The Real McCaw: Richie McCaw: The Autobiography

by Richie McCaw

  We’re ready now. AMI Stadium is ready. The fans in Christchurch are ready—there’s a palpable excitement about what’s coming next year.

  On 3 September the front page of The Press reports that Christchurch hoteliers are expecting a rush on rooms for next year, and have already finalised $60 million worth of accommodation for players, officials and VIPs at the Rugby World Cup.

  I know in my bones that come the extreme pressure of RWC knockout phase, there’s going to be a moment when everything is on the line.

  The only RWC when that didn’t happen was the first, in 1987, when the All Blacks were never really pressed. The lesson from every other RWC is that the winning team will at some stage during the knockout stage need to survive a moment which tips it one way or another. The winning team has often needed some luck in that tipping moment, but you can’t count on luck, and what I want to make sure of is that when that moment comes, we are able to manage it without freezing.

  In the past, we’ve maybe downplayed that pressure, taken the attitude, Hey, we’re tough, we’re All Blacks, we can deal with it. We thought that if we didn’t talk about it or make a big thing of it, maybe it’d go away. This time around, we’re going to do it differently: we decide to acknowledge that pressure and try to develop some tools to deal with it.

  To that end, we work with Bert and with Ceri Evans. When Ceri analyses what happens to the brain under extreme pressure, it makes a lot of sense to me in the light of events in Cardiff. He explains that underlying pressure comes from expectation, scrutiny and consequence. If you play for the All Blacks you’ve got expectation, people are watching and the consequences for not winning are huge, particularly given our history in the RWC.

  Acute stress comes when the brain perceives a threat, either predicted (opposition or individuals do something you’ve planned for) or unpredicted (they do something you haven’t planned for). Either is okay, as long as it’s not accompanied by a feeling of helplessness. That’s when adrenalin-fuelled responses overwhelm the individual, and you get aggressive, or you try to escape, or you go passive—so it’s fight, flight or freeze. I know that I end up becoming passive.

  A happy bunch with the Tri Nations trophy after our win in Soweto. With me here are Woody Ma’a, Sam and Kevvy.

  When any of those things happen, decision making becomes muddled, clarity is lost and accuracy is compromised. If you go into freeze mode, your reactions are dulled, you go through the motions, lack coordination, become indecisive and withdrawn, you don’t hear people around you, you don’t see what’s in front of you any more. You become captured by bad-experience pictures from the past or fear of future consequences.

  Ceri calls that state, when you lose contact with the present, getting trapped in the Red Zone: that glazed look that I saw on those All Blacks’ faces standing under the posts in ’99 and that I saw around me—and was part of—after Traille scored in 2007. where you’re staring but you’re not seeing what’s in front of you any more.

  To get out of the Red Zone and move to what he calls the Blue Zone, you need to somehow retain situational awareness so you can make decisions and be able to execute on those decisions.

  Ceri gives us exercises to help us make that transition from Red to Blue. Breathing slowly and deliberately, nose or mouth, with a two-second pause. While breathing, hold your wrist on the out-breath. Then shift your attention to something external—the ground or your feet, or the ball in hand, or even alternating big toes, or the grandstand. Get your eyes up, looking out.

  You’ve got to use deep breaths and key words to help yourself get out of your own head, find an external focus, get yourself back in the present, regain your situational awareness.

  The other thing you’ve got to do long before you get into the Red Zone is plan for the unpredictable, so that when it happens, it’s expected and you don’t feel helpless.

  Ceri and I look at scenarios that might engender the feeling of helplessness I had at Cardiff, when we didn’t have a play to go to that was specific for the situation we found ourselves in. How to deal with that, how to change momentum when you feel the game plan is not working. It’s not about having or implementing a Plan B, it’s not about turning things round by scoring a spectacular try in the corner, so much as having really specific, practical plays to fall back on to take us through the next minute or two in order to change a particular element of the game. For instance, if we haven’t had the ball for a while, and when we do get it, it’s deep in our territory, what do we do? Hold on to it or kick it? My task is to work through these specifics with Ceri, then translate them into calls or plays that everyone will understand, so we’re all on the same page when we need to go to them.

  But no matter how much you plan, in rugby or in life, not everything is predictable. Some things no one can see coming. They are the unforeseen tragedies which test the human spirit in the most fundamental way possible.

  At 4.35 am on Saturday, 4 September 2010, a 7.1-magnitude earthquake strikes Christchurch.

  I’m oblivious, asleep in Auckland, staying at Ali’s place, ready for a leaders’ meeting before the team flies out to Sydney for the last Tri Nations match of the year. when I wake at about seven and switch on the mobile, it lights up with messages, all variations of ‘Are you okay?’

  Ali’s girlfriend Casey tells me that there’s been a big earthquake in Christchurch. When I try to ring Mum and Dad I can’t get through. while I’m trying, I see on the internet that the epicentre was at Darfield, south-west of the city, not far from my parents’ place.

  On television, there’s something both familiar and unreal about the pictures coming through. They’re much like disaster stories of fire, flood and earthquake you’ve seen before—of Civil Defence no-go cordons, cracked or shattered inner-city buildings, impassable roads, gashes across the landscape, streets under a sea of mud—but this time the streets and surroundings are your home town, buildings you recognise, that you might have been walking past yesterday. The Deans family homestead, Homebush, quite close to Mum and Dad, is semi-upright rubble, with rooms gaping open to the sky. Reports come in that there are no deaths—luckily, the badly damaged inner-city bar and club precinct was largely deserted at that hour of the morning.

  When I do get hold of my parents, Dad says the force of the quake threw him out of bed, but he and Mum are otherwise okay, and their comparatively modern home hasn’t suffered any damage that they can see. Then I get hold of Jo, and she’s good too, and later in the day she goes round to my townhouse and reassures me that there’s no obvious damage.

  The leaders’ meeting is cancelled and it’s decided that the players will fly straight from wellington, Auckland and Christchurch—when they can get out—direct to Sydney. Until my afternoon departure, there’s nothing to do but wait and watch the coverage on television.

  Firefighters battling a blaze in Worcester Street in central Christchurch after the September 2010 earthquake.

  More than a hundred commercial buildings have serious or potentially serious damage, and a large number of inner-city and Lyttelton heritage buildings have suffered a variety of damage, especially to old towers and turrets and chimneys, though the Cathedral seems relatively unscathed. Some suburbs have been badly hit, particularly around the Avon River—Avonside streets have gaping cracks and are covered in mud, and there are these mini volcanoes of liquid silt bubbling up in the ground. Liquefaction—where the soil behaves like liquid—is a word I’ve never heard before. It mixes with broken water and sewer mains and turns Avonside and some of the eastern suburbs like Bexley into foul-smelling swamp. Hundreds of people with damaged homes turn up at Civil Defence centres like the Burnside High School gym, not that far from my place.

  The stories coming from rural residents around the epicentre are like Mum and Dad’s: kitchen floors covered with smashed crockery and food, but surprise at the lack of damage, considering their proximity. For all that, some roads are buckled and closed and there are a lot of power and water
outages. At one stage, there’s an aerial shot of the gash across the plains left by the newly discovered Greendale fault, showing shattered roads, broken water races and shifted shelter belts and fences. One of the more colourful reports says there were three different earthquakes, which ‘unleashed the energy equivalent of sixty-seven nuclear bombs speeding into Christchurch’.

  As much as I try to understand it all, I really don’t. I wasn’t there and I didn’t feel the force of it. Even when Dad told me he was thrown out of bed, I was thinking, Oh, yeah, he’s probably exaggerating just a wee bit. Which makes it much easier for me to put it out of my mind and concentrate on the test.

  The eight Canterbury-based players in the All Black squad, plus Smithy and Shag and manager Darren Shand, are a day late getting out of Christchurch, and there are a few war stories when the boys gather in Sydney, mainly of the sounds of the quake: of thunder or a train roaring through the house, creaking timbers and plaster falling out of ceilings and the contents of shelves and cupboards smashing on the floor. Kieran had been pretty freaked, taking shelter under a doorway with heavily pregnant Bridget. Some, like Brad and Corey, had to leave partners and young kids. Most of them have some damage to their houses, but the worst hit is Steve Hansen, whose house at Tai Tapu on the city fringe is close to collapse. He’s got a young family and his elderly father living with him.

  None of us knows about aftershock patterns—one is 5.6—and as the week goes on and we hear from those left at home about the continuing shocks, the phone bills skyrocket and it must be bloody difficult for some to keep their minds on the job, as fearful partners describe what they’re going through. Steve gets a call from an engineer to say his house is ‘stuffed’.

  We try to talk about it as a team without letting it throw us off course. Steve tells us that we better do a bloody good job, to make the time away from the people we love worthwhile. ‘Hopefully, if we put in a good performance we can put a smile on some faces back home.’

  That smile doesn’t look likely when we’re 9–22 down and the Aussies feel like they’re finally getting over the top of us. But we know that they’ve just flown back from Africa, where they had a big win at altitude in Bloemfontein, and we have an inkling that if we can get field position and exert pressure, the travel factor might tell in the last quarter. We decide to change the attack, go narrower with pick-and-gos, bring it back to our forwards and see if we can beat up on the Aussie pack, take their legs and lungs away. That works: Kieran and I are able to work a move off the back of the scrum to get us to 16–22 with 14 minutes to go, then Kieran smashes over to score the winner in the seventy-third minute.

  Okay, it’s not ideal, but it’s hardly surprising given the events of the week that the boys take so long to get into the game. Once again, our composure is tested, and our leadership gets us home. Even though we lose Kevvy, who exits early with a calf injury, Corey steps up in a rare 70 minutes, despite his worries about what’s happening back home.

  But the biggest ‘learning’ from the game is easy: we miss Dan. This game proves that if we have an Achilles heel, it’s Dan’s. The niggling ankle that’s been troubling Dan all year has been operated on to remove loose material from the back of the joint, so Aaron Cruden is the latest to get to pitch for the Dan Carter Understudy role. But Aaron has a difficult debut, not least because our pack is beaten for the first 50 minutes. Aaron’s replaced by Colin Slade early in the second half, and he shows a lot of composure in his first test. Opposite him, Quade Cooper starts his first test too, and shows a surprisingly heady kicking game.

  But the kicking hero comes as a bit of a surprise, certainly to me after seeing him spray them all over the park in a practice session the day before. Piri Weepu nails five out of five, while Matt Giteau misses four of his seven attempts. That’s the difference.

  My first view of Christchurch is reassuring, as I give Corey a lift home from the airport. I’m prattling on that there’s no way you’d know there’s been an earthquake, when we pass an empty lot on the corner of Cranford and Westminster streets. Ten days ago there was a fish-and-chip shop and milk bar, now it’s a pile of rubble. It was badly damaged, says Corey, and they’ve had to bowl it. Oh.

  Once I start looking, there’s toppled chimneys and collapsed brick walls. I’ve read that Canterbury Hockey has lost its artificial pitches at Porritt Park in Avonside, and the rowers have lost most of the buildings at their Kerr’s Reach facility. Luckily, Rugby Park seems pretty much unaffected, though you can stand there and see over the back fence to where a chimney has broken off and is lying on a roof.

  Cups and trophies from the sideboard are strewn all over the floor at the townhouse, but that seems to be the extent of it. I decide to put in a claim for damage assessment on someone’s advice that there could be stuff I can’t see, but in the ensuing days, as the aftershocks come in, I’m not that fazed. They’re 5 in magnitude or below, and while I read somewhere that a 6 magnitude is 10 times more powerful than a 5, it doesn’t really register, and part of me wonders what all the fuss is about. People are buying survival kits, but I don’t bother. Meridian Energy sends a wee transistor that you should have in your survival pack and I’m thinking, A bit after the fact, isn’t it? GNS Science is quoted in the paper as saying that there might be a couple more aftershocks of 5 magnitude or higher, ‘but the risk of a bigger earthquake is fading by the hour’.

  That’s good enough for me. I do a safety and hygiene video for Red Cross and visit a couple of badly affected schools, and my message is that if that’s the worst of it, we can cope, we’ll be okay . . .

  So I think, bugger the aftershocks, and plough back into training for the end-of-year tour. Over an intense nine-test programme like the one we’ve just completed, you’re obviously match-fit but you lose a bit of base because there isn’t the time to do a lot of individual work. So I try to build my base fitness back up, following All Black trainer Nic Gill’s schedule. There’s greater emphasis this year on shuttle work and change of direction because the game is more ball in hand. I do a lot of this shuttle type running and we get tested with a yo-yo, which is a modification of the old beep test, 20 metres down and back, with a 10-second ‘rest’ to get back to your mark, getting faster and faster until you can’t get back to your mark on the beep and you’re out.

  I hit it hard because I know we’re going to try to lift the pace of our game. By the time we gather in Auckland to fly out, I’m posting figures as good as I’ve ever done. The big news around the naming of the All Black squad is the selection of Sonny Bill Williams. I’ve been watching SBW play for Canterbury in the ITM Cup and, gee, yeah, he’s an impressive physical specimen. It’s clear he has a lot to learn about when and where to best use his pretty outrageous talents, like offloading, and the different lines he has to run on attack and defence, and the complexities around the tackled ball. But the most impressive thing is that he listens and clearly wants to learn, and when I look closely at what he’s doing at the breakdown, for instance, I can see he’s struggling with timing, knowing when to commit and that sort of thing, but when he does commit, he gets his body position right and is brave and strong over the ball.

  SBW . . . he’s an impressive physical specimen.

  Dan’s back from his ankle op, and it’s decided to take one understudy, Stephen Donald, and leave the two younger men, Aaron Cruden and Colin Slade, at home. Big call, but that’s what the selectors are there for—and Beaver’s been the strongest in the provincial ITM Cup.

  There’s no particular discussion of the Christchurch situation before we fly out. The talk is all about housekeeping and objectives, particularly another shot at a Home Unions Grand Slam and the chance to set a new record for the most consecutive test wins amongst the top-tier nations. We’re sitting on 15, and wins against Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales will take us to 20, and break the current record of 17 held jointly by the All Blacks and South Africa.

  That objective lasts as long as it takes us to fl
y to Hong Kong and play Australia. We’ve got the game in the bag at the 60-minute mark after another lethargic start. Our early mistakes put us 12 points behind, but we get back to 17–12 by halftime and are out to 24–12 before Dan goes off and the wheels of the All Black machine seem to fall off with him. Dan might have been okay to play through, but he’s coming back from the ankle surgery and we don’t want to risk him. So on comes Steve Donald for a cameo that does his stocks no good at all.

  It’s not Beaver’s fault that Drew Mitchell scores within minutes of him replacing Dan—it’s another replacement, Ice, who slips over and gives Drew a clear run at the line. But it’s Beaver who misses a straightforward penalty that would have given us an eight-point lead with five to go, and then it’s Beaver who doesn’t find touch with a goal-line clearance, and gives Kurtley Beale a chance to run it back in broken field. If he’d kicked it into the grandstand, a lineout would have taken up time and allowed us to re-set our defence. Young James O’Connor converts his own try and breaks a 10-match sequence of Aussie losses to us. It would be easy to look at Beaver’s mistakes and say they cost us the game—and they certainly didn’t help—but we all needed to take some blame for letting them get back into the game.

  With Conrad and Ma’a on the way to training in Hong Kong, 2010

  Beaver (front) and Ice after the final whistle in Hong Kong.

  It irks me that we haven’t managed to close the game out from a position of such strength with 20 to go, and keep our foot on the Wallaby throat. The way we lost momentum at a time when we usually grab it. And Quade Cooper giving me a shove and a spray after they score the winner doesn’t help. Some people have natural charm and grace: Quade ain’t one of them. But he is one of a really potent Australian backline, alongside young but maturing talents in O’Connor and Beale and, particularly, Will Genia, who is already world-class.