WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Sports fans who have a soft spot for underdogs will find few underdoggier teams in Super Rugby than the Dunedin, New Zealand based Highlanders, the southernmost major professional team on the planet.
The Highlanders went 2-1 for the 2025 season when they beat Moana Pasifika on Friday. That record includes a classic underdog win over the Auckland-based Blues, the defending champions and favorites for this year’s title.
The 31-29 win over Moana was in keeping with the trend of the season, high-scoring and close. Nine of 15 matches so far have been decided by five points of less.
The Highlanders are something of an anachronism in modern professional sport for their commitment to building a team primarily from local talent, shunning expensive recruitment. For that reason, they a central part of the life of their home town.
Dunedin is a college town, home to Otago University whose students contribute to the laid back vibe of a city known, for its Scottish roots, as the Edinburgh of the South.
When the Highlanders home ground was Carisbrook, an aging but venerable stadium open to Baltic-like winds, students would bring sofas onto the terraces and burn them during matches.
The Zoo
In the Highlanders’ new enclosed stadium near the university campus, the students are accommodated in an area behind the goalposts known as “the zoo.” When the Highlanders beat the Blues two weeks ago it was orientation week and the Zoo was particularly lively.
Perhaps because of their local hiring policy, the Highlanders often have been a team of characters more than stars. The current Highlanders squad contains only two All Blacks.
Among crowd favorites over the years include Kees Meeuws, a front-rower — similar to a NFL linebacker — whose toughness on the field contrasted with his passion for the part. Or Brendan Laney whose Caledonian roots earned him 20 caps for Scotland. Or Marty Banks, a flyhalf who began his professional career in Siberia and finished in Invercargill, New Zealand’s most southern city.
The Highlanders have played in Super Rugby for 29 years and won it once — in 2015 when they shocked the favored Hurricanes in front of 35,000 fans in Wellington.
Jamie Joseph returns
The Highlanders were coached then and are coached now by Jamie Joseph whose barrel chest, battered ears and flattened noses speak of his 20 tests in the backrow for New Zealand and 87 matches for Otago province. Between the 2015 final and this season Joseph spent seven years coaching the Japan national team.
“I was coming back to Dunedin, no matter what,” Joseph told the Stuff news website. “Then this opportunity to coach the Highlanders came around.
“It’s a club I love, it’s a club I feel connected to and when given the opportunity to come back and be the head of rugby I thought that was a nice way to look at the club in terms of differences of what it was like when I left.
“But I realized I was a coach not a fish head (official).”
Joseph is a successor to Gordon Hunter — the respected former policeman who coached the Highlanders in their inaugural season in 1996, and died of cancer in 2001 — and whose name is given to the trophy played for between the Highlanders and Blues which the Highlanders regained last weekend.
Joseph kept alive the traditions established by Hunter of physical toughness and of hometown pride. Those qualities where emphasized in the team that Joseph coached to the title.
“I think that’s the blueprint for the teams that I have coached,” he told Stuff. “For every team it all starts up front.
“Sometimes you are blessed with some special players and while the 2015 pack didn’t have any All Blacks, we had a lot of good rugby players and gritty, determined young men who wouldn’t take a step back.”
The Highlanders currently are third out of 11 teams on the Super Rugby title, keeping alive the spirit of the underdog.
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AP rugby: https://apnews.com/hub/rugby
Steve Mcmorran, The Associated Press
