Feature
Carlos the conductor
by Pamela Stirling
Will the genius of Carlos Spencer inspire the All Blacks to a World Cup-winning performance this year?
Spennnn-cer. Spencer. SPENCER. SPENCER!”
All season it’s Carlos Spencer’s name that the commentators have been screaming. All season he has provided the kind of stand-up excitement that he’s been creating ever since he scored a try against Auckland for Horowhenua as a 17-year-old hotshot. But, suddenly, in the Super 12 final last month, they stopped yelling the first five-eight’s name.
And that’s because the talented Blues playmaker only ran six times. Instead, he kicked 22 times and passed 19 times. There was still the sizzling Spencer flair: the banana kick, the no-look backhand flips, the stratospheric snow-covered punts. It was still Carlos Spencer’s match. But the 27-year-old was playing – will you look at that – percentage rugby. He was playing for territory. He was playing his way into the World Cup.
Halfback Steve Devine, Spencer’s Blue colleague and All Black teammate, says, “Carlos Spencer pretty much won us the Super 12 title this year. He’s simply one of the best players in the world. When the forwards get the go-forward ball, my job is just to get the ball in his hands and let him do his magic.” Devine is still grinning a week later about the player now known simply as “the conductor” for his brilliant backline orchestration.
But it’s the unpredictability of Spencer’s audacious magic that has made All Black selectors so wary in the past. New Zealand’s best World Cup teams – the victorious 1987 team and the runner-up 1995 team – both added new dimensions of creative brilliance: in ’87, it was Michael Jones who thrilled with his dazzling displays. But Spencer, with his virtuoso performances but at times erratic form, has been up against Andrew Mehrtens, whose more orthodox team approach has almost always been preferred.
So, just how predictable is Spencer out on the field now? “Oh, occasionally we just have to remind Carlos what we’ve been practising all week, and make sure he does that,” says Devine. “He’s always trying to make new stuff up out on the field. But the advantage is that he sees opportunities out there that a lot of people don’t spot. He’s always trying to do something a little outside the square; always wants to play such an expansive game. I mean, it’s just great to see him running with the ball. People hang off. No one knows what he’s going to do and I don’t think he knows half the time. What I do know is that if he can carry on the form from the Super 12, this will be Carlos Spencer’s year.”
“To be honest, Carlos is in a zone where I don’t think he can play any better,” says Grant Fox, first five-eight for the victorious 1987 World Cup team and assistant coach of Auckland’s NPC side. “The only thing he could possibly improve is his goal kicking – it’s not bad, but it certainly could be a little higher, and he’s working on it,” says the man still known in rugby circles simply as “God” for his own goal-kicking form in the first World Cup. “But right now Carlos is just in unbelievable form. He’s damn near got everything you want in a rugby player, but Carlos is always looking for improvements in himself: he’s a guy who’ll look for a new trick every year. He is a very talented, very clever player who can identify mismatches extraordinarily quickly when he gets the ball as a first receiver off second phase: he sees some forwards standing in front of him, but the backs are gone and it’s like, ‘Right: here’s my licence, I’m gone.’ What really sets him apart is that he is prepared to try anything. A lot of players don’t have the balls to try some of the things he does. He’s not afraid, Carlos.”
But don’t call Spencer a loose cannon. “He’s not,” says Fox. “Yes, he calls moves on the hoof, that’s a sign of leadership. He did a couple of things in the NPC last year where he assessed a situation and said, ‘Look, here’s the move we’ve got, we can just tweak it a little bit. We’ve never tried it, but it’ll work.’ He did it against Canterbury in the NPC semi-final. He scored a try off it. It was a particular set-up we had as the scrum went down, but he saw something in the way they stacked their defence and just tweaked the move on the hoof, just like that, and we scored. I just thought, ‘Wow!’” Auckland won the NPC, just as the Blues have the Super 12.
Ask Fox, as he sits in a Viaduct Basin boardroom looking out at the America’s Cup village, whether we’ve got a better chance of success in the World Cup with guys such as Spencer than we did on the water and he says, straightening his Canterbury logo shirt, “Oh, I’m quietly confident we’ll do this. I really am.”
Page 1 
