Only four players will run out in Cardiff, Wales, on Saturday who featured in the famous 2007 World Cup quarter-final between New Zealand and France.
Respective captains Richie McCaw and Thierry Dusautoir and opposing fly-halves Dan Carter and Frederic Michalak are the four survivors from that heady night in the Welsh capital.
It was an occasion remembered not just for the shock result, but for so much more; the maniacal, bearded stare of Sebastien Chabal; the red, white and blue shirts France wore as they faced the Haka; the puzzling grey get-up worn by the All Blacks; the fact it was France’s World Cup and here they were, playing for their lives in Wales; and the night referee Wayne Barnes became as popular in New Zealand as a compendium of sheep gags.
These four men share the memory of that encounter, and, eight years later, are bound by one other irrefutable fact: This will be their last shot at the World Cup.
Let’s have a look at each player’s part in that famous game and see what’s changed since then as we seek clues as to who’ll come out on top in the Rugby World Cup 2015 clash on Saturday.
Richie McCaw
Then: England’s class of 2015 are now familiar with the harrowed, pale expression that rested on the All Blacks skipper’s visage in 2007. After the defeat, McCaw looked like someone—or 15 Frenchmen—had walked over his grave.
It was the earliest New Zealand had ever exited the World Cup and could conceivably have cost McCaw his job as captain.
Years later, even after the All Blacks had beaten France to win the World Cup in 2011, McCaw was clearly still struggling to accept the loss.
Writing in his book, The Open Side, per ESPN, McCaw opined that referee Barnes had been a major factor in the defeat:
My beef isn't with Barnes so much as with his inexperience. This was Barnes' biggest game by far. On the big stage, an inexperienced referee is likely to become so afraid of making a mistake that he stops making any decisions at all.
By the end of it, I thought Barnes was frozen with fear and wouldn't make any big calls.
Barnes was the focus of the outpouring of angst following the defeat, having failed to rule on what looked a forward pass in the build up to YannickJauzion’s winning try and also paying particular attention to McCaw’s work at the ruck.
The Guardian’s William Fotheringham pointed out in his post-match analysis: “Barnes...penalised Richie McCaw early enough at the breakdown to set the tone for the whole game.”
Now:McCaw did survive, as did that New Zealand coaching team, and together they went on to win the World Cup in 2011.
The 34-year-old is now the world’s most-capped player, rated by South African boss Heyneke Meyer as the best ever and will retire from All Blacks duty when this tournament is done.
He still wields a huge influence on this New Zealand side with his experience and leadership, but doubts have begun to creep in that Father Time is starting to tap him on the shoulder.
His yellow card and penalty count have risen with age, as Stuff.co.nz’s Andy Fryers points out:
As well as Michael Hooper, McCaw also concedes more penalties per match than South Africa's Schalk Burger, France's Thierry Dusautoir, England's Chris Robshaw and the Welsh flanker Sam Warburton.
McCaw's higher penalty rate stretches back at least as far as the last Rugby World Cup in 2011. However, his offending seems to have gotten worse.
In his 40 test starts since winning the World Cup, McCaw has averaged 1.48 penalties per match. In his last 20, the rate has increased to 1.7 and in his last ten, to 2 penalties per match.
Indeed, he has seen yellow in this World Cup for a trip on Argentina’s Juan Martin Fernandez Lobbe.
McCaw has always been famed for his ability to push the laws of the game to their limit, but perhaps with the march of time has come a downgrading of that skill.
Where once he was fast enough to evade capture in the act of skulduggery, he now gets collared.
Thierry Dusautoir
Then: If that night was McCaw’s betenoire, the 2007 quarter-final was the moment Thierry Dusautoir announced himself as a modern great.
The French back-rower made 38 tackles that night, and he scored his side’s first try in a performance that is still talked about to this day as one of the greatest defensive displays the game has ever seen.
To put that tackle count into some sort of context, he has played three games in this tournament and made only seven more than the total he amassed in that 80 minutes.
It’s remarkable to think now that the Toulouse talisman was not originally picked in the squad for that tournament, and he finished it with then-France defensive coach Dave Ellis lavishing praise on him.
"There is no emotion on his face; it is difficult to get two words out of him," he said, per the Guardian. "He just sits there calmly and takes everything in, then he goes out on to the field and changes into a monster. He's the dark destroyer."
Now: As captain, Dusautoir is France’s inspiration. He dragged them back into the 2011 World Cup final with a try in that 8-7 defeat, and he has been the totem around which Philippe Saint-Andre’s erratic selection policy has revolved.
If anything, the changing faces around the 33-year-old rather than his own form fluctuations have been the main hindrance to his influence on this French team.
But his importance was perhaps underlined most when he ruptured a bicep and missed the 2014 Six Nations. France finished fourth. This year, he battled back from a knee problem to face Scotland in France’s final pre-tournament loosener.
The Observer’s Iain Malin wrote that Dusautoir’s “first appearance on the big screen before the match received a deafening cheer from a fervent crowd,” and described him as a “key figure on his return after injury.”
A year younger than McCaw, there may be more left in the tank for Dusautoir if this game goes into the trenches. And that will bring a test of nerve for New Zealand coach Steve Hansen.
If the miles on McCaw’s clock catch up with him in the last 20 minutes, does his coach sacrifice the leader, whose decision-making is such a prized asset, for the energy of his younger heir Sam Cane, or does he let these two warriors go to the final bell?
Make no mistake, if this one is close, McCaw will not depart quietly.
Dan Carter
Then: A 25-year-old Carter, already the world’s most prodigious No. 10, limped out of the action after 55 minutes and watched his team implode without him eight years ago.
In Carter’s absence, Nick Evans took the reins and was unable to calm the panicked ranks of grey-shirted players around him.
The following year saw the Canterbury man swap Christchurch for Catalonia for a brief spell with Perpignan, perhaps in a bid to better understand the psyche of the nation who had twice risen from the dead to wreck All Black World Cup dreams.
Carter was denied his own personal chance at redemption in 2011 when injury ruled him out of the World Cup knockout rounds.
His understudy Aaron Cruden then got injured early in the final, and Stephen Donald, plucked from a spot of fishing to join the squad during the tournament after Carter went lame, rose from the bench to steer a nerve-shredded host nation to the promised land.
Now: Carter is bowing out along with McCaw when New Zealand’s World Cup is done. His next stop is a second stint in France with Racing 92.
Before then, he has unfinished business with this tournament. From back-up to the mercurial Carlos Spencer in 2003, to injury victim at crucial points of both the 2007 and 2011 iterations, the Webb Ellis Cup has left unwanted blanks on Carter’s CV.
He has tuned up for this knockout clash with a purring display against Tonga that saw the 33-year-old somewhere near his untouchable best. Hansen, concurs, per the Independent:
Physically he is one of the best tackling first five-eighths in the business, and his passing and kicking game has just got better and better. I think he’s a way better player now than when he started – a smarter player who understands the game a lot more. He was a raw talent back then; now he’s the full package.
In the same piece by Hugh Godwin, Carter’s back-up man in 2007, Nick Evans, draws perhaps the most poignant comparison when assessing Carter’s World Cup record.
When everyone is talking about the best soccer player in the world it always comes back to: ‘Yeah, he was great, but he never did anything in the World Cup’ or ‘he won two or three, like Pele, so he’s better.’ And you can say the same for Dan Carter. Arguably one of the best players of our generation but he hasn’t done that well in a World Cup.
This is Carter’s last chance to avoid joining that club.
Frederic Michalak
Then:Michalak was the only one of this illustrious quartet not to start in 2007.
Then a 24-year-old magician from Toulouse, he came off the bench to replace Lionel Beauxis in the second half with France 18-13 down.
And it was he who took receipt of the most controversial pass in World Cup history—which doesn’t look any further backward no matter how many times you watch it.
Barnes saw nothing untoward with Damien Traille’s handling, however, and Michalak scampered on, spinning out of a tackle and feeding Jauzion for the try that levelled the game.
Now: Michalak, who turns 33 the day before this game, is part of the unstoppable Toulon side, taking over the reins at fly-half from Jonny Wilkinson and leaving much of the flair he built his name on behind.
Wilkinson, remember, was Michalak's tormentor in-chief when England battered France into submission in the 2003 World Cup semi-final.
Now tutored by the retired England star, Michalak is a player transformed, as French forwards coach YannickBru told the Guardian: "We have lost the carefree boy who surfed on the wave of his talent and we have before us now a model professional player whose thirst for work is never quenched."
Behind a juggernaut pack and with a back line stocked with world-class names, Michalak is more facilitator than alchemist these days.
The tricks come out now and again, and we have seen some delights from him during the pool stages. He went missing in the last game against Ireland, however, and can ill afford to shrink from view again this weekend.
Which Pair Will Prevail?
There is a strange symmetry about the meeting of these pairs in this fixture some eight years later.
Two back-row warriors from the same mould will lead their sides out, but their fates may well lie in the hands of the other pair, the two men still with something to prove on the biggest stage of all.
It is surely too much to expect Dusautoir and Michalak to wreck All Black dreams again.
But as we saw in Brighton on the opening weekend, this game can make fools of us all.
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