by Richie McCaw
England at Twickenham isn’t much better, and we’re held to 6–6 until close to the last quarter, before we get away on them.
‘Defence is now the measure by which this team should be defined,’ writes Gregor Paul. ‘They are not the swashbucklers of old—this is a team built on the most basic principles of test football.’
Ma’a’s power and Conrad’s nous, against Wales, 2009.
Which is a lot kinder than Peter Bills, who, after the England game writes: ‘Silly, elementary errors, poor wobbly finishing and a lack of composure, even from Daniel Carter for long periods, this was an unrecognisable New Zealand team.’ And the ultimate condemnation: ‘It was like watching England play.’
That bad?
And this: ‘The UK media was full of lament, mourning the death of running rugby. There was a genuine sense of disbelief that there was no champion of the beautiful game any more.’
And this: ‘The game plan was all about field position and ball security. Defence was the crushing weapon, with the ferocity of the tackling pressuring opponents. The All Blacks lived off other team’s mistakes more than they ever had.’
That’s more by necessity than design. We still have every intention to have a crack when we can, but our execution lets us down. For all that, we were up against a big brutal English pack, and it took us 60 minutes to take their legs and lungs away from them. We got over the top of them in the last quarter and won comfortably enough and, for my money, we played smart rugby.
Barking out instructions at Twickenham . . . It took us 60 minutes to take their legs and lungs away from them.
We’re knackered, on our last legs, but we know we’ve got one more game in us. We’re trying to play the game we aspire to, we’re trying to stay aligned to the coaches’ vision and keep the faith, but it hasn’t quite happened yet. I have a feeling that we’re just a game away from getting it right and playing the way we envisage we can, if we can just hold it together long enough. We back off training, take it carefully, as we head for sunny Marseilles.
That week when we do our priority planning, I tell Smithy we won’t need any defence this week. Smithy’s really uncomfortable with that, but I’m sure that we don’t need to, we haven’t had a try scored against us in the last three matches and the boys are highly motivated. Trust us. Smithy does, and that week he works on our attacking game, running the drills he knows so well from his previous role, so that Ted and Shag can coach from behind.
That’s an illustration of the coaches being flexible, and an illustration of the power of imagination and attitude. We’re developing to the point where we don’t have to smash each other physically as much as we used to, particularly on tour: we used to have mouthguard sessions for 40 minutes, sometimes 50. That’s come down to five or eight minutes. The rest is accuracy and execution—and imagination, like the way I work on my drills by myself.
Before the tour began, we’d targeted the last game against France, and we’re hoping we can finish a particularly difficult season on a high note. And get at least one of our cups back, the Dave Gallaher Trophy.
There’s also another, entirely unexpected prize on offer—the number-one world ranking is up for grabs, after South Africa get stuffed by France and Ireland (not to mention their midweek side getting beaten by club sides Leicester Tigers and Saracens).
We decide that this is the game where we take our first step towards Auckland and 2011, and leave Cardiff and 2007 behind. Look forward, not back. And yet . . .
There’s a weird sense that this is where we should have been playing our quarter-final in 2007, here in the sun of Marseilles, not the gloom of Wales. Marseilles feels familiar—this is where we began our 2007 RWC campaign against Italy, and, unfortunately, played as well as we did at any stage of that tournament.
We’re looking for some sort of step up, a shedding of the stifling shell we’ve been playing in. Maybe it’s the perfect place to shed the remnants of the Cardiff legacy too.
I look at France’s team-sheet and feel the familiar names bite home. Traille, Clerc, Heymans, Jauzion, Bonnaire, Chabal, Lionel Nallet, Sylvain Marconnet, William Servat, Szarzewski, along with some we’re still getting to know, tough front-rowers like Fabien Barcella and Nicolas Mas. And, of course, the conductor, Dusautoir . . .
New coach Marc Lievremont appears to be putting together something special for 2011.
They did us at home in Dunedin and almost got over us in Wellington. Just a couple of weeks ago further along the coast at Toulouse, they dismantled our nemesis, the Springboks. The score was close enough, 20–13, but they bashed the Boks at their own brutal, physical game. We never got close to doing that to the Boks this year.
Skits night on the end-of-year tour, 2009. Rodders and I are the wannabe counter-terrorists.
On a cool clear night at Stade Velodrome, we know we have to make a statement. Our recent history gives us any amount of edge and emotion for this game.
We’re in the wrong jersey again, white, because France have gone for their dark strip, but that’s the only thing wrong with tonight’s picture, in front of 60,000 Marseillaise.
Marconnet and Barcella give us the big face-off after the haka, and bring real attitude to the first scrum, splintering us. Penalty. Three points down. But this time we’re absolutely up for it, our lineout’s working, we’re hitting holes, and Dan’s got his dancing shoes on. He’s electric, taking it to the line and giving Ma’a and Conrad space and time. It doesn’t immediately pay off, but soon we’re able to put Siti away on the left and he goes round Clerc to score. But Julien Dupuy goals twice from penalties, and we’re still down, 9–7.
There’s a difference in approach from France: they’ve come to play. They believe they can beat us at our own game. They’ve brought their Toulouse tactics, not their Biarritz. That suits us. In the twenty-third minute we score from our own 22, when Mils sees some space on the counter, and puts Siti away. Fifty metres later, Siti finds Mils backing up inside and Mils is over. Try.
The signature moment comes shortly after, when Reado breaks their line, but we knock on. They have the put-in to a scrum in the shadow of their posts, but this time it’s France who splinter and Jerome scores. Marconnet and Barcella have gone from roosters to feather dusters. If you put such store on face, what do you do when you lose it? From that moment, we feel like we’ve got them.
Life couldn’t get any better at the end. We’ve whacked the French 39–12, got our number-one ranking back, and I’ve just won my second IRB Player of the Year Award.
In the second half, we play with the pace and precision we’ve been looking for all season and we blow the French away five tries to none: 39–12. Even Dusautoir can’t get into the game.
We’ve made the statement we wanted to make, needed to make. Reassured ourselves that we can still play, kept the faith with the coaches that if we create a solid platform, we can elaborate on that, build a game with so much width and pace that no one can live with us, even under the existing rules.
‘That’s the way you play the game,’ I tell the media conference. I believe it. There’ve been so many moments of injury and doubt and difficulty this season, but in the end we’ve managed to play the way we’ve always aspired to play. And Smithy shakes my hand after the game and agrees that the defence was magnificent.
Dusautoir in defeat is as unreadably polite as he is in victory. Kipling may have been thinking of a Victorian Englishman when he wrote about meeting those two imposters, triumph and disaster, and treating them the same, but Dusautoir seems to fit it perfectly. He doesn’t seem to sweat it, no matter what happens.
We’ve got the Dave Gallaher back. We’ve got the number-one ranking back. And I’ve won my second IRB Player of the Year Award.
But, more than that, we’ve now got more genuine world-class players than we had at the start of the year.
Cory Jane came in to the wing to replace Rudi Wulf as a converted fullback. But he’s been a revelation, balanced, agile, very good wit
h the ball in the air, receiving and kicking, the perfect modern wing. Ma’a’s cemented his place alongside Conrad, after experiments with Dan and Beaver didn’t work, and the Ma’a/Conrad double act is acknowledged as being up there with Jean de Villiers and Jaque Fourie as the best centre pairing in rugby. And it’s been gratifying to see Jimmy Cowan really start to deliver consistent world-class performances week after week.
Kieran has been magnificent. Jerome has finally found his feet at test level and is delivering the explosive defence and attack that lifts him above the usual tight/loose No. 6. Tom Donnelly, so-called journeyman lock, has given us aerial stability and tough-mindedness in the second row.
Neemia Tialata’s knees can’t handle the volume of work needed to make him an effective force around the field for 80 minutes, but that scrum under the French posts showed he’s still an international tighthead where it counts. And behind him there’s Owen Franks, who hasn’t followed the usual academy route to international rugby, but has come through the school of hard knocks, propping in senior club rugby when he was 18. The Rise of Owen might even make the constant calls for The Return of Zarg (Carl Hayman) redundant. At 21, Owen will come back next year older, wiser and even stronger. Then there’s Ali, at home, recovering from his Achilles. It’d be great to see Spiderman fly again.
When you start weaving those guys into the ‘veterans’ who are still delivering, like Woody and Horey and Kevvy and Brad and Dan and Mils and Siti and me, there’s the making of something special.
We’ve come a long way since a cold night in Dunedin in early June, a long way since a cold night in Cardiff two years ago. Gilbert Enoka reckons two years is often a significant marker in processing loss. It certainly feels like we’ve taken the step forward we needed to take.
No more looking back.
Bugger France 2007.
From here on, it’s about New Zealand 2011.
A recurring theme at the leadership group back in October at Clearwater was staleness. How it all began to look the same: the games, the grounds, the opposition, the hotels, the departure lounges, the stadiums, the people, the places. We looked at ways of changing things.
You should be careful what you wish for.
In high summer, I fly up to the Tasman Glacier to Mount D’Archiac, right at the top of Lake Tekapo, the northern way-point of my first solo 500-kilometre flight. I’ve been lucky, got on to one of those nor’wester waves crashing over the Alps, so I’m surfing along the front edge of the lenticulars at close to 20,000 feet, on oxygen, as the GPS counts me down, keeping the speed up, looking ahead for the best place to turn, the vario bleeping or moaning in my ear as I gain or lose height. As I hit the way-point and turn east before heading back south, I can see across the Canterbury Plains, past Mayfield where Mum grew up, past the Rangitata, north to where the sun glints off the silver braids of the Rakaia and Waimakariri as they work their way across the plains. Between them, as they meet the coast, sits Christchurch, nestled into the crook of the Port Hills, the beginning of Banks Peninsula, fingering out into the blue Pacific.
When I shifted to Christchurch in 1999, I thought I’d made a big mistake. I was away for the first four or five weeks of term with the New Zealand Under 19s, and when I got back to Lincoln I felt left out. I had some mates who’d come up from Otago Boys’, but most of my friends had gone to Otago Uni and had been having a huge Orientation Week, which seemed to go on for a month.
I was in a hall of residence with other sports scholars at Lincoln, but once I got through the first semester, I realised that I had four or five old mates in other halls, two or three I’d gone to school with, one even going back to North Otago age-group rugby. And I gradually made new friends, some through contact with Lincoln, my classes and the halls, some through the rugby academy, and some through my decision to play for the Christchurch club.
That was a biggie, because most of the guys on the rugby scholarship were playing for Old Boys, but Dad’s brother Ian had played for Christchurch, and Bryan Mustchin, who was on the committee there, rang me before I went away with the Under 19s and showed me around the clubrooms. When I got back from Wales, I was in two minds what to do, and thought maybe I should just go with the other guys to Old Boys, when Bryan rang me and said, ‘Training’s on Tuesday.’ So I went along to the Christchurch club to play with their Under 21s, met a whole new bunch of people and really enjoyed it.
I didn’t quite finish my Bachelor of Agricultural Science degree at Lincoln—I’m three papers short, a semester’s work, effectively. There’s a certain regret about not finishing it off, because while I was there I worked hard for it, and Lincoln bent over backwards to help me cope with the increasing demands of professional rugby.
There was always an aegrotat option for exams I missed through rugby, but I didn’t want any aegrotat passes on my results transcript, I wanted whatever grade I deserved, so I ended up sitting special exams. Lecturers would set different papers for me because I was sitting the exams after the rest of the students, whenever I got back from touring.
Despite my best intentions, the grades started slipping, A grades the first year, then the odd B would creep in, and then a C or two by the time I pulled the pin in the first semester of 2002. It got too difficult trying to keep all the balls in the air. Whenever we got a bye week, I’d be out until midnight or later every night until game night came round again. I wasn’t doing myself justice and even though I was passing the exams, I wasn’t actually learning anything. I thought, well, I can always come back to it. Maybe I will one day, or do a different degree. I enjoyed the academic challenge and kind of miss it.
It was leaving Lincoln that opened up flying to me, really. When rugby was all there was, I found I needed something else to challenge myself, so I began flying at the end of 2002.
Walking away from my degree was the right decision at the time, but you have to be careful about narrowing your world too much. If you want to get to the top in professional sport, it’s easy to develop tunnel vision, seeing the world around you as a means to an end. To some extent that’s inevitable because you’ve got to be selfish, in the sense of making sure you do whatever it takes to get the best out of yourself week after week. But there’s a danger that soon your whole world ends up inside that tunnel, and you lose your friends from outside the sport who see the world through different frames of reference. I’ve been fortunate to keep old friends from school and university, who have that outside perspective.
Although, in saying that, keeping my old friends isn’t just a matter of luck. Once I got really embedded in professional rugby, I made sure that I kept up those friendships outside rugby, not let them slip. I was often away, but when I was at home I’d make contact, because I realised it would be easy for them to start thinking, ‘Ah well, he’ll be busy,’ and not bother. I’ve still got a bunch of mates who are hugely important to me. They’re the ones who’ll give me shit and tell me to pull my head in if they feel I’m getting carried away with myself.
The longer I stay in Christchurch the more I realise what a good decision it was to come here rather than stay in Dunedin. I’d done my time at school and it was an opportunity to move on to something else, and I’ve ended up with a great mix of friends around me, not to mention family.
Mum and Dad both went to school in Christchurch, so it was always more familiar to them than Dunedin, and when they sold the farm in 2002, they bought a lifestyle block to the west of the city and settled there. Jo and Sam live close by, and in 2008 I bought a townhouse close to Crusaders HQ in St Albans, and finally gave away the flatting to live more or less on my own, apart from Hayley and the occasional house-guest like Spiderman. I can—should—walk to work, though I seldom do.
Christchurch has become the centre of my world, for all those reasons and also because it’s easy to get from there to the other places that are also important to me, either by driving one of the great roads of the world, from Fairlie across the Mackenzie Basin to Omarama or on over the Lind
is Pass to Wanaka, or by flying myself down there.
In winter I usually bring the Discus back to Springfield airfield, about 25 minutes from Mum and Dad’s, and get to glide around the foothills of the Alps and look out at the city that’s become home.
In 2010 the pre-season preparation and housekeeping at St Albans for the Crusaders falls into place easily enough. Jacko has returned to claim the back seat of the bus alongside Brad and Corey, I’ve got a great leaders’ group around me—Reado, Andy Ellis, Brad, Jacko, Ti’i Paulo, Corey and Dan. Owen and Corey share the sheriff duties, Colin Slade and Kahn Fotuali’i are the timekeepers, video entertainment is courtesy of Andy, Adam Whitelock, Tom Marshall and Isaac Ross, music by Kade, Sam Whitelock and Dan Bowden, Ministry of Perks and Lurks under Crocky (mentored by Toddy), Ministry of Information under the control of Pete Borlase, Robbie Fruean and George Whitelock, team song by Tim Bateman and Isaac, refreshments organised by Sean Maitland, Ryan Crotty and Zac Guildford. These are the off-field components of a team which expects to do the business on the field.
And we do, for quite a long time, despite getting thumped by the Reds at Suncorp in Round 2, where Ewen McKenzie is making his mark with a talented young inside back pairing of Will Genia and Quade Cooper.
I’ve been given leave to miss the first two games (and the pre-season stuff) so that I can recover from last year, and come off the bench in Round 3.
We put together a couple of bonus point wins at home over the Sharks and the Blues, before travelling to Hamilton to beat the Chiefs, and then beat the Lions for another bonus point.
