Celebrating the art of effortless style.

2012

Then everything landed at once, and it started in January.

Otago named him in their sevens side for the national tournament at Queenstown, under Hawker again, this time in charge, and by then coaching him at Pirates as well. Auckland beat them 36-24 in the final. Plenty of people who were there argued Otago had been the best side at the tournament. Suckling played every minute of it on the wing.

Nine months later he was picked in a Highlanders Development side and scored four tries in a single afternoon against Tonga A, the sort of performance that makes a coach stop talking and start remembering a name. Tony Brown was watching. Brown has since become one of the most respected coaches in world rugby, but what he saw that day was simple enough: a quick, powerful outside back who knew how to finish.

Suckling was overlooked for the first two games of the season, then made his Otago debut and did not come off the field again. From his first cap through to the final he played every minute of every match.

They went all the way to the ITM Cup Championship final. Otago knocked over Tasman in a semi-final they had no business winning, coming back inside the last twenty minutes after conceding two intercept tries, and earned a trip north to Pukekohe.

The final was played at ECOLight Stadium in front of 12,000, the biggest crowd Counties Manukau had drawn since the days of Jonah Lomu and Joeli Vidiri, with Tana Umaga coaching the Steelers in his first season. Otago called in three current All Blacks for the occasion in Ben Smith at fullback, Tamati Ellison and Adam Thomson, and Suckling ran out on the wing alongside them. Counties were too good and won it 41-16.

A kid from Sumner was playing in a national final outside Ben Smith.

There was an education running alongside the rugby, too. Smith was already an All Black by the time Suckling arrived in the Otago environment, and the two shared a room. For a young player trying to work out what elite rugby actually looks like from the inside, it amounted to a private tutorial in how the best prepare, recover and handle pressure, and in how little fuss they make about any of it.

THE ACL

Then rugby handed him a different sort of lesson. In the very next pre-season, in a match against Southland, he tore his anterior cruciate ligament. The 2013 season was gone before it started.

For an outside back whose whole game was built on speed, acceleration and footwork, there was no guarantee he would come back the same player. Plenty do not.

He got himself back on a field a long way from Dunedin. He went to Hong Kong and played fullback for Valley in the off season, and in 2013 they took the Premiership Grand Championship. It turned out to be the first of six in a row for Valley, a run that still stands as a Hong Kong record.

He returned to Otago in 2014, played out the year and finished with sixteen appearances for the province. The blazer they handed him after his fifteenth appearance is still one of his favourite possessions.

A year later, Canterbury came calling.

THE RED AND BLACK

Canterbury signed him in 2015. He made his debut at Forsyth Barr Stadium against Otago, the province that had given him his opportunity, which is the sort of scheduling only rugby produces.

The environment he walked into was something else again. Scott Robertson was coaching, and Richie Mo'unga, Luke Whitelock, Johnny McNicholl, Ryan Crotty and Tom Taylor were among those in the side, with Jordie Barrett and Jack Goodhue arriving inside a year. Canterbury were partway through winning eight national titles in nine seasons. Nobody simply walked into that side, and getting a jersey in that outside back group was as hard as anything in the country short of an All Blacks trial.

Suckling did not make up the numbers. He became part of it.

One of the players who helped him settle was McNicholl, a mentor and teammate who knew exactly what it took to survive as an outside back in a ruthless environment, and who was not shy about reminding him of it. Early in one season Suckling finished a try out wide. McNicholl's response was immediate.

"Never score on my wing again."

The wink came half a second later. It was a joke, and it was also a sign that he had found his place in the room.

Teammates from that period describe a player who could keep a dressing room loose when it needed loosening and have a serious conversation when it needed that instead. Elite teams are not built purely out of good players. They are built by people who care about the bloke next to them, and that side of his rugby may end up mattering as much to Sumner as any of the silverware.

THREE TITLES AND THE LOG

Across three seasons Suckling played 21 games for Canterbury and scored 11 tries, on the wing, at fullback and off the bench, wherever he was needed. Canterbury won the competition in each of those years, taking the ITM Cup in 2015 and the Mitre 10 Cup Premiership in 2016 and 2017.

The first of them closed the circle. He played nine games in his first season in the red and black, in the most competitive outside back group in the country, and when the final came around he was named in the matchday 23 at AMI Stadium. Canterbury beat Auckland 25-23, with Tom Taylor kicking the decisive points in his hundredth and last game for the province. Making a Canterbury squad on final day is a selection in its own right, and plenty of good players spend a whole career there without one. Eight years after his name was left off an academy list, the same union picked him for a national final.

Late in 2016 Canterbury went to Hamilton to challenge for the Ranfurly Shield. Waikato had held it for 355 days across six successful defences and were in no mood to hand it over, but Canterbury got home 29-23 in a fast, loose match to take the log for the first time since 2010. Luke Whitelock captained from the back of the scrum, and Mo'unga, Barrett and Goodhue ran the 10-12-13 axis. Suckling was on the right wing.

He broke his hand in that match, and his season ended there at three appearances. The shield came south with him on the field and the bill arrived the same afternoon.

He came back the following year for the best season of his three in the red and black, nine games and five tries, more than he had managed in either of the years before it.

SUMNER'S FIRST SHIELD

There was another jersey in those years, and it was a Sumner one.

Through 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017, Suckling played club rugby for Sumner in the first half of each season before heading into the provincial campaign, and he captained the side through it. He made more than thirty appearances for the club in that period.

In 2016 he led Sumner to the DCL Shield.

That trophy takes some explaining to anyone outside Canterbury club rugby. It was donated to the Canterbury union in 1906 by the Distillers Company Limited of Edinburgh, whose manager had watched the All Blacks play Scotland and wanted to do something for the game in New Zealand. It runs on a challenge basis, so whoever holds it must defend it in every home game, and it has been passed around the province for well over a century.

In all that time it had never been to Sumner. Suckling was the first captain in the club's history to lift it, and it has been back twice since.

BUILT, NOT GIFTED

The speed was only ever half of it. He built a body to go underneath it.

At 86kg he power cleaned 140kg at the Crusaders High Performance Gym, a mark he still shares with Robbie Fruean, who was a considerably heavier man. He squatted 220kg and benched 135kg.

Put those numbers next to the 11.36 and the player comes into focus. He was never going to be the biggest man on the field, so he made himself one of the strongest for his size and out-accelerated everybody else. Identify the gap, work on it, keep going. Anyone who knows him will recognise the pattern, and it is the single most transferable thing he brings to a club side.

He has never quite put the sevens game down, either. Since finishing at Canterbury he has turned out for a New Zealand Legends side in Tahiti and at the Hong Kong Tens, the invitational tournament that has been pulling old internationals back into boots since the 1980s.

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

Towards the end of his Canterbury run, Robertson encouraged him to head overseas and take the money. It was the obvious next move, and most players in that position take it.

Suckling did not. He had been building a quantity surveying career right through the academy years, the Otago seasons and the Canterbury ones, and he chose to keep building his life in Christchurch. He is now the General Manager and Senior Quantity Surveyor of a Christchurch construction cost consultancy.

That decision says more about him than any of the rugby does, and it happens to be the most useful thing about him for anyone who pulls on a Sumner jersey in 2027. Almost nobody at this club is going to make a living out of the game. There will be work, study, trades, university, families and mortgages running alongside every Saturday, and most of the advice that circulates around club rugby about managing all that comes from people who never had to try. Suckling did it for a decade, at the top of the domestic game, and made a decent fist of both halves.

COMING HOME

Sumner is where it started. He has been at the club since 1998, when he pulled on his first jersey in the under 9s, and he learned his rugby there before leaving to find out how far the game would take him.

It took him to Australia, to Dunedin, to Hong Kong, and eventually to three titles and a Ranfurly Shield with Canterbury. He never really let go of this place either, which is how Sumner came to have its name on the DCL Shield. Now he is bringing the rest of it back, and he has taken the job as a volunteer. The motivation is simpler than a pay cheque, which is to make sure the next kid out of Sumner gets a clearer run at it than he did.

Suckling puts it simply.

"Rugby gave me a career, and it started here. I've been lucky to play in good teams and learn off some very good coaches, but what I want is for young players at Sumner to be able to see the whole road from where they're standing, because I couldn't. The job now is an environment where they get better, enjoy their rugby and actually want to be here."

His Sumner side will look a lot like the player he was: quick, physical and ambitious, but organised underneath it. There will be a clear attacking identity, measurable standards, honest analysis of why games are actually won and lost, proper attention to the mental side of performance and a real commitment to developing players rather than just picking them.

The value he brings on top of that is not in a coaching manual. There is a temptation in rugby to think the pathway runs in a straight line from school to academy to NPC to Super Rugby, and plenty of good careers do not work anything like that. So when a young Sumner player sits down in front of him and asks what it takes, he will have something more useful than theory. He can tell him what it feels like when Canterbury says no, what three years in an academy does to your patience, what it is like to rebuild a knee and start again, and what you learn sharing a room with an All Black.

The boy Canterbury did not want at eighteen became a Canterbury champion, and the club that produced him got its first DCL Shield with him as captain. Now he is back at St Leonards Square for a third time, and this time he is not chasing the opportunities. He is making them.

Footage from Marshall's playing career: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql8_1bT-4dQ