Dan Carter named his five favourite memories against the Springboks on For The Love Of Rugby: South Africa. Four of them are wins, and the one he ends on is a kick he missed at the ground the All Blacks go back to on Saturday.
Dan Carter missed the kick. Touchline, to win the Test, nearly 95,000 people in Soweto screaming at him.
And it is still the game he ends on when someone asks him about the Springboks.
Carter has signed with For The Love Of Rugby: South Africa for the run of Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry, which puts the most decorated fly-half in the game’s history on a South African podcast being interviewed by a man who spent a decade scrummaging against his forwards. “I cannot believe I’m drinking out of a South African rugby mug,” he told Kitshoff. “Oh, how things have changed, eh?”
Kitshoff, who won 83 caps at loosehead and World Cups in 2019 and 2023, asked him for five. Carter gave five, and the four-Test series is level at one apiece as the third one arrives at the exact ground his last story happens in.
Something links all five. He does not say it out loud until the end.
The drop goal nobody in his own backline was ready for
He goes to the 2015 World Cup semi-final first, and immediately undercuts himself.
“I wasn’t that well known for dropping goals in Test matches,” Carter said. “I think I only did sort of eight or nine throughout my career.”
Eight. In 112 Tests, from 1,598 points, which is still the world record. He hit one of them in the 62nd minute of a semi-final at a rain-soaked Twickenham that New Zealand won 20-18.
What makes it worth telling is that it was never the plan.
“It was supposed to be a lineout drive… So no one was expecting in the backline to get the ball. So all of a sudden the ball gets knocked down out of the lineout, Aaron Smith passes to me, my backs are all standing on their heels. They weren’t ready for the ball.”
That detail is the whole thing. A drop goal off a called maul is easier than a drop goal off a set play, and for a reason most viewers never think about: the defensive line has not started moving. Everybody in green is loading forward to meet a drive. Nobody has left the line to charge a kick, because a kick is not what the picture is telling them. Carter gets a clean, unhurried strike from about 25 metres because the Springboks are still solving the wrong problem.
Watch for it the next time a lineout goes down messily inside kicking range. The window is about a second and a half wide, and it only exists while the defence still believes in the maul.
Nineteen points, and the Springboks never got on the board
His second is a scoreline that reads like a typo.
New Zealand went to Newlands in August 2008 as a wounded side. They had been knocked out of the previous year’s World Cup in the quarter-final by France, and Carter does not soften it.
“Became the worst performing All Black side in the history of Rugby World Cups,” he said.
Then they beat the world champions 19-0 in Cape Town, on Percy Montgomery’s 100th Test.
“So we targeted this game in South Africa, in Cape Town, and we kept them scoreless. It was 19-nil… and we kept the [Boks] scoreless in South Africa.”
Keeping South Africa pointless is not primarily a tackling achievement. It is a discipline achievement. A team only stays on zero if the opposition never gets a kickable penalty, which means eighty minutes without a soft offside, without a hand in the ruck inside your own half, without a scrum penalty at the wrong end. Nobody manages that against the Springboks by accident. By Sky Sports’ count it had happened five times in the fixture’s first 94 Tests.
Then South Africa beat them three times in a row
The third one is not a win, and Carter picks it anyway.
“So in 2009, two test matches in South Africa. We lost. We return back to New Zealand for a third test match in the Tri Nations and we lose at home in Hamilton. Completely outplayed all season, all three test matches.”
That is the only year of his career in which South Africa did that to New Zealand. He spends about forty seconds on it. It reads less like a memory than a hinge, and it exists in his list purely to set up the next one.
Read also: Conrad Smith’s account of what Botha did to him in every single ruck explains what that Springbok pack was actually like to play against.
The haka where he could see how badly they wanted it
Eden Park, July 2010. New Zealand won 32-12, and Carter’s memory of it is not the scoreboard.
“I remember performing the [haka] and just looking at how much the [Boks] wanted this game… that was one of the most physical games that I’ve ever been a part of. And our forwards that day did not take a backward step. We had the likes of Kieran Read just knocking over their big boys, getting up and doing it again. Jerome Kaino just absolutely [pole-axing] these guys that are twice the size of us. And I’ve never seen an All Black forward pack step up like they did in that moment.”
He is talking about a South African eight built around Bakkies Botha, Victor Matfield and Schalk Burger, and the size gap he describes was real rather than rhetorical. Bismarck du Plessis has since told the full story of the hit that flattened him in Durban, which gives a fair sense of what the era felt like from Carter’s side of the ball.
He missed the kick that would have won it
Then Soweto, five weeks later. John Smit’s 100th Test, FNB Stadium, a crowd Sky Sports reported as close to 95,000, which Carter remembers as 96,000, and New Zealand behind with five minutes to go.
Richie McCaw scored in the corner to level it. Gilbert Enoka has named McCaw as one of the three players who defined that era, and this is a fair advertisement for why.
Which left the touchline conversion, and the best goal-kicker who has ever played the game standing over it.
“I was like, ‘Right, I’ve got to kick from the sideline to win the game.’ … I was like, ‘This is what I dream of. This is what I do at training every session. I’m kicking to win a game.’ And I missed the kick, and I was absolutely gutted.”
There was time for one restart. New Zealand took it, went through a few phases, and then Ma’a Nonu ran into John Smit.
“[Nonu] gets the ball, does his little side step, breaks through a tackle of the legendary John Smit — who unfortunately has [Nonu’s] boot in his hand, and he slipped out of his boot. So [Nonu’s] running down the field with only one boot on, runs about 30 metres, delivers this pass with just such precision to Israel Dagg, who runs round, scores the match-winning try.”
29-22. Smit finished his hundredth Test holding a boot.
So why does a man with two World Cup medals end on a night he nearly cost his team? Because of what the eighty minutes felt like, and because of when it turned.
“That game was brutal. Everything was against us. There was just so much pressure… We couldn’t even really hear ourselves think in the hostile environment that we’re in. But we found a way. And against all odds, where everything was against us, we managed to find a way in that last five minutes.”
All five of Dan Carter’s favourite Springbok memories turn on the same twenty minutes
Go back through the list. A drop goal in the 62nd minute. A shutout that needed eighty minutes of discipline. A collapse. A physical answer to that collapse. And a comeback inside the final five.
None of them are first-half memories. That is not a coincidence, and Carter explains why in the same conversation, describing a plan New Zealand ran against South Africa for a decade.
“We knew that if we could match the [Boks] in those areas, then our speed and our fitness and our skill execution would eventually catch up on them and we’d dominate them in that sort of last 10, 15 minutes. And that’s when we’d really pride ourselves on finishing the game off.”
Absorb the set piece. Survive the aerial game. Win the last quarter on legs. That was the method, and every moment in his top five is a product of it.
Then he gives it away.
“And, you know, dare I say it, you’re probably doing it better than us at the moment.”
He is talking about the bench. He is also, without quite saying so, retiring the thing his whole list is built on.
Read next: both camps have already called this series for Baltimore — only one of them has ruled out a draw.
Your turn
Saturday’s Test is at FNB Stadium, the ground where Nonu ran 30 metres with one boot on. Rassie Erasmus has gone back to the front row he first picked, and if this series follows the pattern of every game in Carter’s five, it will be decided somewhere after the 65th minute.
Every one of Carter’s five hurt somebody. Botha flattening a centre. Smit holding a boot. Anyone who has watched this fixture for long enough has one game they cannot let go of, and it is rarely the famous one. Which is yours, and what happened in the last ten minutes of it?
