Crusaders carry torch for Canterbury

For coach Todd Blackadder (right), free passes because of the circumstances were never an option. He insisted on a routine, despite no home ground and constant travel, telling everyone to 'just get on with it'. Photo / Dean Purcell

You might have seen the Crusaders this year. They've been to a town near you. Actually, they've been to a town pretty much near everyone.

Nudging 100,000km in air and road miles during a five-month boys' trip, they're 80 good minutes away from concluding the Greatest New Zealand Sports Story Ever Told.

Hyperbole?

Try to think of another team in our sporting history that has had to play through as much adversity; whose players and coaches guiltily kiss their wives and children goodbye and hope like hell another "big one" doesn't strike while they're away; who have debunked all the accepted wisdom about playing in one of the world's toughest rugby competitions without their home ground; who have kept on winning.

You could maybe point to the 1953-54 New Zealand cricket side in South Africa.

Teammates wept for Bob Blair as he walked from the tunnel on to Ellis Park just hours after learning his fiancee had died in the Tangiwai rail disaster, and felt physically sick to see the bandaged and bloodied Bert Sutcliffe take guard on a lethal pitch.

It was by comparison, however, a brief moment in time - and they lost, bravely but heavily.

The Crusaders have not lost very often - their record this year stands at 14-4 - and have a chance to notch their eighth Super rugby title while, in the words of towering lock Brad Thorn, "psychological warfare from Mother Nature" is waged against them.

Remarkable doesn't come close to describing it.

This story, like most modern-day Canterbury tales, starts on Tuesday, 12.51pm, February 22.

"I was having lunch with Wyatt Crockett in Kilmore St, near the middle of town, when the earthquake hit," says halfback Andy Ellis.

"We just braced ourselves against the wall of the cafe until it stopped and then went outside to see what was going on.

"The thing I remember is the dust, there was dust flying everywhere, and all the cracked windows. There were all these freaked-out people running around."

Ellis tried to ring home, to his wife and 1-year-old daughter. The lines were down.

"It was a matter of jumping in your car and getting home as quickly as you could to check your immediate family was okay, then checking on the rest of your family."

His actions were being repeated by Kieran Read, eating in another part of town, and by several other teammates and thousands of people across Christchurch.

In the following minutes, hours and days, the scale of the devastation to the city and loss of life would become apparent.

It left Crusaders chief executive Hamish Riach tiptoeing across a public relations highwire without a safety net. Yes, reconfiguring the season without a home ground was going to be a logistical nightmare.

Yes, it was a potential fiscal calamity, but just down the road in Ashburton a family was grieving for Crusaders board member Phil McDonald, who died inside the Pyne Gould building.

"Personally I found that very difficult," Riach says. "In a way Phil became our touchstone around the earthquake. You grieve for a city and the 180 people that died, but Phil was our face, the human element of the disaster. You quickly realised that in Christchurch, everyone had their own Phil."

The needs of rugby and the Super 15 seemed altogether prosaic when weighed against the needs of family. Never did "the show must go on" sound so hollow.

And it didn't go on. Not immediately, anyway.

With the backing of the New Zealand Rugby Union, Sanzar and the Hurricanes, their match in Wellington scheduled for the Saturday after the quake was cancelled.

Having lost their opener to the Blues, and as it became apparent that their home ground, AMI Stadium, was unusable, it seemed their season on and off the field was at the point of unravelling.

"If in a quiet moment you let your mind wander too far ahead, it was very hard to cope," Riach says. "There were too many imponderables around how badly the stadium was damaged and how we were going to manage our season.

"The way we coped was to break down the problems into bite-sized pieces and concentrate on those that were most urgent.

"That meant taking our first two games to Nelson and just concentrating on getting that right. Then working something out in London, then Timaru and so on."

Meanwhile, the players and coaches were making their own decisions.

Let others feel sorry for them, or make excuses for their failures. None of that would wash within the squad. The earthquake and its aftermath would give them no free passes.

Coach Todd Blackadder would show how much respect he had for his players by raising, not lowering, the expectations he placed on them.

What he expected was the Super 15 title.

The players came up with their own rules and rituals. Some decided they wouldn't shave until water was restored to all of Canterbury. Some still haven't shaved.

But the most rigidly followed rule was the one that allowed them to separate their jobs from their lives.

"When we went through the gates at Rugby Park [the Crusaders' training base] and parked our cars, that was it. We were in rugby mode," says Ellis. "We had to shut everything else out for the time we were there. Once we drove out the gates, that's when we could start thinking about our families and everything that was happening again."

In that respect they might even have been lucky, says former All Black Jon Preston, a born-and-bred Cantabrian temporarily exiled in Wellington.

"They've had rugby to focus on," he says. "It's something. A lot of people in Christchurch don't have a major thing to focus on, something that can take their minds away from their dire situation for a little while."

The Crusaders, he says, have still faced massive stresses and difficulties, "but in some ways it might have triggered something and even helped, though that's a moot point".

Assistant coach Daryl Gibson agrees. He firmly believes that rugby has allowed the players to release the pressure valve. He's seen it first hand.

"After we called off the game in Wellington, we started training again at Lincoln for the Waratahs match [on March 4]. We hadn't had a hit-out for close to two weeks, so we played a game situation with two teams.

"There was a lot of aggression and you could see the players working out a lot of the stuff they'd been carrying around with them," Gibson recalls.

The coaches used that emotion to their advantage.

"It was from that point on we said to the guys, 'Listen, everyone has pretty much written us off.' We knew we had a good team, but most of the media said we couldn't win playing on the road without a home base. The one thing I know about this Crusader team and the teams of the past is that if you tell them they can't do something, it's great motivation," Gibson says.

Wallabies coach Robbie Deans publicly doubted whether the team he coached to multiple titles could add another one under the circumstances, but had the media actually written off the Crusaders? A wide smile forms on Gibson's face.

"I don't know if they actually did say it, but we made it up anyway," he laughs.

So began the journey - a real one, not a mantra like the one John Mitchell tagged on the 2003 World Cup campaign. The itinerary: Nelson, Nelson, Dunedin, London, Timaru, Tauranga, Nelson, Perth, Cape Town, Bloemfontein, Napier, Brisbane, Timaru, Wellington, Nelson, Cape Town and Brisbane. Aside from the Australia to South Africa legs, they would return home to Christchurch between every game.

"We took a game to London. Who would take a home game away from your home base?" a still incredulous Blackadder exclaims. "There were times when I thought it was going to be a big challenge and big obstacles, but we've overcome them all."

That's only the rugby side of it. For some, the biggest challenge was walking out the door every week.

The leaving was tough, Ellis said, but he's tried to quakeproof the house. For example, nothing is left hanging on the walls.

"It's definitely tough leaving; it can be daunting."

Gibson has preschool triplets and a 5-year-old daughter, Poppy, who still asks him when they can leave Christchurch and move to Australia, where it doesn't shake.

He moved his family to the in-laws in Tauranga for nine weeks. His house was damaged on February 22 and the aftershocks keep adding to the disruption. The big jolt in June cracked the hot-water cylinder and left him with barely a dry thing in the house.

His family has returned to Sumner, as does the guilt when he leaves.

"I do feel guilty and I think a lot of us feel the same way when we go away," Gibson says. "We know there could be another big one and we're not there. In the past fortnight, that's been the case for me - I've just been hoping there's not a major event while I'm away."

They don't talk about it much when they're on the road. As Thorn says: "We don't need to because we're living it, the aftershocks and that, it's psychological warfare from Mother Nature."

They rarely talk of personal hardships because their sacrifices pale in comparison with those who have businesses in the red zone, or those residents of badly affected suburbs.

They don't like being separated from family, but for most of the past four months they've slept in comfortable beds, eaten in nice restaurants and flown at the front end of planes.

Blackadder says rugby games aren't won on emotion, so they've concentrated on phrases like "being clinical" and "executing game plans".

The sort of stuff the Crusaders have always been a cut above (although before the Stormers match they watched and were left in awe by a DVD of inspirational stories from the quake that was compiled for them).

As they see it, the team have become an inspiration for the ravaged city simply by doing their jobs.

"There's been a lot of adversity. It's hard to describe unless you've seen Christchurch," Blackadder tries to explain.

"We're a beacon of hope for our community and the guys want to do well for our supporters because they're going through such hardships. The players know that people back home don't have running water and power, and that they're scared. It's given the team a lot of perspective."

By his own admission, 1974 Commonwealth Games gold medallist Dick Tayler has spent too much time in recent months getting angry.

There was his well-publicised resignation from the Halberg Awards voting academy, but mostly he's been angry at Mother Nature, frustrated at the pace of the rebuilding and sad about the prospect of "people moving away from a beautiful city".

He's ready now to let a little light back in. The president of the Canterbury Rugby Supporters Club will be there at Suncorp Stadium tonight. You can't underestimate what the win would mean to him and his fellow residents of Christchurch.

"You've got to understand, it will be like a shot of adrenaline," Tayler said.

"What the Crusaders have done is give a bit of hope. From day one you got the feeling they were going to put their heart and soul into it."

Thorn admits that this particular final - and he's played a few in his long cross-code career - is bigger than usual.

"In the past when I've played grand finals it's been about the team and myself. But this one ... I feel responsibility, there's more to this game."

It's more than a game, more than a title even - the Crusaders already have seven on the sideboard. It would be more like the affirmation of a love affair.

"People love the fact we've been on the road the whole time, we've had injuries, we've had obstacles, but we've never complained. We've just got on with it.

"People back home are really enjoying that. They're really proud of us," Thorn says, his gravelly voice finally getting to his payoff line.

"And we're really proud of them."

The Crusaders aren't the first team to lose their home after a natural disaster. The New Orleans Saints couldn't play at their Superdome after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Their 2009 Super Bowl win was seen as a symbol of the city's rebirth.

"Funnily enough, we talked about the Saints and what they went through and how their team and their stadium became a symbol and how important it was for that city to have a winning team," Gibson says.

Put that in perspective, though. It took the team a little more than three years to win a title after Katrina and by then they had their stadium back. The year they had to relocate, they went down 3-13.

The Crusaders still don't know when they'll even get their home back and they won't have wasted too many hours thinking about it.

It's just one building of many in a devastated city that continues to wake up to a nightmare every day.

Wouldn't it be nice if the city woke up tomorrow with a smile on its face?