Talking Point
The question seemed an obvious one to ask the youngster who was on his first All Black tour and had made his Test debut just a couple of days earlier in Dublin and was set to meet Scotland.
How much had he learned from Todd Blackadder, his fellow Canterbury Crusader back-row man?
The reply seemed amazing. He explained that for all that he looked up to Blackadder there had been no direct dealings between them.
Blackadder had captained the All Blacks and the Crusaders earlier that year and had left New Zealand rugby to join Edinburgh that very week.
That is how quickly Richie McCaw was promoted from provincial rugby into the All Black set-up once his talent had been identified and at no point in the ensuing 14 years has anyone been given the slightest cause to wonder whether too much was asked of him.
Occupying a position which demands that its exponents play on the edge he has attracted the attention of a curious group of rugby devotees who seem only to have noticed as a result of his efforts that in order to be competitive at elite level back-row forwards should only respect the offside line when officialdom gives them no other option.
The McCaw detractors are hugely out-numbered, however, by those who recognise that since 2001 we have lived in the era of the greatest player ever to have adorned the game.
In doing so he has carried himself in a manner befitting that status at all times.
There was no sense in 2001 of talking to a youngster, as is so often the case when talking to newcomers to the international arena, particularly in this amateur age.
Already being talked about as a special talent by his fellow New Zealanders at that stage, McCaw seemed then to have an understanding of who he was and what he was about.
If even he could not have anticipated becoming the first captain to lift the World Cup twice, playing 148 matches, winning 131 of them – close to nine in every 10 – on the way, there was a sense that he had very high expectations of himself even then.
He may not, then, have learned directly from Blackadder at that time – although they have worked exceedingly closely in the interim, the former Edinburgh captain having been head coach of the Crusaders for the past seven years – but there were huge similarities in the way they carried themselves which is a result of the rugby culture in which they grew up.
More than anything that is what gives New Zealand a chance to continue to dominate the sport even as the limits of their playing and commercial resources ought to be turned against them in the professional age.
That came across even in the reflections of Sonny Bill Williams, something of a maverick in these terms who has flitted between the union and league codes and even interrupted his rugby career to take on professional boxing bouts.
On the day he gave his World Cup winners medal to a young supporter Williams expressed full understanding both of how important it had been to send McCaw, if he retires from Test rugby as he is expected to, Dan Carter, Ma’a nonu, Conrad Smith and Keven Mealamu on their way in appropriate fashion but also that others are already being lined up to replace them.
“It wasn’t spoken about at all during the week but us boys knew that we had a job to do to see those fellas off as winners,” he said of a group which contained McCaw and also included Dan Carter, Ma’a Nonu, Conrad Smith and Keven Mealamu.
“They’re legends in their own right but you ask all the New Zealand media and they’ll tell you that the talent in New Zealand is crazy. We’ll just have to wait and see who the new names are but those guys are going to be special again."
I wonder who we will be talking to next autumn?
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