Dylan Cleaver: Too soon to pin hopes on Slade

Colin Slade has a bit of work to do before he becomes Dan Carter's back-up. Photo / Getty Images

Sometimes you can want something so badly you talk yourself into it happening. It's a phenomenon so common they've got a term for it - self-fulfilling prophecy.

And so it seems to be with the rugby media and Highlanders star recruit Colin Slade.

There's a sense that, with the dearth of credible contenders, we're prepared to overlook anything to anoint Slade as the back-up to Daniel Carter - even the facts.

The 23-year-old wasn't awful against the Cheetahs on Friday night, but he wasn't very good either. If you were awarding marks out of 10 and were being totally objective, your finger would be hovering over numbers four and five.

But 20 minutes of composed test footy in Sydney last year - as opposed to the harum-scarum performance by Aaron Cruden in the preceding hour, or the disastrous cameo by Stephen Donald in Hong Kong one test later - seems to have been enough to convince most of us that Slade is the man.

Shouldn't we wait a few more games at least, or is the fact he has come through the Canterbury-Crusaders system evidence enough that he is the answer to Graham Henry's trickiest question?

It would be wrong to say the Highlanders beat the Cheetahs in spite of Slade, but it would be far closer to the truth than saying he was a major reason they won.

He lost the ball in contact, he fumbled, he threw bad passes. One turnover led immediately to a try. In short, he was ragged.

Yes, he made the occasional nice interjection and his turnover is credited for Adam Thomson's first try, but you'd hope that with the amount of times a first five-eighths touches the ball during a game, he'd do at least a couple of good things.

About the best thing you could say about him is that he wasn't Donald or Cruden - or Stephen Brett, who, arguably, has been the most consistent No 10 behind Carter this season - because if either of them had put together the sort of performance Slade did on Friday night, there would have been an entirely different reaction to it.

The focus would have shifted 180 degrees from the couple of clever things he did to the numerous errors; the sort of errors that, as Henry is wont to say, lose test matches.

Which would not be fair on Slade, either. He's only a couple of hours into a comeback from a broken jaw that had him eating dinner through a straw for a few weeks.

Expecting him to be running the show, as Carter does at the Crusaders, is plain ridiculous.

He might get there. Let's hope he does. The Highlanders and, probably, the All Blacks will be the better for it.

Let's just not pretend he's there yet.