I am more ambitious than that and I still have things I want to achieve
Posted in General on 03. Oct, 2010
I am more ambitious than that and I still have things I want to achieve.”If Cullen can recapture, at 28, the form that made him an icon in New Zealand, the epitaph on his Test career may be premature. Wayne Smith, who was Mitchell’s predecessor and will shortly rejoin the All Blacks coaching staff as an assistant to Graham Henry, is a big Christian follower.”He’s the greatest running full-back of all time,” Smith said “He could do things that no one else could do. “If I wanted to play out my career under no pressure I would have signed for a Japanese club. More than 30,000 tickets have already been sold for the final at Twickenham on 23 May.”There will be pressure on me to perform and that’s great,” Cullen said. If Munster win on Saturday they will meet the winners of Wasps and Gloucester, who play on Sunday, in Ireland in three weeks.Llanelli or Biarritz, who play on Friday night, have a semi-final against the winners of Toulouse-Edinburgh. To lose two finals and two semis by such narrow margins is either unfortunate or careless.Cullen, who lives in a village in Cork where his neighbours are O’Gara and Stringer, has been recruited at considerable expense to put the record straight. Cullen scored his first try but has yet to appear on the winning side.Munster, who beat the All Blacks in Limerick in 1978, regard the Heineken Cup as their Holy Grail and Thomond Park, where they are invincible, as a stepping stone.
They lost in the quarter-finals to Colomiers in France in 1999; they lost 9-8 in the final to Northampton at Twickenham in 2000; they lost 16-15 to Stade Fran?s in the semi-finals at Lille in 2001; they lost 15-9 in the final to Leicester at Cardiff in 2002 and last year lost 13-12 in the semi-finals to Toulouse in Toulouse. Cullen had a super Super 12 last season scoring eight tries in 12 matches for the Hurricanes, but he arrived in Ireland with a shoulder injury which required an operation. He played his first game a month ago, a defeat to the Neath-Swansea Ospreys in the Celtic League at Cork, where there was a record attendance, and his fourth on Friday night when Munster lost narrowly to the Celtic Warriors at Pontypridd. My loyalty now is with Munster.”From Cork to Limerick they are still waiting with baited breath, for slowly Christian soldiers onward. If you can’t go to war for your country, the next best thing is to pull on that black jersey and try and win a Test for your country I’ve done that and that phase of my life is over. We had signed a superstar and that’s not a phrase you just throw around He has earned it.
I can’t believe for a second that Christian is only the fourth or fifth best full-back in New Zealand.”In his biography Life On The Run, Cullen said: “I know that I still have a lot of good rugby left in me and I want to perform on the biggest stage possible. “Even after hearing that he might be interested in coming to Europe I didn’t believe it. I was sure New Zealand Rugby would want to keep him and I assumed he had been secured long term.”The level of interest when the announcement was made was massive. Gaffney flew to Wellington and persuaded Cullen to sign a three-year contract. “I had absolutely no idea he was on the market,” Gaffney said.