Privileged Pressure: Cassie Siataga's Historic Kick for Samoa
By Thomas Airey
"Keep your head down and go through the ball."
The Queensland rain is now bucketing down as hard as it has all game.
Passionate Fijian fans in the crowd are yelling at the top of their lungs.
It’s sensory overload, a real-life Hollywood moment as Manusina first five eighths Cassie Siataga lines up the penalty kick that would clinch Samoa’s first ever Oceania Rugby Women’s Championship title with time up on the clock.
But all she can focus on are those words she so often heard from her kicking coach at Tasman last year, former Māori All Black halfback Billy Guyton, who tragically died just last month.
“Keep your head down and go through the ball.”
“That’s all I was hearing when I was setting up the tee, when I was looking at the posts, thinking of all the little things he said to me, and he believed in me, so I couldn’t doubt myself,” Siataga said.
“It was having the team in my ear, you’ve gotta do it, you can do it. They call it privileged pressure. It’s a lot of pressure but we’re privileged enough to be in that position to do it.”
Manusina head coach Mata’afa Ramsey Tomokino was backing his star pivot all the way home too.
“Cassie Siataga, she’d be like Grant Fox to me... every time Grant Fox stood up for a kick you knew he was going to nail it, and Dan Carter’s probably the same,” he said.
“But even then I was thinking the rain, in my head thinking she could slip, she could slice it because it actually started to really bucket down. But Cassie man, she was on.”
Siataga scored all 19 of Samoa’s points in the finale and was the competitions’s top scorer overall.
It was a step up from the 28-year-old’s already impressive debut Manusina campaign in 2022 which saw her named the team’s MVP.
Tomokino said Samoa were very fortunate to have Siataga on board having been passed over for selection by the Black Ferns earlier in her career.
Born and raised in Christchurch with roots in Tanugamanono and Magiagi, Siataga was a key figure in the Canterbury teams that won all four Farah Palmer Cups from 2017 to 2020.
“We’d obviously made approaches to her earlier on, years back as well and she was kinda holding out,” Tomokino said.
“The minute that Sui [Manusina captain Masuisuimatama'ali'i Tauaua-Pauaraisa, a clubmate at Linwood and close friend of Siataga’s] had said Cassie wants to play now, I was like ‘nah you’re kidding!”
Every young woman in New Zealand rugby grows up dreaming of the Black Ferns, and Siataga was no different.
“It’s something you strive for week in, week out. It was always there in the graft for me and I never really got that crack,” she said.
“It’s almost a blessing in disguise now.”
While she never made the Black Ferns, Siataga fully understands what it means to play for New Zealand.
A prodigious shortstop in softball, she made the White Sox as a teenager and represented them many times, even playing for Midland College in Texas on a scholarship before returning home to rugby.
But all that international experience couldn’t hold a candle to the feeling of representing Samoa.
I’ve never cried for the national anthem, but the first time in the blue jersey, the Samoan national anthem came on and the tears just came out of nowhere,” Siataga said.
“Now that I have actually put my hand up, I regret all those times I did say no and all those times I could have been playing international tests but was just chasing something else.”
Despite those lingering regrets, Siataga came aboard just in time to help Manusina qualify for tier two of the inaugural WXV competition to be held in South Africa later this year.
“The only way we’re going to keep going up the world rankings, and any of our Pacific Island teams, is to get more tests and get more exposure, especially to those top level teams that we’re going to be playing,” she said.
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