Fullback's trademark is picking those gaps

By CHRIS RATTUE

Leon MacDonald didn't just emerge from Christian Cullen's shadow this season. Remarkably, he managed to cast a bit of his own shade over the player many regard as the best All Black fullback ever.

It has not been all of MacDonald or Cullen's doing. Injury appears to have blunted Cullen's prowess, and maybe affected his top two inches as well.

A flash of the old brilliance here, a touch of the vacant there, it's as if he's playing on a memory which only allows the odd flashback.

There are even suggestions that Cullen will not be included in John Mitchell's All Black squad.

But MacDonald is a certainty for the national side and deserves the tag as this country's best fullback, even though he believes his best position might be in the midfield. That's what his old coaches in Blenheim believe, anyway.

"When I go back there they always ask when I'm going to play in the midfield again," says the 23-year-old MacDonald, who played in all the major national age-group teams.

"I've given up on being a first five-eighths. I don't really enjoy the whole responsibility of running the game. I prefer to run off other people's passes.

"But playing in the midfield is definitely still an option. It's where I played as a youngster and I certainly haven't given up on doing that again."

MacDonald will be at fullback for tonight's NPC final, when Canterbury start as strong favourites against Otago at Jade Stadium.

It will be his third NPC final - he played for Canterbury in the 1997 win against Counties Manukau and the year before that, when Marlborough lost their third division game to Wanganui.

An ankle injury left him on the sideline, though, for much of last year's NPC, including the Ranfurly Shield games and the loss in the final to Wellington.

It was a season of mixed results for MacDonald. He made the All Blacks for the first time, but only appeared off the bench.

And as can happen at the highest level, one incident clouded people's judgment of him.

At Ellis Park, when the All Blacks needed to swing last one attack into action in a desperate bid for victory, MacDonald forced the ball near his dead ball line. It suggested that he might not have the ability to do the right thing under pressure.

"It's never bothered me that. Other players were yelling out to me to push the ball down. Often people don't know the full story when things like that happen."

This season has marked his arrival as a quality fullback. He no longer has the spare-part feeling in the All Blacks, after starting all but two of this year's tests.

Whereas Cullen might swerve around the outside of defenders, MacDonald has that uncanny knack of spotting holes in the middle of defences.

Canterbury's methods this year have helped. Their athletic forwards, Andrew Mehrtens' long tactical kicking and their attack-minded backs pull opponents all over the field and disrupt opposing defensive systems, leaving gaps in the middle of the field. Gaps which MacDonald always seems to pick the right moment to run through.

Tonight he gets a final chance to show his wares in the domestic competition and then it will be off to Ireland Scotland and Argentina.

One of the questions now is whether he will be back with his "roomy" Cullen, whose place looks under threat.

"You room with people in the same position so I've spent a lot of time with Christian and even apart from that, we get on really well," MacDonald says.

"He is the greatest All Black fullback, certainly for people of my generation, and I never found it frustrating waiting behind him.

"I've learnt a lot rubbing shoulders with him."