by Our Sports Desk

NEW ZEALAND boss Steve Hansen hailed the durability of “special player” Dan Carter yesterday as he prepares to line up in his first Rugby World Cup final.

Mercurial fly-half Carter will be part of an All Blacks team unchanged from the one that edged out semi-final opponents South Africa five days ago.

The 33-year-old is set to exit Test rugby after Saturday’s Twickenham showdown against Australia, bringing down the curtain on a 112-cap international career before joining French club Racing 92.

And All Blacks head coach Hansen believes that Carter deserves huge praise for bouncing back from serious injury blows during the last few years.

“He had a horrific run of injuries over a couple of seasons that took away his confidence,” Hansen said. “Up until then he was relatively injury-free.

“If you are around long enough you are going to have a bit of adversity, and he’s had two seasons of it prior to this year.

“It’s the mark of the guy how he’s come through that. A lot of people might have said: ‘Enough’s enough, I will chuck it in,’ but he stuck with it, and the big thing this season is he has had the ability to play game after game after game.

“It doesn’t matter who you are, confidence is a massive thing in sport.

“When you start to play well it’s like a snowball, and it gets bigger and bigger and all of a sudden it becomes an avalanche.

When he’s like that he’s a special player.”

Carter is nearing the end of a fourth World Cup campaign — he was injured when New Zealand triumphed on home soil four years ago — and if he signs off his All Blacks career in victorious fashion, something that he has done on 98 previous occasions, then New Zealand will make rugby union history as first back-to-back Webb Ellis Cup winners.