Scotty Stevenson: Driven Carter still dreaming of topping off magnificent career

Dan Carter. File photo / Getty Images

We met on the roof top pool deck of the Heritage Hotel in Auckland. The traffic below throbbed and hummed and clogged up Fanshawe St at lunchtime. The low-slung winter sun bounced off the Harbour and back lit Dan Carter, poster child for the Quest for Greatness, male model for the Destiny Interrupted Club, All Black.

It was August then, a test match week in Auckland. Three days after we met, Carter would dazzle everyone in a brutal crushing of Australia at Eden Park, and Richie McCaw would become the most capped test player in history. Like Jordan and Pippin, or Russell and Cousy, or Bourbon and Coke, there is Carter and McCaw.

It was another week in the outwardly glorious and inwardly tumultuous life of Dan Carter. Beyond the upcoming weekend - the familiarity of Eden Park, the same old Wallaby foe - there stretched the eternal road of uncertainty, lined on either side by ghosts of World Cups past and the signposts which pointed to that personal fate towards which he knew he had to walk. Oh, The Places You'll Go!

He had brains in his head and feet in his shoes, did Dan Carter. He also had his doubts. They were self-doubts, the kind that players who are capable of extraordinary things always get when they play ordinary games. He didn't pay much attention to the critics, he told me. None of them came close to being as tough on him as he was on himself.

He spoke, as most All Blacks do, in the second and third person. There is no 'I' in team, only a 'me' - and then only occasionally. Somewhere along the way in rugby's professional era, the 'me' was somehow subjugated by that strangely formal reflexive personal pronoun, 'myself'.

Dan Carter resisted that particular urge. Like when he told myself that kicking the winning dropped goal in a Rugby World Cup final would be a dream come true. It was my fault, really. I brought up Jonny Wilkinson in the conversation, and only because the Jonny Wilkinson-Dan Carter debate rages on due to the one glaring omission in Carter's CV and the one crowning glory in Wilkinson's.

"I have huge respect for Jonny," he told me. "He's an absolute perfectionist and that's shown by his accuracy under pressure. Nowhere was that better illustrated than in that World Cup final.

"That is every first five kicker's dream, to land a dropped goal like that to win a World Cup final. I'm a bit more realistic though. Opportunities like that don't often come around but you want to prepare yourself as best you can so if you are in that position you have the confidence to give it a go."

I thought about that for a long time afterward. I thought about one phrase in particular: "Opportunities like that don't often come around." But that opportunity did come around in 1995, and again in 2003, and again in 2011. Stransky and Wilkinson had their opportunities. Stephen Donald had his opportunity. Dan Carter is still waiting.

That's why, he told me that day, he re-signed with New Zealand Rugby, after sitting in his hotel room ahead of the quarter-finals and asking: "Why me? Why now?" And after watching a triumph in which he could play no practical part. He had watched his team and his friends win the Rugby World Cup, sure, but it was the equivalent of using 'myself' instead of 'me': he was the object of the discourse, not a participant in it.

This week, he returns to the ground at which he was reduced to tears in 2007. The shots of that 25-year-old kid, bewildered and disbelieving in the grandstand at Millennium Stadium, still spook the most diehard believer in the All Black jersey and taint the champagne of one of the most celebrated careers in all of rugby.

Dan Carter wants his opportunity. He wants that dream finish. He wants that moment that every first five dreams of.

He sat there on the roof of that hotel in Auckland and avoided saying that. What he said instead was: "People are always telling me about the things I have already done in my career, but I want to leave my mark for what I do here and now."

Maybe, this time, destiny will not be interrupted so early.