THE LAST BIG PUSH
This is it for Kieran Read, the last big push. He will retire from test football after the World Cup – cart his battered body off to some foreign clime where he and his family can have the overseas experience they have always dreamed of.
A test career that began in Edinburgh, November 2008 will end, he hopes, in Yokohama, November 2019.
He’s already made his mind up that he will pull up stumps after the World Cup. He’ll be 34. He’ll have played at his third World Cup and be certain he’s not going to make it to a fourth.
And he obviously feels, without needing to say it, that there will be nothing left to aim for by then. He’ll have achieved just about everything he could.
He’s already got two World Cup winners’ medals. He’s won Super Rugby three times with the Crusaders and the way things are looking at this early stage, it could be four by next year.
He’s been World Rugby player of the year, enjoyed a series against the British & Irish Lions, won an NPC with Canterbury, played more than 100 tests and by the time he finishes, he could be the second most experienced All Blacks captain in history.
Short of playing sevens at the Olympics, there’s nothing he hasn’t done and it will be the right time for him to exit.
“So for me I think it probably won’t be in New Zealand,” he says of his post-2019 future.
“We have always thought as a family that we would like to go overseas and use that experience for the kids. That is probably the main option at the moment.”
“That [retirement] is an option as well. There are plenty of options out
