For two seasons in Tokyo, Cheslin Kolbe scored tries at training that nobody in the squad had seen before. By the end, nobody was looking up.
That is Sam Cane’s story — 104 Tests, All Blacks captain, and the only man sent off in a World Cup final, in the final Kolbe won. He told it on The Aftermatch with Kirst & Beav, and it is a stranger compliment than anything he said about Kolbe’s actual rugby.
How a sent-off All Blacks captain ended up training with Cheslin Kolbe
In October 2023 the two of them were on opposite sides of the tightest World Cup final ever played. Cane was sent off in the 28th minute, the first man in history to go in a final. Kolbe was yellow-carded late and watched the last minutes from the sideline as South Africa won 12-11.
A month later they were unveiled side by side in Tokyo Suntory Sungoliath kit at a press conference in Chofu. Kolbe had come from Toulon. Cane had taken a sabbatical from the Chiefs and would end up staying. They spent the next two seasons in the same training squad.
Asked what it is actually like to see Kolbe every week rather than on a Saturday, Cane did not hedge.
“It’s one thing to watch him play on the weekend and be like, yeah, he’s a gun player. But to see him every week at training is phenomenal. He’d be up there with one of the greatest players of all time. What he is able to do is pretty much unmatched.”
Kolbe starts on the wing at Ellis Park. What’s your prediction?
That is a former All Blacks captain putting a Springboks winger in the all-time bracket. It is not a throwaway line from a man who spent a decade being asked to stop him.
“I’ve never seen tries like it”
But the praise is not the interesting part. Asked about the tries, Cane described something else — not what Kolbe did, but what it did to everyone watching.
“He scored tries at training where you just go, no one else scores tries like that. I’ve never seen tries like it. But after a couple of years guys are sort of like, oh, you’re just another Ches try at training.”
Read that again. A squad of professional rugby players watched a man do something none of them had ever seen, then got bored of it.
They got used to it. That is the compliment.
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What Cheslin Kolbe did in his last Japanese season
The numbers back the anecdote. In 2025-26, his final season at Suntory, Kolbe finished as the top points scorer in Japan Rugby League One with a personal best of 185 points, edging the Black Rams fly-half by a single point in the last round. He played 16 of Suntory’s 18 games, mostly at fullback rather than on the wing.
Sungoliath went from a five-match losing streak and near-certain elimination to the semi-finals, with Cane captaining and Kolbe carrying. Cane is still there. Kolbe has gone home to the Stormers, where he will play alongside Siya Kolisi.
Cheslin Kolbe starts at Ellis Park Against All Blacks
He wears 14 on Saturday, with Kurt-Lee Arendse on the other wing and Damian Willemse at fullback, in the first Test of Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry. Pieter-Steph du Toit captains in Siya Kolisi’s absence.
Kolbe is 32 and a two-time world champion, and the argument about where he sits historically has quietly stopped being an argument. He has never won World Rugby player of the year — nominated in 2019 and again in 2024, beaten both times by a Springboks teammate. The men who play against him have made their minds up anyway.
Cane watched him from a metre away for two years and put him among the greatest of all time. Ellis Park gets him at 17:10 SAST on Saturday 22 August, in the first of four Tests. Where would you put him?
