Review: Crusade On! Celebrating 25 years of the Crusaders

How did a team who came last in the inaugural season of Super Rugby go on to so dominate the competition during the next quarter century, that when it was finally shelved last year you could hear fans in three countries breathing a collective sigh of relief?

According to Matt McIlraith’s Crusade On! Celebrating 25 years of the Crusaders, the seeds of success were sown in their first diabolical effort.

“Smithy [Wayne Smith] and Deansy [Robbie Deans] both coached a good number of the players from the first Crusaders team. Toddy [Todd Blackadder] and Razor [Scott Robertson] both played in the side and brought the toughness and the smarts we gained from that campaign forward to their teams,” McIlraith writes in his foreword.

The down-to-earth philosophy – that the team comes first, and no member is of any greater or lesser importance than another including the bus driver - informs the chapters. To the point Andrew Mehrtens, Wayne Smith, Richie McCaw, SBW and Dan Carter don’t get their own separate highlighted profile but the travel agent who mapped out their very complicated itineraries post-2011 earthquakes along with backroom characters like Errol [Poss] Collins and Les [no nickname supplied] McFadden do.

Instead, stories of the great Canterbury All Blacks and leading coaches of the professional era are interwoven in a chronicle of 25 seasons forming the spine of this handsome volume which also features a comprehensive directory listing every single player to ever pull on the jersey.

The wealth of statistical detail makes it an impressive almanac; a sort of Encyclopedia Cantabrica, if you will, but the well-chosen anecdotes are where the heart of the book lives. There was the time Afato So’oalo was attacked by a cheetah in South Africa while wearing the cape players who had mucked up in some way were shamed with.

The one when Ross Filipo got invited round to Brad Thorn’s for dinner. The two barely knew one another, but that didn’t stop the Australian from ripping off his shirt after tea and forcing the new teammate to watch a DVD of career highlights with the older man, “popping his pecs [pectoral muscles] the whole time.”

The huge crowd who turned out to greet them at the airport after they had spent the best part of five months on the road before narrowly losing to the Queensland Reds in the 2011 final at Suncorp Stadium was a heartwarming behind-the-scenes gem.

The earthquakes form a division in the story from which point onwards the Crusaders never again played at Jade Stadium and had to make do with a ground that previously was reserved for league and the parade of prize-winning heifers after the A & P Show.

As such, the reverberations of the disaster remain, preserved not only in the tragic loss of life, buildings and security, but also the ending of a carefree, steadfast culturally-certain existence founded on robust parochialism with rugby at its centre. A further three titles were won afterwards without generating nearly as much spontaneous joy or folklore as the previous seven.

While hardship has been faced and endured, the stoicism of the people not only survives but is shared by more recent arrivals. The most Canterbury sentiment in Crusade On! belonging to Imam Gamal Fouda, of Al Noor Mosque, responding to calls for the team to change its name after the 2019 massacre.

“It was their [the worshippers] team too. We didn’t want to be used. Our view was that we wouldn’t expect the team to tell us what to call our mosque, nor would we want to tell them what they should call themselves.”

McIlraith’s book is a celebration of the team’s legacy. The author was previously the side’s media manager so it’s not told at arm’s length. An offering from a writer who loves the team deeply for readers who adore them passionately.

Reviewed by Ali Ikram