able to go grow my kicking game anyway, like having the opportunity to just play so many games, see so many pictures, understand how their backfield defends, how their tacklers tackle the different type of pictures around the ruck, just things that we don't, the pictures that we don't really get here at home and Another really cool thing about playing up there was there was nine teams in the competition and each team attacked and defended completely different. So every time you played, you were playing against a completely different opposition that threw different opportunities and presented different pitches, which was awesome for me as a decision maker, understanding
And just seeing different pictures and training against and playing against different defensive pictures, especially all the time, was a massive growth opportunity.
You naturally do play off the cuff quite a bit, though. It would have felt probably more natural to you than the players that you're playing with in terms of those changing pitches week to week.
Yeah, it was for me. And what was challenging, though, is that anyone who's played against... I don't know if it's all Northern Hemisphere teams, definitely like English, they're very structured in the way that they play, right? When you play against those teams, you train and prepare a certain way all week and you know exactly what they're going to throw at you. You get to the game and they throw exactly what you were expecting at you. And that's just the way that my team is specially trained. They were very structured in their approach and struggled in some aspects to adapt to changing pictures unless we had trained it.
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