Andy Capostagno : Rugby
Maybe he knew. Maybe he knew that even he couldn’t improve upon 74-28 and that therefore retirement was the most sensible option. Sean Fitzpatrick was probably sitting in the stands at Eden Park on Sunday watching his beloved Auckland Blues deconstruct the Western Stormers and he probably thought, hell, I can’t improve on that. The question is, could anybody?
It was the second biggest combined points total in Super 12 history. The Blues scored 11 tries and the Stormers were actually well within their rights to smile about the fact that they scored four of their own and hence managed a bonus point. They ran into a team playing the kind of rugby that should not be unveiled too often, for fear that everyone else playing a similar ball game involving 15-a-side might just pack up and go home. Maybe that’s what Fitzpatrick did.
You run out of adjectives to describe a man who played 92 tests in the cauldron of the front row, led his country 51 times, won a World Cup winners’ and a World Cup runners- up medal, and for at least a decade never played a bad game. Even with all that, he was hardly eulogised into retirement. Many respected players and coaches will regret that Fitzpatrick retired without ever receiving his come-uppance.
He had a lip, you see. He was a master of the Australian art of sledging. Furthermore, he did enough naughty stuff on the blind side of the referee to have considered a career in the World Wrestling Federation and he was not slow in presenting himself as the martyr, as Johan le Roux will attest. All of which meant that, at least in this country, admiration of the man was somewhat grudging. If he had once been caught, either by a perceptive referee or a right hook, it might have been different. But that’s what made Fitzpatrick special; he was too good to get caught.
In my mind’s eye, I can see him now, hobbling up the Ellis Park tunnel towards me. The All Blacks had just snatched an incredible 35-32 victory over the Springboks, finally laying to rest the Ellis Park bogey. He was clearly in pain, but during the course of our television interview he was the same Fitzy as always – proud of his team, generous to the defeated side, chatty without being particularly eloquent, above all aware that captaining the All Blacks meant, among other things, being polite to idiots with microphones, when all you really want to do is collapse in the dressing room.
Even so, it never felt like that was the beginning of the end. How could it have? Fitzy was the iron man who had played 63 successive tests, a world record. It was a bang on the knee and it would be okay. It was, too. He played against Australia in Brisbane the following week, a performance that left Taine Randell, his probable successor as All Black captain, dumbstruck.
“There was no way he should have played. His leg was stuffed, but he just went out there and did the business. I guess that said it all about his pride in the All Black jersey. It certainly had an awesome effect on the team,” Randell said.
Fitzpatrick should never have made the tour to the United Kingdom at the end of the last southern hemisphere season. Maybe he just didn’t know any better. My last glimpse of him as a player in the flesh was five months ago, at one of the most unlikely venues, Ashton Gate Football Ground in Bristol. My father-in-law had procured tickets for the English Rugby Partnership fifteen against New Zealand and I squeezed into the 20E000-strong crowd feeling about as comfortable as any dyed- in-the-wool Bristol Rovers supporter was entitled to feel at the home ground of Bristol City.
Fitzy was on the bench. He got up and trotted round the field with the rest of the subs at 20-minute intervals and received an ovation when the crowd realised he had come on with 15 minutes left. Typically there was a hint of skulduggery about it. The first time we spotted him he was throwing the ball into a lineout somewhat more rapidly than the opposition were expecting. The try was prevented, but there were a few of us who wondered how he had joined proceedings without the approval of the referee. Perhaps he had, by then, joined the ranks of the chosen few who can treat the laws with a cavalier disregard. If not bigger than the game, he was at least a colossus with whom one would not wish to argue on the finer points of etiquette.
How good a hooker was Sean Fitzpatrick? As a ball player Uli Schmidt might have had the edge. Might have. As a scrum technician John Pullin could be mentioned in the same breath. Was he as good a hooker as the Auckland Blues are a team? He was not. No one is that good, as the rest of the Super 12 teams are about to find out.