While Ron Cribb is a regular on New Zealand television as an emerging All Black powerhouse, so are many of his childhood mates - but they feature regularly on Crime Watch.

The powerful No.8 made his debut for New Zealand against Scotland last month after a dominant year locking the scrum for Canterbury in the Super 12, but considers himself lucky that sport dragged him away from a life that has seen many of his friends locked up in jail.

Cribb and his brother Gary grew up on the tough streets of West Auckland, brought up by their father Jim after their parents separated when he was two.

"That's where all the stolen cars end up. There's a lot of West Auckland on Crime Watch," Cribb said. "A lot of our friends are in prison, they did some stupid things, armed robbery and all that sort of stuff, it's quite fortunate we didn't end up there.

"Dad and sport kept us away from that."

Jim Cribb knew the value of sport and, after playing alongside Australian five-eighth Stephen Larkham's father Geoff for the ACT representative side in the early 1970s, he returned to Auckland and was always going to send his sons onto the sporting field.

At the age of seven, Cribb had no time for crime while playing rugby league, cricket, soccer, squash, tennis and softball but took another 10 years to play his first game of rugby, when his future was settled.

He missed out on an Auckland under age rugby league representative team because Jim couldn't take him to training and, after scoring five tries in the centres in a match for his local league club, Massey High School's first 15 coach invited him to play rugby.

"I grew five or six inches and they threw me in the forwards," Cribb said.

The 24-year-old is now compared to Zinzan Brooke, one of New Zealand's all time great backrow forwards and, while he looked at Brooke and Buck Shelford as inspirations, he plays his own game.

"I don't look at trying to do what Zinzan did, I've always been myself, and do my own thing. I take it as a compliment," he said.

He has already haunted Australian rugby fans when he scored the decisive try in Canterbury's Super 12 final win against the ACT in May but was uncertain what was in store at Stadium Australia in his first Bledisloe Cup Test on Saturday night.

"This is my first Test against Australia so I don't really know what it's going to be like," Cribb said. "But it's definitely going to be a huge step up from where we left off against Scotland."

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