Cool, calm Cruden ready for job ahead

BY TOBY ROBSON

Pressure? Are you kidding.

Aaron Cruden should have bags under his eyes from staying up at night in Sydney this week playing over the All Blacks moves.

His ears should be burning from the buzzing advice of well-meaning team-mates and coaches reinforcing the importance of the job at hand.

All Blacks first-five. Heir to King Carter.

The naming of the test side to play Australia has been delayed till tomorrow, but the 21-year-old will wear No 10 at ANZ Stadium on Saturday.

The nation will hyper-analyse his every move with an eye towards next year's World Cup and the prospects of Cruden, rather than Dan Carter, manning the rudder.

But don't expect the smallest and least experienced guy on the field to be overawed by the challenge.

Pressure is not a rugby match. Pressure is being told at 19 you have testicular cancer. It's the teenage equivalent of the 7.1 earthquake that rocked Christchurch last Saturday.

Mother nature has given perspective to many in the All Blacks camp this week. Cruden already had it.

The cancer diagnosis really did change his outlook, he said. "It meant I had to mature a lot more quickly.

"It made me take nothing for granted and realise that you have to do what you enjoy because you don't know when your time's up and how long you are going to be around."

There is another string to the calm assuredness of the man stepping into Carter's shoes.

Cruden has been with the All Blacks now for four months. He has played five tests off the bench and scored a try against Wales.

And crucially he has trained with the side for countless hours. The calls are not new, the gameplan is not foreign and his team-mates are not strangers. The teacher has taken his apprentice under his wing and Cruden said he would call Carter after the test to ask how he thought he had gone.

It is a transition that coach Graham Henry planned in advance. There would be no hospital pass, like the one thrown Stephen Donald's way last year.

Cruden is at ease in the All Blacks environment. His body language is assured and his voice heard. He handles media like a veteran because he's been here all year.

Second-five Ma'a Nonu joked with his new No10 during training at Leichardt Oval yesterday in the same way he does with Carter.

"I look at him [Nonu] and gain a lot of confidence because I've played with him through the Super 14 and we've got a bit of a combination going," Cruden said. "I think that's something that will ease my nerves a bit."

In fact the All Blacks' likely backline – Piri Weepu, Cruden, Nonu, Conrad Smith and Cory Jane – would be the Hurricanes' were it not for Mils Muliaina and Israel Dagg.

The question is how much the gameplan changes under Cruden's stewardship. He runs more than Carter and his kicks out of hand are not as prolific.

But his confidence is the same. It extends to wanting to take the goal-kicking duties to "prove some critics wrong". It extends to welcoming opponents who try to expose his lack of size in defence.

He admits the butterflies will gather during the next four days, but the concept of being nervous in the 80 minutes after the opening whistle is a foreign one.

"My style is that I like to just get out there and play footy. You probably find you get a lot more pressure during the week than when you are actually out on the field.

"When you get out there it's just another game, another field against some other opposition. You just want to go out there and do what you love."

For Cruden, rugby is escapism in its most raw form. It is a hectic, adrenaline-rushed, testosterone-pumped environment that leaves no space for whether you've left the stove on, or whether you had cancer.

- © Fairfax NZ News