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'Blood everywhere, missing teeth, broken noses, black eyes. It was horrifying.'

By Josh Raisey

The new season of RugbyPass Offload aired this week, bringing with it the introduction of a new section in which an extract from a legend’s autobiography is read.

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Max Lahiff and Ryan Wilson joined host Marc Edwards in episode one, where Lahiff put his oratory skills to good use and read out a rather extreme excerpt from an autobiography for Wilson, who had to guess who the legend was.

This is the extract, see if you can work out who it was written by, and watch the video below to find out the author: “We ended up at a dodgy South African nightclub. I still don’t know how we settled on that particular place, but somehow half the World Cup squads were there, blowing off steam after the tournament. South Africa was still a pretty divided country racially in some scenarios. I remember being vaguely conscious that some parts of the crowd might have been disturbed by the Polynesians in our midst.

“Out of the blue, a voice boomed out over the club’s sound system: ‘Could all the New Zealanders please leave the premises immediately’. Shocked at what was unfolding, Luke McAlister and I fled the venue and the pending violence.

“We didn’t know it yet, but that one random, somewhat selfish decision might have ended up saving lives. As soon as we left things exploded. Players started brawling with the bouncers. But what sent the whole scene over the edge was when reinforcements arrived not long after. That included several fans arriving and big security types piled out.

“It became a scene of extreme violence, and guys from both sides were getting seriously beaten up. The whole thing had a level of violence way beyond the average pub brawl. Sam Tuitupou laid a couple of guys out, before being overrun.

“Then gunshots rang out.

“The gunfire saw members of the New Zealand Under-21 team seek the refuge of their team vans. Sam had been pistol-whipped, Jason Shoemark had copped a hell of a beating. As the vans tried to leave, the windows were smashed in – guys were jumping fences, just running for their lives.”

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“We headed back to the hotel scared out of our minds, still not sure what had happened. When we arrived it was just carnage. There were guys with blood everywhere, guys missing teeth, broken noses, black eyes. It was horrifying. Everyone was terrified, scared for their lives.

“I still don’t know if guns were being shot at people, or whether security guards were just shooting in the air to put the s*** up them. It doesn’t really matter – the fact that they had guns and were pistol whipping guys and pointing them at us made the situation by far the most serious and intense I’d encountered at any point in my playing career.”

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