NRL 2026: Inside the incredible journey of Aublix Tawha to World Club Challenge, Brisbane Broncos, background, Dolphins

There was a rumour going around the Netherlands.

A rumour that a Kiwi coach named Zane Gardiner, who was working with the Dutch national rugby team, reckoned he’d found the hardest tackler in Holland.

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“It was a thing,” Carlos Roberts told foxsports.com.au. “It was a thing.”

It was no rumour to Roberts.

He’d seen the player with his own eyes; the way he turned up to their first training session, almost as if he had a point to prove, and “rocked this guy”.

“A big man” weighing about 140kg.

“He tackled him so f***ing hard,” Roberts said, “and I’d never seen this guy be hit like this before.”

Roberts had been playing rugby union since he was 10 years old, reaching a decent level.

“But f*** … it’s maybe a bit crazy to say but I’d never seen someone tackle so f***ing hard.”

Roberts went over to the Netherlands amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Stuck at home doing nothing, he just “thought f*** it” and moved across the world.

Soon after, fellow Kiwi Aublix Tawha did the same.

The two lived just 50 minutes away from each other on New Zealand’s North Island, Tawha in Huntly and Roberts in Waihi.

Yet before they ended up together at Rugby Club ’t Gooi, founded in 1933 and one of the oldest clubs in the Netherlands, Roberts had “never heard of the guy”.

Neither had any of the rival players in their local competition. But then they started to hear the rumours, and later the loud, collective gasps when Tawha came flying in to put on a shot.

“He was known for that, for the physicality of his game,” Gardiner told foxsports.com.au.

Apart from coaching the Netherlands national team, Gardiner was also helping out Delta, the nation’s team in the new Rugby Europe Super Cup. The tournament was set up for clubs outside the traditional Six Nations powerhouses of the rugby union.

Tawha was quick to gain selection. And to make an impression.

In his first training session with Gardiner he “smoked a few guys”, even though they were holding hit-shields. Tawha was “different from everyone else” in the Netherlands, Gardiner said.

Having also played rugby league growing up, the coach could tell that Tawha was just taking another step towards an NRL career.

“He was athletic, (had a) good skill set and (was) just super physical. But he also had that real hardman mindset that when he does something he does it with intent, which is what we always try and coach guys to do,” Gardiner said.

“When he hits, he hits. You feel it.”

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Gardiner ended up being right. But it was another four years until Tawha ran out off the bench for the Dolphins, making his NRL debut against the Knights at Perth’s HBF Park.

It was somewhat fitting that Tawha’s debut came in Western Australia, because it has been a road less travelled for the 26-year-old to get to the NRL.

From New Zealand to Canberra, the Netherlands and then country New South Wales, before finally getting his chance at Redcliffe and now, on Friday morning, in Hull for defending NRL premiers the Brisbane Broncos.

“I honestly couldn’t be any (more) proud of where he’s got to now,” Adam Kyle, Tawha’s coach at the Canberra Raiders and Yass Magpies, told foxsports.com.au.

“The rise from playing park football in Canberra three years ago to the World Club Challenge. He’s just out of this world.”

‘PUMPING FRONT ROWERS’ AS A ‘SKINNY’ TEENAGER AT THE RAIDERS

He’s the talent spotter who helped unearth the likes of Jack Wighton, Jarrod Croker, Josh Dugan and Josh Papalii.

And before Tawha first came onto Canberra’s radar, then recruitment manager David Hamilton had been doing a lot of work scouting in New Zealand.

It was there that the club came across a much skinner Tawha than the one now pushing for a bench spot in Michael Maguire’s first-choice 17. Tawha was more of an outside back in his early Raiders days, playing a bit of fullback and centre in the 2017 SG Ball season.

But you wouldn’t have been able to tell it unless you saw the No.1 on his back. Kyle, who coached the likes of Nick Cotric, Seb Kris, Harley Smith-Shields and Bailey Simonsson, compared it to the way Luke Phillips used to bring the ball up at the Roosters.

“He (Tawha) would just carry it like a front rower, a hundred miles an hour, just super aggressive,” Kyle said.

At that point in time, the team wasn’t doing too well. But as a coach, Kyle’s goal was to identify talent that he could bring through the system, with the hope they would one day debut in the lime green.

“Aublix was certainly one of them,” he said.

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“The fact he always was looking for contact, the fact he was always looking to put a shot on was something that got us really excited, but at the same time also we had a couple of issues with some of his discipline at times too, because he’d get really amped up and try and look to put on a shot and maybe drift up a little bit too high or bounce off a tackle and end up missing it.”

Or sometimes he would end up having a freak accident, like in one game against North Sydney where he clashed heads with teammate Tremayne Chatfield.

Aublix broke his nose, while Chatfield suffered a concussion. “And then after that we just almost sort of became like best mates,” Chatfield told foxsports.com.au.

Chatfield, who once had his own dreams of playing in the NRL, said Tawha’s physicality was “next level”, recalling games he was playing fullback and “pumping front rowers”.

“I haven’t seen anyone as physical as him,” he added.

When the SG Ball season wrapped up, Tawha then played for the Belconnen Sharks in the Canberra Raiders Cup before moving up north the following year to join the Tweed Heads Seagulls in the Hastings Deering Colts alongside former Raiders teammate Gideon Afemui.

He then played a few more games for the Seagulls in 2019 before a shoulder injury saw him return home to New Zealand, where he appeared for Waikato in the NZRL National Premiership.

Covid-19 then hit, but when restrictions were lifted Tawha, who was working as a scaffolder in Hamilton at the time, got a call from Garry Phelps, who was captain-coach at Paraparaumu Rugby Club.

Phelps had got word from a family friend of his, who also happened to be an ex-player of the club, that he had a few boys from Hamilton, including Tawha, who would be a good fit for the team.

Tawha then played in a local Oz-tag tournament and from that alone, Phelps could tell that he was eager, so he told him pre-season would start in a few weeks and to come down.

He didn’t know much more about Tawha, who was then about 21 years old. Phelps quickly learned that Tawha moved towards the storm, not away from it.

“You could see it in his eyes,” Phelps told foxsports.com.au.

“He had a thirst and a hunger for contact, and that’s rare.”

‘JEEPERS’: THE ‘RARE’ TRAIT THAT MADE TAWHA STAND OUT

What’s just as rare is bringing up the name Aublix Tawha and there not being a story. Not being someone who was on the wrong end of one of his tackles.

There aren’t really words to best describe the ferocity with which Tawha hits. Only sounds.

On the occasion that Tawha came flying in and put a shot on one of Paraparaumu’s 120kg second rowers at training, all you could hear according to Phelps was “the clap”.

“It was loud, it was huge,” he said.

“The guy was sort of horizontal with the field so you knew, ‘Jeepers. He doesn’t just like it. He can back it up’.”

But Tawha didn’t need to make big hits to earn his new teammates’ respect. As much as that was what he was known for, Aublix Tawha – both the player and person – is so much more than that.

The “best thing about him”, according to Phelps, was the humility that accompanied the ferocity.

“He wants to fit in and you could really see what was important to him in terms of family, culture and camaraderie,” the former Paraparaumu player-coach said.

Tawha would always come to him after games to see if there was anything he wanted to work on. He was always happy to do extras, and after missing one training session, he sent Phelps a message apologising and asking if he wanted him to play for the ‘B’ team that week.

“For a guy that’s one of the more standout players to say stuff like that, it speaks volumes,” Phelps said.

Tawha aced the fitness tests, too. Phelps can’t remember the exact score, but it was around the middle of the four-minute mark in the Bronco, which is considered a professional elite time.

Tawha, playing at centre, was instrumental in getting Paraparaumu to the Ramsbotham Cup final that year. The game went into extra time and dragged on for 106 minutes in total – the longest in the history of Horowhenua-Kāpiti club rugby, with Paraparaumu winning 36-33.

It was the perfect send-off for Tawha, who soon after moved to the Netherlands. With Māori and Dutch heritage, the idea of spending time in the Netherlands had been in the back of Tawha’s mind for a few years after a friend put him in contact with Blake Nightingale, who was playing union over there.

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It was almost four years since Tawha was last in the Raiders’ junior system, with the hope of one day making it to the NRL. But with that dream at a crossroads, he “sort of gave up”.

So, he hopped on a plane for what ended up being a gap year of sorts. It was exactly what he needed.

“It wasn’t until I went to Europe that it sparked it back up for me when I was making rep teams,” Tawha said last year.

“It gave me the inspiration to have another crack (at the NRL).”

THE GAP YEAR THAT MADE TAWHA A ‘COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PLAYER’

Nightingale remembers Tawha “made a name for himself very quickly” when he arrived.

There’s that rumour again; that rumour about the hardest hitter in Holland now running around in the domestic competition. But what exactly did that look like?

According to Nightingale, most players avoided running down Tawha’s channel. And when they did?

Usually one of two things.

Either they ate turf, or ate turf and Tawha got a red card.

About three or four times, Roberts reckons.

That rumour saw Tawha start to develop a reputation – one that found him on the wrong end of the referee’s whistle.

But Roberts said it had less to do with Tawha having poor technique and more the brute impact of his hits making them look worse than they were; recalling one game where he body slammed an opponent so violently that it appeared Tawha had dumped the player on his head.

“But we had it on video because we record our games,” Roberts said.

“This guy ran at him and then Aublix picked him up and body slammed him so f***ing hard … he got a lot of penalties for hitting people too hard.”

Gardiner added: “The hits he was putting on were big but that’s what you’re seeing now.

“You see him in the NRL, he’s not the biggest guy but he’s got good technique in terms of how he gets his power and generates power and then drives through the tackle using his front foot really well.

“He’s mobile so he can get in front of guys and really hit him and then in rugby union because you’ve got a guy that’s sort of new to the competition and has a reputation of banging guys, it’s just an unfortunate circumstance of being an extremely physical player and not having the technology to check and unfortunately there were a number of cards yellows and reds.”

Chatfield reckons Tawha had only “one gear”.

“And that’s 100 per cent,” he said.

That included his mate’s form in Amsterdam nightclubs.

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“We had this thing where when people come over for the first year they get a bit crazy with drinking and partying and with him, when it came to drinking as well, he was also the most intense in the room,” Roberts laughed.

“He would drink on the weekends and then show up to our gym sessions on Monday and Tuesdays and literally out-train everyone. He’d smoke two packs of cigarettes in a weekend and then win every fitness test, and we had some pretty insanely fit guys in our team.

“He’d win everything, it was insane.”

Roberts said Tawha was “easily” the hardest worker in the team, and that wasn’t just restricted to the field. He had gone to the Netherlands with his partner, who was able to study part of her law degree abroad. She wasn’t working and instead focusing on her studies, which meant it was on Tawha to support both of them.

“He was working as a gardener 50 hours a week,” Roberts recalled.

“Still winning fitness tests, dominating at training.”

Even after all those long hours at work and despite having already proven himself by making all the representative squads, Tawha was still offering to play on both Saturday and Sunday if needed to help the team out.

He was also speaking up during training, not to tell the rest of his teammates how it was done, but to single out the “smallest guys in the team” for whenever they put on a hit in defence.

“Even if you played a s*** game,” Roberts said, “if you had tackled someone as hard as you could or flew into tackles he would notice it and he would always bring it up.”

There was one other topic that Tawha would often bring up: the NRL.

It was “always an open subject”, according to Roberts, even if Tawha had somewhat closed the door on it before he left for the Netherlands.

But after returning to New Zealand from Amsterdam, now having twice represented the Netherlands national rugby union team on the world stage?

“He was a completely different player,” Chatfield said. “He was just hungry.”

And when Tawha got a phone call from Adam Kyle, his former Raiders SG Ball coach, giving him one “last chance” at that NRL lifeline had always dreamt of, it only took one training session to prove just how hungry he was.

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Tawha had just landed at Sydney Airport, and it was around two o’clock when he boarded the bus to go to Canberra.

He’d already flown around three hours from New Zealand and by the time he made it to the nation’s capital, it was another 45 minutes to Yass, the regional town in country NSW which could be his ticket to the NRL.

He was picked up by Kyle, who was coach of the Yass Magpies and still connected to the Raiders.

“Look, mate, you’ve been at the Raiders before. I know what you’re like as a player, and I know what I guess Ricky and the coaching staff look for within players,” Kyle recalled telling Tawha.

“Mate, if you come over here and you’re ripping and tearing and killing it, there’s a huge chance you’re going to get picked up by the Raiders here.”

At that time, Canberra were pulling players out of the first-grade competition in and around Yass to suit up in NSW Cup, so there was an opportunity there that Tawha was desperate to take.

“Look, I just want a chance,” Kyle recalled Tawha telling him.

“This is my last chance. I’ve come back from the Netherlands… I’m not going to get another crack. So I’ve got to give it everything I’ve got.”

That started from the moment he arrived in Yass.

Kyle had picked Tawha up from Canberra and told him on the way there not to worry about training that night. After all, he’d spent around seven hours on a plane and bus, while he hadn’t even seen the place he was staying in yet.

But Tawha insisted: “No, no, no, I want to train tonight.”

So, that was that. Tawha would go along to training.

“Let’s just go easy mate,” Kyle replied, knowing they were having a really tough conditioning session, “you’ve only just got off the plane and stuff.”

Tawha went on to win every single drill.

“And I mean every single drill,” Kyle said.

“By a considerable margin too. We then got into full contact in a really tight corridor, like basically a smash and bash drill, and Aublix was just absolutely ruining players.

“At the end of the session I had the other coaching staff and Tim the Yass president come up and go, ‘Oh my god, this guy is elite’… considering he’s just got off the plane, that’s ridiculous.

“It just shows the character of him. He knew he was a big signing for us and he didn’t want to turn up and just rest on his laurels and be like, ‘Oh, you guys should know who I am and what I’m about’. He absolutely ripped in straight away and all the boys were just in love with him.”

And if they hadn’t already fallen in love with him, how about after Tawha played with two broken hands?

When he broke the first one, the team told him to get scans. But “Aublix being Aublix”, as Kyle put it, told them he got scans and was given the all clear.

“He came to training and his hand was the size of a balloon,” Kyle said.

He went on to win man of the match in their next game, where he broke his other hand … and this was while working on the tools all day as a landscape gardener.

“So he was basically, with two broken hands, lumping soil and carrying a wheelbarrow around all day… just ridiculous,” Kyle recalled.

“But again, he’s a grafter mate. He needed money. He needed to work.”

He needed this last chance. Yet when a shot at the NRL finally came calling, that character Kyle referenced earlier once again shone through.

Tawha already had a relationship going back a few years with then Redcliffe Dolphins coach Ben Te’o, who liked that the Turangawaewae junior reminded him of himself as a player.

So, when Tawha was playing for Yass, the team started putting together highlights packages of him and posting them on Facebook. They got a few bites early on, but nothing concrete – until Te’o reached out to Tawha directly, asking if he was back in Australia.

Suddenly, that path to the NRL – the one Tawha wasn’t even sure was there anymore when he left for the Netherlands – had opened up again.

He had a Queensland Cup deal. The NRL was closer than ever before.

But he had one final game to play for the Magpies.

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“The very last game before he was due to go to Redcliffe they asked him not to play right,” Kyle said.

“His hands were busted and he was in all sorts and we basically said, ‘Look, don’t worry about it, mate. You’ve got bigger things’.

“And he’s like, ‘No, it’s my last game. The boys need me’. We were playing against the competition heavyweights at the time and even with two broken hands and having just signed a Queensland Cup deal, he still played for us and I think was best on ground that day as well.

“Again, the character of him is just incredible.”

Tawha would often go over to Kyle’s house for dinner during his time at Yass. But he wasn’t just a guest at the table; he was setting it, then packing it away, and later reading the kids their storybooks before bedtime.

And on the field, he was the first setting up and the last packing everything away. It’s the same now that he’s in the NRL.

“He will give and give and give,” Kyle said.

“He’ll be walking around in his speedos because he’s given everything away. It’s that special kind of person… he’s got so much to give but then you see him on the field and he’s just an animal.

“He’s an absolute animal.”

An absolute animal who once “terrorised” former Raiders halfback turned Queanbeyan Roos captain-coach Sam Williams shortly after he finished up in the NRL, and that was with those two broken hands.

“He was unbelievable that game,” Kyle said.

For Chatfield, Tawha’s former Raiders teammate who later played with him at Yass, it was the moment he realised his close friend was “too good” to be playing park football.

The two shared a house in Charnwood during their Yass playing days and there were times Tawha would get homesick, so Chatfield would bring him up to his family in Bateman’s Bay.

“I’m Aboriginal and he’s Māori obviously, so we’ve got very similar cultures,” he said.

“I’d bring him down and, man, after the first trip down here, he was just like a part of my family. Like all my uncles and all my cousins, they look at him like family just because of who he is.”

And who is he?

“He’s genuinely one of the best people that I know,” Chatfield reckons.

“He’d take the shirt off his back for anyone and he’d do anything for anyone.”

THE TEARS AND ‘CHIP ON HIS SHOULDER’ BEHIND TAWHA’S NRL DEBUT

When Tawha debuted last year, Chatfield – now owner of the Oyster Cove Cocktail Bar in Bateman’s Bay – decked out the venue in Dolphins attire and even made a special cocktail called the ‘Aubs’. The game was put on the big screen, of course.

“Man, it makes me that proud,” Chatfield said.

“When Aubs debuted, I literally cried … it was one of the proudest moments of my life and I wasn’t even playing, just because I’ve seen what he had to sacrifice. I know everyone in the NRL deserves it, but no one deserves it more than him.”

Even before his NRL debut Tawha was making waves, with Kyle recalling Tawha telling him about one training session in his first pre-season where he “absolutely annihilated” one of the Dolphins forwards, sparking a push-and-shove.

Then there was the square-off with Spencer Leniu which resulted in both being sent to the sin bin, with the Dolphins rookie later texting Kyle after the game to tell him he was “not having it”.

“He was challenging me. I was going for it.”

It is easy to see why Michael Maguire compared him to former NRL hardman Ruben Wiki, while Broncos hooker Billy Walters told foxsports.com.au that teammates have been warning him that Tawha is “M.A.D. mad on the field”.

But behind the madness and controlled chaos is a simple reality. For Tawha, “footy was a way out”.

Long before the big hits and bone-jarring tackles, he was just a kid wanting more than what he saw around him.

“Where I’m from, there’s a lot of drinking, and there’s not really much there,” he said last year.

“If you’re not playing footy, or you don’t have a good education, there’s not much good to get up to.”

Which is why it makes sense that Tawha was “very tough on himself” in the Netherlands, as Roberts recalled, playing and training as if he had a “big chip on his shoulder”.

It was the same at every stop in his long journey to the NRL… and now the World Club Challenge on Friday morning.

He quickly won over coach Maguire in the pre-season, just as he did with Kristian Woolf, who had a very simple message for Tawha when the Dolphins’ injury crisis opened the door for him to debut.

“Woolfy says he believes in me and that I can do the job,” Tawha said.

And when a reporter asked what that meant, to have someone like Woolf believing in him, Tawha couldn’t help but smile.

“It’s crazy,” he replied.

“Someone like that saying they believe in you. Coming from where I come from, you never thought you’d talk to someone of that calibre.

“Now I’m here playing NRL and he’s telling me that – I just don’t want to let him down.”

But letting anyone down is something Tawha just doesn’t seem capable of doing, broken hands or not. And for a Broncos team where all the talk is about the possibility of a premiership hangover, hunger is the last thing anyone has to worry about with Aublix Tawha.

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