WHAT DRIVES THE best to be the best?
Achieving is not enough, nor is winning.
For Richie McCaw, it’s the pursuit of perfection.
In very few sports is it even possible to achieve a 100% winning record in a season.
In basketball, baseball or ice hockey winning every game in a week is a feat to be proud of.
In football, half the world thinks a draw is a decent result away from home while in European rugby a losing bonus point can easily be spun as a positive.
With a comparative number of games, it happens at college level in American football with startling regularity. However, this New Zealand side have played over half of their games while visiting a different continent, never mind away from their familiar stadium.
This Sunday, Ireland are all that separates McCaw and his side from becoming the first ever All Black team to achieve the perfect season.
Time off and good behaviour
“Sitting back over the summer reflecting on something like that, it’d be pretty satisfying,” says the All Black captain after his kick-around with the stars of Dublin GAA.
“The way we’re looking at it this week is that you don’t wanna be getting carried away with these sorts of things. What would make having a bit of time off good is having a good performance on Sunday.”
The problem which McCaw and many of his teammates have raised this past fortnight is that they have not completed stage 12 and 13 of the task with quite the level of dominance they would enjoy. The perfect 80-minute performance is always the goal.
“Well, you’ve got to,” he said needing barely a millisecond to think.
“That’s what you play the game for; to be better and better at it. You know, if you were just happy all the time, then I don’t think you’d want to improve or keep looking at ways you can get better. If you do, then someone else will move past you.
“That’s the thing that keeps everyone going in this team: even if a scoreboard goes your way and you haven’t performed; you’re happy, but not satisfied. I think that’s a good thing.”
That happy dissatisfaction has been the usual setting for New Zealand on this spring tour. France, it seems, will always spook them to some degree, but they still came through thanks to Charles Piutau’s moment of inspiration. Even with England looking dead and buried, Stuart Lancaster’s men were stubborn enough to think they could come back and win in Twickenham. The Chariot rolled into the lead, only to be shunted into an eight-point defeat by the finish.
The last time McCaw was satisfied by a result was the day he lifted the Rugby Championship. It was a perfect storm of intensity, talent, a dry ball and attacking ethos and now leaves McCaw chasing that same high like some Queenstown adrenaline junkie.
“It was an interesting game,” the flanker says of one of the finest contests TheScore.ie has ever seen.
“The Springboks really wanted to play and they played particularly well and because of that there are opportunities. When both teams are really having a good crack a few opportunities come.”
‘Bang, we took them’
However, the perfect game for a neutral made sure there were points for Steve Hansen to ask his men to improve upon:
“After that game we were particularly happy because we ticked that box, but we had let them in for four tries and they had us under pressure at times. When you’re reviewing games, you always think like that, but as a performance, when we had our opportunities we took them.
“A bit like last weekend, we had our three opportunities and, bang, we took them. That’s what you do in Test footy.”
Simple as that.
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