'Hairs on the back of my neck still stand up': McCaw on defending All Blacks' 'home'

The All Blacks have played 50 times at Eden Park since they last lost a Test there, 31 years ago. Scotty Stevenson talks to players who have been a part of that streak about why "The Garden" stands alone as the team’s true fortress.

The All Blacks will take to that hallowed turf on Saturday night for the 94th time in a Test match. They’ve won 80 of them. They’ve drawn three. They’ve lost just 10. They haven’t played South Africa there since 2013, when Bizzy du Plessis was marched off the park for a double-yellow and the home side eased to a 29-15 victory. South Africa’s last win in Auckland was in 1937, which is a long time ago. So long ago that the Hindenburg was still in one piece.

They’ve come close since, most notably in 1994 when the sides drew 18-18. No one really talks about that match or that result. They get stuck instead on the 23-20 loss to France, which immediately preceded it.

That loss. The last one. The one from which the All Blacks built the most incredible single-venue record in the history of Test rugby. The try from the end of the earth to the most secure rugby dominion on earth.

Why has Eden Park come to represent something so special to the All Blacks? What is it about that famous field, built upon a swamp and the shattered dreams of would-be raiders, that makes it so unique?

Simply, this is the home the All Blacks built. Not by choice at first, but over time, as victory was piled on victory, and a run became a streak, and a streak became a quest, and a quest became a record. This was the ground that, more than any other in the country, came to symbolise the biggest games, played in front of the largest crowds. A test at Eden Park was a defining afternoon and then a defining night. Sure, the All Blacks have had their share of success in all the other towns, but there is no place like "home".

Richie McCaw played the first of his 22 tests at Eden Park in 2002, and the last of them in 2015. Along the way, he helped the side win back the Bledisloe Cup in 2003 and return the Webb Ellis Trophy to New Zealand in 2011. His final match on New Zealand soil was against Australia at Eden Park. The All Blacks crushed them 41-13, and McCaw was subbed off the field in the 61st minute. The crowd rose as one and clapped him off.

“The hairs on the back of my neck still stand up when I think about that night,” he tells me from the family home in Wānaka.

“It was the noise! I wouldn’t have expected that for a guy getting a breather with a quarter of the game to go!”

It was a special night, as New Zealand said goodbye to one of the very best to don the black jersey. So special, that the vast majority of the 50,000 there that night stayed long after the final whistle to hear his captain’s address. He says now he was already thinking that he still had to go and win the World Cup again.

“I only lost two games in New Zealand, and my philosophy was that no team was going to get an easy one when they came to visit. Eden Park fed that narrative, but when I started, the record wasn’t really such a big thing. It just became something as the years went by, and the wins kept coming.

“I think it was the fact that it has played host to so many big moments – Bledisloe Cup battles, and world cups, and it was the biggest venue we played in here, and even bigger once the stand was finished for the 2011 World Cup.

“When you played for the All Blacks at Eden Park, you really felt like you were home. When I would come back with the Crusaders for Super Rugby games, it always seemed strange to turn right to the visitors’ changing rooms, rather than left to ‘ours’.”

Mils Muliaina knows every corner of Eden Park.

“If you blindfolded me and dropped me inside that changing room, I would know exactly where I was and where everything is.”

A member of the 100-test club, the World Cup winner was a fixture in Auckland sides before his elevation to the All Blacks. He knows the ground like the back of his hand and says the national team all share that sense of familiarity with it.

“The timings were always the same, the changing room was always yours, you’re always in your right spot. Right before you go out to warm up, you can sense the atmosphere building, and you understand exactly what it will be like when you first emerge from the tunnel.

“Even the bus ride there. When you got to the gate, you knew the last song was on the discman, or the iPod, or the iPhone, and the last thought you may have had of messing up that night leaves you. That was what Eden Park games were always like; they had a rhythm of their own. It was our rhythm.”

McCaw and Muliaina were already veterans of the team when Israel Dagg first played at Eden Park, against Tonga in the opening match of the Rugby World Cup in 2011. He recalls warming up for that fixture in the changing room, watching Jonah Lomu closing out the opening ceremony.

“To me, it always felt like part of being an All Black was getting to play at Eden Park. It’s a hell of a place with so many special memories for the team, and getting ready for that match, I truly knew that I was home, that I belonged there.

That night didn’t go completely to plan for young Dagg, though.

“I accidentally sat in Keven Mealamu’s seat. CJ [Cory Jane] was sitting in seat number two, on the left-hand side of the room by the bathroom door, and I just wanted to sit next to him. Big mistake! Seat number one was Kevvy’s, and he did not hesitate to shoo me out of it. From then on, seat number three was mine. That’s the way it stayed.

“And that was a key part of it, really. The seat in the changing room was the same, the bus ride was the same, the hotel we stayed at was the same, and the room we stayed in was the same. It only felt like that in Auckland, which is a weird thing to say because we are a team from all across the country. Even so, everything about an Eden Park test week felt more like an All Blacks week.”

The hotel. In those days, it was the Heritage, on Hobson St in the CBD. Once upon a time, it was the tallest building in town and housed the Farmer’s Department Store. The top floor was the grand tearoom, with lights the size of wine barrels hanging from the ornate Art Deco ceiling. Windows to the harbour allowed the northern light to play on carpet the colour of calf shit. The All Blacks would pose for team photos in that room before every series.

“I had more than 100 stays at that hotel,” says McCaw nostalgically. “It was pretty much the same room every time, and it came to feel like home for sure.”

For Muliaina, that hotel was as much a part of the experience of a test week as Eden Park. He remembers all the staff, the way they treated the team, the shortcuts found in service lifts and stairwells, breakfasts in shirt sleeves – never singlets.

“We used to start most camps in Auckland, so there was always that extra familiarity. The hotel was always the same, the week was always the same. Regardless of where we had been, the Heritage Hotel remained familiar to us. There was definitely something special about it. It was home.”

Home. That is the word – the concept – that underpins all of this.

“It’s a feel,” says Kieran Read. “You have to acknowledge it in some ways, indulge in a bit of an out-of-body experience that comes through the history of the team over many years.

“When we talk about home, I mean we [the 2011 team] won a World Cup there, and after that point we had a memory to fall back on to remember the nerves and the atmosphere and how hard we had to play to deserve the win. That stayed with us and made us all determined to protect that memory and that legacy.

“For a number of the new guys, this will be the biggest Test they have ever faced there. It will be their defining moment.”

So, what of the pressure, then? There is no doubt the All Blacks have spoken about it this week. Head Coach Scott Robertson has admitted the streak has been a part of the theme of the build-up, but is it a little dangerous to get so caught up in the hype around the record?

“Once you create this history – and it is spoken about – that’s something that as All Blacks we grab hold of and it becomes part of who we are and we don’t want to be part of a team that breaks that streak,” says Read.

“But I wouldn’t call it pressure at all. I think it’s invigorating.”

Dagg agrees, arguing that the record is a source of great power to the All Blacks teams.

“I did think it gave us an extra 10% before the game had even kicked off. I am sure opposition teams think about it, but no one would ever admit that.

“Because we won there, we always knew we could win there. I think of South African Tests, or the Wallabies semifinal, and French final, the Irish in 2012. There have been some amazing, magical moments for me at that park, and we all felt the lift of playing there. The opposition knows the record, and they all want to break it.”

The South Africans will be hunting that scalp on Saturday night. Regardless of which side of the jersey divide you find yourself, the anticipation ahead of this occasion suggests no fan is truly certain of the outcome. Die-hard All Blacks fans are biting their nails while the blinkered Bokke supporters can sniff blood through a cloud of hope.

Muliaina remembers his last Test against the Boks at Eden Park, in July 2010. The previous season, the All Blacks had been beaten in three straight Tests by the old foe, twice in the Republic of South Africa and once in the Republic of Hamilton.

“There was definitely an Eden Park factor at play in that Test in Auckland, and we knew the opposition players are thinking about it. We could just sense that deep down in places they didn’t want to acknowledge, they understood the aura of that park as well as we did.”

The fans will understand it, too, and close to 50,000 will be there on Saturday night to witness the 94th Test match at Eden Park. Richie McCaw won’t be among them this time, but he still has his memories to fall back on.

“I remember that bus ride to the park ahead of the Rugby World Cup final, and jeez, I was nervous. I remember looking out at all the fans banging on the bus and waving at us, thinking, ‘I just hope these people are as excited as this afterward!’

“Looking back now, though, I love that experience, just as I loved all the battles at Eden Park, a place that we know we have a great advantage.”

And what does he make of that Eden Park record now, 23 years after he first ran onto the turf in an All Blacks jersey?

“We always said it would get broken one day. Just don’t be in that team when it does.”

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