Dan Carter lines up a penalty during the 2015 Rugby World Cup Final. Photo / Photosport
Dan Carter lines up a penalty during the 2015 Rugby World Cup Final. Photo / Photosport
If a thrillingly mad 24 hours of Champions League football this week which saw Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur triumph in their semifinals taught us anything it's that you should never give up and that, or perhaps because, sport will always have the capacity to surprise and thrill.
It can alsohurt, disappoint and send people into (hopefully temporary) despair. Ask Barcelona, who, incredibly, shipped four goals at Anfield to allow Liverpool into the Champions League final in Madrid and ask Ajax, who let in three second-half goals in Amsterdam to allow Spurs to join them for an all-English showdown on June 1.
You may not want to ask Lionel Messi, the Barcelona and Argentina striker who is perhaps the best of his generation and one of the greatest to play the game, because he was in floods of tears afterwards, and was then ordered to do a drugs test which forced him to miss the team bus to the airport.
When he eventually got there he was abused by various Barca supporters. It's difficult to imagine how his day could have got much worse from there.
And yet in the days before his team's semifinal he was talked about as a genius who could bend time and space on a grass field with his own will.
He was incredible in the first leg at home against Liverpool and yet hardly fired a shot in the second before missing the bus. As Sir Alex Ferguson said, football eh, bloody hell.
Which brings us in a very roundabout way to Dan Carter, arguably the All Blacks' finest ever first five but a man who seemed destined for World Cup disappointment until just over four years ago, and who was this week judged by the Herald as New Zealand's best World Cup No 10 for his performances in England in 2015.
Carter was himself in tears after the quarter-final defeat in Cardiff in 2007 and in crippling pain when invalided out of the 2011 event in New Zealand and there were even suggestions that he shouldn't be taken to the United Kingdom in 2015 due to his relatively poor form for the Crusaders.
Dan Carter with the Webb Ellis Trophy. Photo / Photosport
The All Blacks were determined to enjoy that World Cup rather than be weighed down by expectation as defending champions, saying "pressure was a privilege" and yet the weight Carter had put on himself to play a meaningful part in his final World Cup in his final year for the team is difficult to appreciate.
The All Blacks' loose forwards Kieran Read, Richie McCaw and Jerome Kaino, locks Brodie Retallick and Sam Whitelock and midfielder Ma'a Nonu were inspirational in those sudden death matches against France, South Africa and Australia, but Carter was the brains of the operation.
It takes a special player to be able to consistently deliver in those circumstances but to have the presence of mind and ability to drop goals from long-range in the semifinal against the Boks and final against the Wallabies marks him out as a great, a man who was Messi-like in terms of his ability to control and dominate a game, but a man, unlike Messi, whose talents were rewarded with a World Cup. (The 31-year-old Messi has played in four of the football versions without success.)
And then there was Carter's conversion of Beauden Barrett's try in the final at Twickenham, one of the world's great stadiums.
For the first time, Carter used his right foot, rather than his left – not to take the mickey, but just because he could and would never get the chance again.
"It took me back to my childhood where dad would teach me to kick with both feet. I used to practice conversions off my right and my left," Carter said afterwards.
"It was quite funny because prior to the start of the World Cup I was having a conversation with Aaron Smith and he asked me if I had ever kicked a conversion with my right foot. I said no, but funny you mention it because I would love to kick at least one in a test match.
"He was like, 'imagine if we are ahead by more than a try in the World Cup final, it's your last kick in a test match', and we kind of laughed and joked, 'yeah, that would be great'."
15. Ben Smith 2015 14. John Kirwan 1987 13. Joe Stanley 1987 12. Ma'a Nonu 2015 11. Jonah Lomu 1995 10. Dan Carter 2015 9. David Kirk 1987 8. Kieran Read 2011 7. Richie McCaw 2011 6. Jerome Kaino 2011 5. Sam Whitelock 2015 4. Brodie Retallick 2015 3. Owen Franks 2011 2. Sean Fitzpatrick 1987 1. Tony Woodcock 2011
