Daniel Carter kicked 14 points, including the conversion of Casey Laulala’s solitary try, to give the Canterbury Crusaders a 19-12 win on Saturday over the Wellington Hurricanes in a Super 14 rugby final marred by dense fog.
Fog settled so thickly on Jade Stadium for the inaugural final of the expanded Super 14 competition that most of the 35 000 spectators caught only fleeting glimpses of a match from which the Crusaders took their sixth title of the provincial tournament.
One described it as ”the best game I never saw”.
Players were often little more than shadows in a swirling mist to fans who couldn’t see one side of the ground from the other and pieced together an impression of the match from the snatches which flittered through their field of vision.
Laulala was only a flash of red to most fans as he cut back from centre on a narrow angle with just under 20 minutes remaining and found the only gap that opened all night in the Hurricanes defence, which had otherwise resisted interminable Crusaders pressure.
There was only a muted roar from the closest spectators as the former All Black touched down near the posts but the roar gained volume and momentum as the stadium’s giant screen replayed the try.
”We still wanted to use the ball wide, in spite of the conditions, but the message from the coaches was just to kick it high and try to win it back,” Laulala said.
Carter converted Laulala’s try and kicked four penalties, two in each half, to first boost his team to a 6-3 halftime lead and then to a peak lead of 19-9 18 minutes from fulltime and before the last of the Hurricanes’ four penalties.
All Blacks halfback Piri Weepu was knocked unconscious in the ninth minute but got up to kick the Hurricanes’ first penalty three minutes later. David Holwell kicked another to tie the scores at 6-6 in the 43rd minute and Jimmy Gopperth added a third for a 9-9 tie after 54 minutes.
Gopperth’s last goal, 11 minutes from time, created the final seven-point margin.
Canterbury Rugby Union officials considered postponing the match in the interests of player safety, as visibility fell to just metres, but both teams were in favour of playing.
Canterbury official Hamish Riach said he consulted players, match officials, weather forecasters, broadcasters, sponsors and officials of the New Zealand and Sanzar rugby unions before deciding to proceed.
”The forecasters said there was no hope of it clearing today or even tomorrow so we really had no choice but to go ahead. When the players said they wanted to play, that pretty much decided it,” he said.
Seldom in the professional era has a first-class match been played in such marginal conditions. The fog thinned at times but, at its worst, players 20m apart were barely visible to each other.
”It was very difficult. At times you could hardly see the ball,” said Hurricanes captain Rodney So’oialo.
”They did ask us if we wanted to postpone the game but we said ‘no.’ We didn’t want to disappoint the fans and both teams were here to play.”
South African referee Jonathan Kaplan faced a nightmare as the fog set in but he accepted the players’ decision to go ahead.
”It was quite eerie when we arrived at the stadium and saw the fog,” he said. ”It was certainly a strange occasion but it was also a good occasion.
”All we said before the game was that we didn’t want the conditions to impact on the game. The two teams have a similar culture and we relied on them to sort it out. We just stuck to the basics and at end we had a game.” – Sapa-AP