Why Richie McCaw apologised to Dan Carter on the pitch in 2015
Dan Carter has admitted that he forced Richie McCaw to apologise to him on the pitch in 2015.
Carter demands really high standards from his teammates, and that includes the equal GOAT Richie McCaw.
In an interivew the flyhalf looks back at a memorable 2015 in which he guided his All Blacks side to Rugby World Cup glory and explains why he got an apology from Richie McCaw on the pitch.
It might just surprise the **** out of you.
CREDIT: Trailblazers
New Zealand coach Steve Hansen spoke at press conference at the Royal Park Hotel on Sunday.
“I’m still hurting as you’d expect, and I’m sure the whole country’s hurting. You come to a tournament like this and you want to win the thing. Last night, we got beaten by a team that was better than us.”
“I don’t know if it was so much better. I think it’s small margins when you get two teams like that. Is it hard to stomach? Of course, it is. It’s gut-wrenching. But life’s not fair, so why would sport be fair?
“You don’t always get the thing you want and when you don’t, you have to measure your character on how you deal with it. I’ve been very proud of the way the boys have stood tall and kept their heads up. We’ve got a week now to have another opportunity to play.”
On whether the bronze medal match is a waste of time:
“That’s not for me to comment on. The fact is the game is there and we have to get up. They’re the inconvenient facts. How do we get up? We get connected again, and we set ourselves an immediate goal and we work hard to make sure we really enjoy this week.
“It will be the last week this team is together and we have an opportunity to do it well. I know in talking to the boys that we’ll get a response.”
On whether England’s performance surprised him:
“It didn’t take us by surprise, we knew we were in for a hell of a battle. This England team hasn’t just snuck up and poked us in the face. They won 18 games in a row and there’s only one other team that’s done that in the history of the game and that makes them a formidable side.
“We played them last year, managed to win by a point. It was a titanic struggle. They were coming into this tournament over the last four years with a massive amount of pain themselves. The massive adversity of not even making the quarter-finals of their own tournament (in 2015) hurt them.
“They’ve been working and working their butts off, probably more than any other England team in history. We got what we expected and we just have to acknowledge that on the night, they did things a little better than we did.
“It’s about execution and they did it really well. You just can’t take away from the fact they played well. When you look at our own stats, apart from that middle part of the lineout, most of our stats are pretty good.”
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