ANALYSIS Over a lifetime of covering rugby, Phil Gifford has seen many of the greatest players to don the black jersey – and the biggest change in that time has been the arrival of professionalism in 1996. Today, in a series rating the best All Blacks of the professional era, he looks at midfielders and first five-eighths. Midfield Pita Alatini (1999-2001, 17 tests) A change of coaches, from Wayne Smith to John Mitchell, late in 2001, basically snuffed out Pita Alatini’s test career .
But for two seasons under Smith he was a star, showing the quick thinking and mercurial running that had led to him being offered a scholarship to King’s College when he was still at Ferguson Intermediate School in Ōtara. Aaron Mauger (2001-2007, 45 tests) Aaron Mauger was marked as a player of unusual maturity from the time he was selected, as an 18-year-old straight out of Christchurch Boys’ High, to fill in for Andrew Mehrtens at first five in the 1999 Canterbury team. Two years later, he was in the eye of the storm when coach Robbie Deans dropped Mehrtens from the Crusaders, for Mauger.
“He [Mauger] is a very mature kid, in life and on the rugby field,” Deans would say. Mauger’s reputation would potentially have been hugely enhanced if he’d been selected for the losing 2007 World Cup quarter-final with France. He would have been the perfect person to drop a late goal to win the match.
His All Blacks captain, Richie McCaw, had seen Mauger coolly snap a crucial 35m dropped go.