We’ve got a plan: Cruden
Chiefs first five–eighth Aaron Cruden is confident in his team’s off- field preparations as they look to surprise the Crusaders in their semi-final.
After a long flight back from Cape Town, the Chiefs are in Christchurch this Saturday for their last-four clash of the Super Rugby knockouts.
And Cruden believes they have done everything correctly during their trip and feels they will be in good condition for the derby showdown.
“We’ve got a plan and it involves from the first minute we left the field, around recovery and so on,” he told Stuff. “Even when the boys travelled we slept at certain times. So we have arrived back well. We had a late start yesterday, brought it back a little bit today, and the same again tomorrow, so we’re just slowly moving back into the right time zone, then maybe going the other way again in a week’s time.”
Meanwhile, head coach Dave Rennie also had confidence in how they are preparing in terms of recovery and analysis ahead of Saturday.
“All I’ll say is we stripped a lot of things back. We’ve looked at everything, we’ve looked at the science best practice, and then adopted what we thought would suit us based on the time we are going to play the game, and so on, so there has been a number of things,” he said.
“I certainly feel we’re in a lot better place now than we were this time last year.”
He added: “In the end it’s around recovery, getting the mind right and getting the body right, and then about convincing ourselves we’re ready to go.
“We’ve had success down there in the past, we know we’re playing a really good side who’s probably been the form team of the comp, but we’ll back ourselves to go down there and we’re going to have to play well. “In the end, because we didn’t win our pool, we knew we had to travel. So you’ve just got to get your head around it and embrace it.
Chiefs: Damian McKenzie, Tim Nanai-Williams, Anton Lienert-Brown, Charlie Ngatai, James Lowe, Aaron Cruden (co-c), Tawera Kerr-Barlow, Michael Leitch, Sam Cane (coc), Liam Messam, Brodie Retallick, Mitchell Brown, Nepo Laulala, Nathan Harris, Kane Hames. Reserves: Liam Polwart, Aidan Ross, Atu Moli, Dominic Bird, Lachlan Boshier, Finlay Christie, Stephen Donald, Shaun Stevenson.