With just five minutes of Stephen Crichton’s time, you wonder if the game’s best defensive centre has, for once, made a terrible mistake. While NSW teammates pick at watermelon slices and reporters scavenge for stories (and left over watermelon slices) around the Blues’ Leura team hotel, Crichton begins to unpack the how and why of what he does without the ball. Coyly at first, then with the patience of a kindergarten teacher, he explains the bluffing, double bluffing, patience, play reading and snap decision-making that makes him so good. And you wonder if he’s wasted in rugby league. The poker tables of Las Vegas might be his true calling. A post-playing, Shane Warne style jaunt on poker’s world tour beckons, sans Warnie’s stupid hat.