Tom Robinson knows all about timing. Bad timing is when your sun protection product gets cleared for market from mandatory testing at the, er, end of summer. Good timing is what is playing out right now at the Blues.

The 27-year-old flame-haired forward from Northland, and part-time entrepreneur, is a key figure in what might just be the hottest rugby team on the planet right now. He plays blindside flanker, and sometimes lock, for a Blues team that has won its last 11 matches on the trot, and sits seven points clear at the top of the Super Rugby Pacific standings.

And he has a theory about why now, after the best part of two decades of ineptitude and inconsistency, the Blues have finally morphed into the team they’ve always believed they could be.

“There’s no miracle thing that’s happened,” Robinson tells Stuff ahead of Thursday’s trip across the Tasman for the penultimate regular season clash against the Brumbies. “It’s what’s been building over the last few years … a lot of it is belief and confidence. It’s not that we know we’re going to win, but we know how to win, and we know what winning looks like and it’s becoming part of our culture.”

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Personalities help, adds the man they call Sauce. “The characters, the culture … that’s built from the players and the players are picked by the coaches. There’s something special here – we’re playing hard, we’re playing for each other and we’re having fun doing it.”

You can say that again. The Blues dropped their season opener to a miracle finish from the Hurricanes in Dunedin (“We actually played some of our best footy that first 70 minutes”), and have won everything since.

A win on Saturday night at GIO Stadium will clinch the 11-1 Blues the No 1 spot with still a round remaining in the regular season. They understand the importance of home advantage – they’ve just tabbed 124 points and 19 tries in their last two matches at Eden Park – but Robinson is adamant the blinkers are affixed.

“It is cool, but there’s a feeling that the job is nowhere near done,” he said of the storylines revolving. “We’re not looking at win totals or thinking about playoffs. It’s the Brumbies, 1 v 2, we want to finish top, and we’re not going to button off now. It’s going to be our biggest challenge yet, I reckon.

“They are steely at set piece, have a good maul, are good at the breakdown and have some good game-drivers. If you let them get on top you could be in trouble.”

That’s unlikely with a Blues pack who very much have each other’s backs. With Robinson and James Tucker coming off two big games in the second row, Ofa Tuungafasi and Kurt Eklund setting a high standard up front and Dalton Papalii leading a dynamic loose trio, the big men are laying a mighty foundation.

“We’re all happy doing the dirty work,” says Robinson. We’ve got a team-first mentality… some games you do that work and you might be in the right place at the right time to score tries, but we’re not chasing those opportunities.”

For Robinson the first Chiefs game, where he conceded back-to-back penalties late in the piece and handed the visitors a chance to snatch victory at the death, was a “big learning curve”.

“At different moments in games you need different things. At that moment what I did wasn’t the right thing. It was getting to that set piece thinking, ‘all right, what’s the time on the clock, what do we need, and this is what I need to do’.”

But for a turning point in the Blues’ season, Robinson nominates the second Chiefs clash, won 25-0 in Hamilton: “That showed what we’re capable of, and set a line in the sand – all right, that’s the standard now.”

Even the ugliest win of the season (22-18 over the Force in Perth) had its merits. “To go 26 phases after 80 minutes on our goal-line … you compare that to the first Hurricanes game where we let it go in last two minutes. That was an improvement.”

It’s not all rugby either for one of the raconteurs of this Blues squad. Robinson and fellow Northlander Josh Goodhue have formed a startup producing a sun-protection product called Zinc or Swim.

“We were sick of getting sunburnt in pre-season training … the sunblock was sweating off. We needed something stronger, we think of ourselves as colourful types (the product comes in white, pink, blue or yellow), so Zinc or Swim was formed. It’s available on our website, we’re slowly getting into retail stores, and it’s going well.

“Unfortunately we didn’t have ideal timing, launching at the end of summer. We had to get it SPF tested in Australia, got held up by Covid, so we’re ready seven months ahead of next summer.”