Mc Caw calf Hindrance against France

The Star
Wednesday 24th, 2007
by Nick Torleton

Richie McCaw is not letting injury be an excuse for what happened in the RWC quarter final.

Half back Byron Kelleher has claimed that a calf injury & a viral infection affected the All Black skipper in the loss to France.

But McCaw said that the virus only affected him before th match vs. Italy, but he did have a tight calf early in the week before the quarter final.

"Come the game, it was pretty much fine", he said. It did not impede him against France, he said. "It was a bit sore after the match, but a few other things are worse."

Two weeks of mulling over what went wrong in Cardiff have not let McCaw to think anything should have been done differently.

"I don't know if there will be things that will pop up as time goes on. I think we were well-prepared and ready to go."

France were pretty desperate in the second half -"they got their tails up and a couple of calls went against us. That's the way it goes. I've questioned myself a lot on what we could have done differently."

The All Blacks didn't perform their best against France, "but we tried bloody hard to".

The captain doesn't want to get into the debate about the future of Graham Henry and the management team, but said he'd enjoyed what they'd done over the past few years.

"It'd be a pity if they get judged on one game, but I guess that's the way it is. Hopefully the right thing will be done."

If they carried on, it would be fine with him he said.

With a fortnight on his hands back home that he was not expecting to have, McCaw has been his pilot's rating up at the control of the vintage Dakota of the Southern DC3 Trust, of which he is patron.