Watch the final Test of the 2025 British & Irish Lions Tour of Australia live and on-demand via Stan Sport.<\/a><\/p>\nHe will then finish his career with the Western Force in Super Rugby AUS before officially hanging up the boots.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was ready to go into bat with Joe [Schmidt, Wallabies coach] about potentially running the water just to finish in my boots.\u00a0I didn’t see it coming, but really appreciate it and I won’t let the boys down,\u201d White said and smiled with his trademark wit.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s all happened pretty quickly, to be honest, in the last two weeks or so. A couple of honest conversations probably with myself more than anything and a couple of people and it just feels like now’s the right time at the end of this year to finish up.<\/p>\n
\u201cSomething in me that just wants to compete and I guess if the body could keep going, I would keep going.\u00a0But the body’s just given me a lot of signs that now’s the right time and I think it’s time I start listening\u2026.It just feels right.\u00a0Everything, it seemed like everything was pointing me in that direction.\u201d<\/p>\n
White told the team on Tuesday of his decision, and his three young kids and his partner are set to join him in camp on Thursday to celebrate his last time in the gold jersey.<\/p>\n
The scrum half was his typical jovial self when asked about telling the group the news and what he\u2019ll miss about the game.<\/p>\n
\u201cI tried to make a bit of a joke out of it, and with my personality, boys don’t hear many jokes from me.\u00a0So I had to let them know I was kidding but I\u2019m very lucky to have a group like this around me,\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI love love absolutely every part of [this job].\u00a0There hasn’t been a day where I’ve felt like I’ve gone to work.\u00a0I live and breathe it and these boys have to tell me to calm down a bit, stop talking rugby and there’s stuff outside of it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’ll miss the competing.\u00a0I’ll miss putting the body on the line. I’ll miss working hard.\u00a0Yeah, all of it.\u00a0I’m very lucky this weekend that we get to play in front of a packed stadium at home.\u201d<\/p>\n
White was privileged to get the opportunity but there was one thing he\u2019d trade it for.<\/p>\n
\u201cI could absolutely give this moment back to have the result on the weekend [reversed]\u00a0and have Jake and Tate go out there this weekend and I’ll be sitting in a suit\u2026This is all awesome for me at the end of the day to get this, but I’d trade it in 100%,\u201d he added, the true competitor shining through until the end.<\/p>\n
[I\u2019m] not about the fairytale, I would have preferred we’d be going into a decider and the team being unchanged and that’d be that.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’m sure I’ll look back after and this will be pretty cool\u00a0to be able to go at Accor and play in front of, I won’t let anyone down, I guarantee you that. I\u2019d trade it for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of the all-time characters in Australian Rugby, Nic White, believes the time is right to call it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":35881,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85,2500],"class_list":["post-35880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-rugby","tag-sports","tag-wallabies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35880"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35880\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}