KEY POINTS:
It's an interesting thought and Nick Evans paused a moment as he pondered it.
"Is your philosophy to be the No 2 first five-eighths in the world?" he was asked this week.
Any All Black worth his salt wants to be the best in his position in the
game. Evans is no different.
Except he's got the best No 10 on the planet in front of him and Dan Carter will take some shifting.
Evans gets his first start at the World Cup against Portugal at Stade Gerland in Lyon late tonight and when the opportunities arise he knows he's got to clutch them and keep pressing on.
But No 2?
"Obviously you aim to be No 1 and, if I am No 2, it's a pretty good achievement," he said.
"I'm always out there trying to better myself and knock him off the perch. Who knows, maybe one day I might. It might not happen but I'm not going to look back and say I didn't give it a crack."
As Evans quipped, if he'd been born 10 years later things might have been very different.
Certainly life would have followed another path had his head turned to Aussie Rules instead of rugby in his late teens.
It almost did. He enjoyed his Rules and played both games for a time. He spent six months in Melbourne and played a couple of grades below the AFL. There was talk of a trial at the Sydney Swans, whose fortunes he still follows avidly.
"There was a point in my life where it came down to Rules or rugby. I did the positive/negative charts, but my heart was always in rugby a little more.
"At the time, the Blues had Carlos [Spencer] and Luke [McAlister] was coming through. There were a lot of good first-fives around and I thought would it be better to go to Rules.
"Then I made the Super 12, Tony Brown left [the Highlanders] and that opened it up for me in Dunedin."
There's no question that with his booming punting - honed in the Rules game as a rover "catching the crumbs off the big fellows" - speed off the mark and gliding, incisive running, Evans would be first pick in almost every frontline rugby nation.
Evans has started five of his 12 test appearances since his debut against England in 2004. He could be forgiven for casting an envious eye around the globe and thinking what if ...
He quipped that being in Carter's long shadow is "very annoying".
"He's not a bad player is he?"
But seriously, "it was really hard at the start. This year I've concentrated on the mental aspect of being in that situation.
"I had to work on me being up for every bit of rugby I get. Not so much preparing for a test, it's preparing for the opportunities I get.
"The philosophy I go on is if I'm playing really well and putting pressure on him, then that's going to make him play well, and it's going to be better for the All Blacks."
But he's not about to sit back, go into cruise mode and settle for what comes his way. Evans is 27, in the prime of his rugby life. Cruising along doesn't sit comfortably and so he keeps pushing himself with the idea of displacing Carter.
If he didn't have that attitude what's the point of it all?
"If I thought I was just going through the motions I probably wouldn't be playing my best and wouldn't be in the All Blacks."
He knows that, with the best will, the All Blacks are likely to face little more than a training exercise against Portugal. But standards must be maintained after the Italian job in Marseille, or more particularly the opening half hour, of which Evans reckoned "you could probably give the tape to people around the world and say 'that's how you play rugby' .
"If we do things half hearted that's a step back."
And stepping back doesn't seem to hold much appeal for Evans.
