Going Deep - Scotty Stevenson

There are few teams in professional rugby that can muster the kind of roster-wide belief the Crusaders can. As head coach Scott Robertson said last week after his under-strength side strangled the life out of the Hurricanes, “We go to the well for those that dug it for us.” On Saturday night in the Hamilton drizzle, they went to the well again.

Even before the game kicked off, emotions were running high. The Crusaders had gathered early in the day at the team hotel to watch as Wyatt Crockett was presented with his 200th game jersey. It was embroidered with date and milestone and opponent and it was presented to him by his wife Jenna, because this was not about a player; it was about a family and the very fabric of the franchise.

“Jenna has been a part of this team for as long as Crocky has,” Scott Robertson said later that
evening as he talked about the presentation. “She has given us her time as much as he has.”

It had set the scene for the task ahead. The Crockett kids, Sonny and Emmett had been presented their jerseys, too. Their father’s greatest achievements, now adorned in their father’s achievements. The man of the moment was a touch speechless after that, by all accounts. Few words. A bit of dust in the room. So much on the line that night.

As a general rule, a Chiefs-Crusaders match needs no extra spice. In recent years this has become one of the marquee games of the season, purely because it is fuelled by the kind of hatred most often witnessed in divorce courts and on old episodes of Jerry Springer. Hate, at least in this context, is not a wasted emotion. Chiefs Assistant Coach and former Crusader, Tabai Matson says both sides lift their intensity in the week leading up to the clash. Both sides have used the other as equal parts irritation and aspiration.

There was no Sam Whitelock, no Ryan Crotty, no Jack Goodhue, no Jordan Taufua. All four of those players are key starters. All four are national representatives. It is not overstating things to say that most teams would struggle to plug the gaps left by those sorts of absences. The day prior to the match, Assistant Coach Brad Mooar had said, both simply and prophetically, “We’re going deeper.” And he believed it, and so did the players.

Crockett, for his part, was happy to have left any fanfare behind him at the team hotel. He was on the bench that night, with his family watching in the stands. As Matt Todd led the Crusaders onto Waikato Stadium, Crockett simply wandered down the tunnel with the other reserves, right at the back, and took his place on the pine. He would eventually enter the game in the 46th minute, right about the time the Crusaders really started to go to work. About the time depth counted for more than anything else.

When Heiden Bedwell-Curtis had crossed for the first of the Crusaders’ tries off a quick tap from Codie Taylor, it looked as if the red machine was still purring despite its replacement parts. However, the Chiefs are not the kind of team to be bullied in their backyard, and Sean Wainui scored the home side’s opening try right on quarter time. Soon after, Charlie Ngatai made the Crusaders pay for some loose transition work in midfield, kicking the ball downfield, winning a jackal on David Havili and setting up the breakdown for Luke Jacobsen to score on the right.

Up 13-10, this was the time the Chiefs needed to break the Crusaders. Instead, the Crusaders hitched up their britches and dug in; they went back to what has worked for them from the beginning of time: they went to the forwards and scored through the lineout drive. Matt Todd, the captain, eventually surfaced through a sea of shoves and pushes and acrimony to claim the score. They took a seven-point lead into halftime.

There are no guarantees on nights such as this. Not when these two teams are involved. There are too many variables, too many players who can break a game apart. Seven points is no kind of lead to hang your hat on, and perhaps that’s what the Crusaders understand better than most. When the side had found themselves down by 29 points against the Waratahs, they had gathered under the posts and talked about winning the next moment, and the moment after that, and the moment after that. They believed, as all good teams do, that if they just got their shit together, they would eat up that deficit and come out on top.

Now they clung to a lead in Hamilton as a poxy light rain fell, and they began to tick off those moments. A try after the break, a maul that grunted and ground its way upfield, a knack for the long kick and an eye for the spaces that mattered. Crockett’s early entry in the second half may have been premeditated. What better way to remind the team of what was at stake? On the park: Quinten Strange and Ethan Blackadder. Just like the 200-game veteran who now joined them they traced their roots back to the tiny town of Collingwood. This is where a young Wyatt Crockett measured himself against Ethan’s father Todd. Just how deep would you like to go?

Deeper: It was Crockett’s great friend Luke Romano who managed to put the ball down after a typically gritty Crusaders goal line siege late in the game. It stretched the lead to 14 points. A point for every season the most-capped player in Super Rugby history has been setting scrums on the training paddock at Rugby Park.

And then it was done. The Chiefs were good, but the Crusaders had gone to the well again. They stood there afterward as Jenna and Sonny and Emmett joined Crockett on the field, and the whole team gathered behind them for a photo to mark the occasion. And in that moment, a realisation: this team is more than a franchise, it is a family.

And there is nothing deeper than that.