OPINION: Has the country gone mad?
For the past few weeks there has been a discussion about who should play No 10 for the All Blacks. You might as well wonder if Charlie Watts should be the Stones front man when Mick Jagger's at the audition. It's over. Aaron Cruden isn't just the best No 10 in New Zealand right now, he is one of the best of all time.
Yeah, yeah, there I go, waving my big hyperbole in the air again, but Cruden and the Chiefs have taken us back to a special time. They have gone back to the seventies when little men were valued, when skill and intelligence were prized above brute force, when the '71 Lions taught the world how to play. Right now Dave Rennie's Chiefs are teaching the world how to play.
They weren’t very good against the Blues in in so many ways. They were smashed at the breakdown, their lineout fell apart when Nathan Harris came on, they were absurdly whistled off the park in the first half , their kick chase was atrocious, they missed more first up tackles than they have all season. And yet they won 29-23 because they can pass and the Blues can’t.
The Blues did have one moment of absolutely perfect passing and they cut the Chiefs open with it. From a lineout, Bryn Hall's pass to Tevita Li was spot on, Li then put it in front of the looping Ihaia West and West gave an accurate pass to Rene Ranger. And then Ranger butchered the try, not helped by Hall's running line, because he gave the final pass to the wrong side.
Until Tana Umaga finds blokes who can see and execute the right pass, the Blues will go on butchering victories. Note to self, Tana. Playing wings in the centre is asking for trouble.
It is not a mistake this Chiefs side would have made. Their passing is drilled, just as it was all those years ago. The Lions did more work on the pass than any other skill. In training if a pass was ever behind the man or too high, there was a sense of collective shame. They ran relay races, the pass against the man. The pass was the code that converted the possible into reality.
Possession, not position, meant attack. Mike Gibson called it "responsible speculation". That is how it is for the Chiefs. You can see that they have made playing the game fun. They have also made watching the game fun, which is why more than 20,000 turned up to see them play in Hamilton. And the man running the show is Cruden, whose influence reminds me of Barry John.
Gibson said, "I am sure that the flyhalf is the person who reflects the attitude and the potential of any team of which he is a member, and no one did that with more individuality and with a greater sense of character than Barry John. His ambitions had very few limitations…Very few flyhalves can have daunted opponents as completely as Barry John."
Cruden daunts the opposition. His highlights reel from the previous few weeks is frightening. He turned the game against the Blues.
Cruden's chip ahead created the first try. With the Chiefs 10 points down, Cruden seized the moment, anticipated before every other player on the pitch and was through the gap for the try. Minutes later he was holding Ranger with an inside show to create the chink of space for a try on the outside. He then stopped a Blues counter by not rushing in but blocking the inside pass.
The previous week Cruden tackled and then turned over a lock forward. But what about that second-half try? He pulled up the entire Brumbies defence by threatening the line and showing the ball to Charlie Ngatai. The Brumbies fullback was still flopping about on the bank when James Lowe caught Cruden's left-foot kick and scored. That was Barry John reborn. I know already it will be my highlight of the season.
The week before, Cruden picked up a ball off his toes and spun and gave the pass in one movement for the try. Gibson points out that "rugby breaks down into an appreciation of what is possible…If you are willing to be positive, you can achieve anything. If you are too conservative, you cannot really enjoy the game."
The arrival of Kieran Kane at the Chiefs is making anything possible. It has been a pleasure to watch little men such as Brad Weber, Cruden, Lowe and Damian McKenzie show how beautiful the game can be. England largely bashed their way to a Grand Slam. Men such as James Haskell were told to operate in a very narrow channel and smash anything that moved, with or without the ball. That's how England played at the 2009 Junior World Cup and Cruden ran rings round them.
Lima Sopoaga is a tidy operator but one of the great rugby myths is how well he played against South Africa last year. Sopoaga had a moment in the match, a moment that blinded. The rest was ordinary. Beauden Barrett is a fantastic fullback who can lose his cool at 10.
It is time for New Zealand to declare a no-contest. The country should treasure Cruden because the bloke is a rugby genius and they don't come along very often.
