At 18 minutes into the conversation Dan Carter broke the bland, blue chip sheen he sometimes assumes off pitch and showed what can only be construed as a flicker of emotion.
It came after a succession of questions about a dreary Six Nations, Ireland's absurdly poor record against the All Blacks and the Irish winter conspiring against brimming, attack minded rugby. Given Argentina's emergence as the fourth best team, Carter was asked, will it be more difficult for European countries to do well in the World Cup.
"That's such a pretty negative sort of outlook," he replied breaking into a frustrated smile. If Carter said anything yesterday it was about New Zealand rugby culture.
It was about how players at his level think about the game as an emotion-free, process -driven, moment by moment breakdown of every decision and action in a game.
The winning of the game, he says, is the compiling of each point in time, victory a million pieces of action stitched together, all of it guided by an attack -driven spirit.
In the 2015 Rugby World Cup Final against Australia and two years after he met with Robert Kraft, the owner of the NFL's New England Patriots, about possibly joining the team as a kicker, Carter scored four penalties, converted two tries, the final one taken with his weaker right boot. He also kicked a drop goal.
He was named the Man of the Match and afterwards received the IRB Player of the Year award for the third time.
Conventionally handsome, corporately schooled and impossibly successful, there is a lot not to like about the twice World Cup winner, who like all of the other All Blacks down through history have never lost to Ireland.
The process
“If you start seeing it (losing to Ireland) as a negative, you’ll start worrying about the result. Purely, every time, I’ve played the Irish, it’s not ‘I don’t want to be the first team to lose to Ireland’. Otherwise you start getting those thoughts in your head, and they’ll actually happen.
“For us, obviously it (never losing to Ireland) is recognised, because that’s the history, but it’s always about the process. It’s never about the result. It’s just concentrating on doing what we have to in each moment of the game. The process and the result will take care of itself.”
Carter does do irony. Now with Racing Metro in Paris after a spell in Perpignan, his defence coach is his old outhalf rival Ronan O’Gara, who has been teaching him how to pronounce Foróige, the Youth Citizenship Awards and the reason he is in Dublin. He also kicks with O’Gara but is not ‘coached’ by him.
It’s not lost on anyone that the dynamic between the Irish coach and the 112-times capped Kiwi pupil is shot through with a specific tactic used by New Zealand when they played Ireland in previous years.
“Who would have thought it? Playing against Ireland we used to target the 10 channel and now he’s a defence coach,” he says in a merciless observation. He then rows back.
“He’s still early into his career and I’m sure he’s got an extremely bright future. We’ve had a few competitions and I’m undefeated against him and I’m quite proud of that. There’s no coaching, it’s winners takes all. We’re not trying to help each other at all. We’re trying to get one up on each other.”
He says O’Gara is good because coaching defence is all about attitude, about technical details but also “wanting it”. He says he doesn’t watch much of the Six Nations, a fact that is interpreted as the stiffest criticism he could have expressed about the competition.
But he sees the Six Nations rugby improving over the final matches. Again the championship’s perceived lack of vim and adventure is not due to the Northern Hemisphere weather but to skill sets.
“In New Zealand it is a very attacking style of play where you want to score tries no matter what,” he says. “You have to back your skills. It’s pretty terrible weather in the winter but you continue to try to perform those skills whatever the conditions. It will change your game slightly but it shouldn’t mean ‘right we not going to try and score points today because of the weather’.”
With 1,598 points for the All Blacks, he knows.
