Todd poster boy for being better, not bitter
There’s no more pertinent question to present an aspiring All Black than whether they are ready to get bitter or better?
There are a few in the team named to play Argentina who have had to confront that question and discover that if they say the latter, whether they have the capacity to prove it.
There’s no better example than Matt Todd. He has shown a near unassailable desire to prove himself; to never take rejection personally but use it to work harder to force his way back into the All Blacks.
Goodness knows he could be long gone from New Zealand by now, holed up at a big budget foreign club, raking in the cash.
He has been in and out of the squad since 2011, the metaphoric third wheel, first to Richie McCaw and Sam Cane, and now to Cane and Ardie Savea.
It’s not an easy role if you want to feel valued or wanted. But Todd has hardly noticed. Or if he has, he’s told himself it’s better to be the third wheel than fourth or fifth.
And that attitude has earned him the No 7 jersey in Buenos Aires. While he’ll be over the moon about that, All Blacks head coach Steve Hansen is happier still.
The coach admits Todd is his favourite player precisely because the Crusaders man displays the resolve the All Blacks demand.
No one can have any sense of entitlement to an All Blacks jersey. It doesn’t work like that, so why be bitter if the coaches pick someone else?
Todd gets it and has proven that. Although the difference between bitter and better is only one vowel, it is a lot more than that.
Todd won’t have to explain that to Kane Hames. He, too, gets it.
Hames is a graduate from the school of hard knocks; someone who has had to scrap for respect and recognition and who has never had an easy run.
Each and every minute he has spent as a professional has been earned and cherished.
He couldn’t win a Super Rugby contract for what must have seemed like an age. And when he did win his first, he wasn’t able to renew it, despite the fact he was sitting on the All Blacks’ radar at the same time.
Not everyone has seen what he has to offer and that’s unlikely to change in the immediate future. Hames faced a wall of doubters before he made his first start for the All Blacks against the Boks in Albany and gathered a few more after. The first couple of scrums didn’t go so well that night and most people decided to blame the new bloke. It wasn’t rational analysis of what is an eight-man job, but then Hames is conditioned to life not being fair, and all the adverse commentary will have done is stiffen his commitment to prove those who blamed him wrong. The bit the critics missed in Albany was that even if Hames had been at fault in those early scrums, he found a way to steady himself mentally, adapt and correct the problem and by the final 15 minutes of the first half, the All Blacks were dominant. Better not bitter — Todd and Hames are the poster boys of that campaign.