Ta'avao & Luke Jacobson set for more time on sideline

Following their first loss of the Super Rugby season, the Chiefs have now been dealt double injury news, with All Blacks duo Angus Ta'avao and Luke Jacobson set for more time on the sideline.

Ta'avao was given a four-to-six-week recovery timeframe following a misdiagnosis on a leg injury, with an update provided by Gatland revealing that the 29-year-old's issue is actually a suspected quadricep tear.

“We thought it was a knee contusion and a haematoma from the Blues game, and it’s actually ended up being quite a significant tear in his quad,” Gatland told reporters in Hamilton.

Ta'avao will see a specialist to assess whether rehabilitation or operation is the way to go, and Gatland said he could be out for between eight and 12 weeks.

Jacobson, meanwhile, was pulled off just 10 minutes into the 26-14 defeat to the Brumbies in Hamilton last Saturday.

Gatland said it was a "neural" issue and Jacobson would miss at least the next match, against the Waratahs in Wollongong next Friday, but perhaps another couple of weeks after that too, with a possibility of playing for the Chiefs Development in their match against the Blues Development in Hamilton on March 13 ahead of the Chiefs' two-game tour of South Africa.

"We thought he was 100 per cent and ready to go, from a running perspective he was good, but when you go out there, and it's a full-on game, pushing in the scrums and mauling and stuff, it's kind of a load that's hard to replicate from a training perspective," Gatland said.

"So we've just got to make sure that we do enough work on loading that up before he comes back."