As a kid, Sunnybank lock Dylan Rowe always wanted to play international rugby.

But he never expected to do it for Croatia. 

Rowe recently returned from his seventh Rugby Europe Trophy campaign, a journey that started with a sliding doors moment after a Premier Rugby game in Brisbane almost a decade ago.

“I was on my way over to play in Scotland and after the last game I played at Souths, I was chatting to a mate and somehow we got to talking about my heritage and my grandparents who were born in Croatia,” Rowe told Rugby News this week. 

“He said that he had a mate that had played a handful of games for Croatia and that he knew the coach who was from Auckland. 

“I got in touch with the coach and mentioned that I was going to be on that side of the world in a few weeks and it all sort of went from there.”

Croatia play in the second division of the Rugby Europe Championships. 

World Cup sides like Georgia and Portugal battle out the top division, with Croatia playing the likes of Ukraine, Lithuania and the Czech Republic in the hope of earning promotion to the top division of a tournament Rowe never thought he’d be involved in. 

“Croatian rugby has a pretty heavy Kiwi influence,” Rowe explained. 

“There seems to be a lot of New Zealanders with Croatian heritage and most of the coaches over the last few years have been Kiwis so the rugby has a very Kiwi feel to it. 

“Culturally though, it’s completely different. It’s Eastern Bloc rugby, they are very passionate people and that comes through in their sport. It’s not quite like football culture, but there are some similarities. There’s a lot of talking with their hands, put it that way.”

This year, Croatia defeated Lithuania and Ukraine but couldn’t match it with Switzerland, who topped the group and earned promotion to the top tier for next season. 

“Switzerland have a lot of players playing in France. They were favourites to win our group and they did just that but we stayed in the match for quite a while against them, which was pleasing. 

“It’s a much bigger sport in Switzerland compared to Croatia. Croatia only has four teams in the domestic comp and this year, I was one of only four imports. We were happy with this year though and I think we’re in a good position to push for promotion in our next campaign.”

Rowe is planning to return to Croatia before the start of next year’s tournament in October. 

“Poland have been relegated from the top division so they’ll come down to us. So it’ll be Croatia, Poland, Lithuania, Czech Republic and one other side that will be promoted from the third division.”

But before he returns to Europe, Rowe is focussed on helping Sunnybank return to the Premier Rugby finals. 

The Dragons are seventh after 10 rounds and while they’ve only won one match this season, Rowe says his side is a lot better than their ladder position suggests. 

“All but one of our losses has been by less than seven points and we’ve also had two draws so it’s been pretty brutal,” he said. 

“We’re playing some really good rugby though. If you wanted to advertise the competition, you’d use our highlights I reckon because when we’re on, we’re really on. 

“But highlights aren’t everything obviously because we haven’t been able to close out tight matches.

“We’re a really tight group so now we’ve got to start having some tough conversations with each other to try and lift our standards. 

“It’s not good enough to be getting close to these teams, if we want to win, we’ve got to get comfortable being uncomfortable and that starts with how we communicate with one another at training.”

Sunnybank travel to play a Wests side coming off two straight losses this weekend, but Rowe said the Dragons weren’t looking too much into the recent results of last year’s grand finalists. 

“Wests are still Wests.They’ve shown over the last few seasons that they are one of the benchmark sides and they are always capable of putting a lot of points on teams. 

“They’ve started slowly in the last few games though so we need to try and take advantage of that. 

“We can’t ease into the match like we have in our recent games. We’ve got to put our foot down and take control of the match.”

In the rounds other matches, Norths host UQ, GPS play Souths and Brothers take on Easts.