The true measure of Craig Fitzgibbon does not lie in his commanding performance for NSW in Origin I. It does not lie in the stream of consistently top-class football that triggered his return to the representative arena. The true measure of Craig Fitzgibbon lies in the two torturous seasons when he was trying to carry the badly misfiring Roosters pack like Atlas with the world on his shoulders.

"It might have looked like I was playing badly," the Roosters skipper says before today's clash with the Warriors at Mt Smart Stadium.

"And we had a bad run there as a club. To be honest, anything I say about it will sound like I'm making excuses. But I suppose I was carrying a few injuries back then. That didn't matter. Even if people thought my legs were shot, I was really putting in. I know some people might have thought I'd lost it, but I kept trying. I'm proud of that."

Fitzgibbon's ankle blew up in 2006. He plays that down. Given the chance, he'd play down a martian invasion. But his father, former Illawarra Steelers coach Allan Fitzgibbon, says his son's injuries - he twice had serious knee problems before the ankle flared and still carries a chronic hip condition - were severe enough to make other players quit.

Fitzgibbon had every right to stuff his Roosters training bag with his Test caps, Origin jumpers and premiership medal and go out to pasture in millionaires row: the English Super League.

But he stayed solid.

The lowest of the low came on July 7 last year. The Roosters suffered a humiliating 56-0 loss to Manly, only a whisker away from the club's worst loss in its 100-year history. Coach Chris Anderson quit (before he was pushed) the following week. Fitzgibbon's career and club were going up in smoke. Every head in the Roosters' dressing room hung low. His stayed up.

He said all the Roosters could do was keep working, because you never knew what might happen.

"Craig has had a few injuries that would have put most players out of the game," Allan Fitzgibbon says.

"Playing prop at the Roosters for a while there was killing him. He didn't complain, he would have kept doing it if they wanted him to, but it just wasn't right for him. He's had stages where he's played against adversity, injuries or otherwise. He's just worked hard. He's always been that way inclined. He had a really bad ankle in 2006 but he tried to carry them through the entire season."

The biggest beneficiary of the Roosters signing powerhouse forwards Willie Mason and Mark O'Meley this season has been Fitzgibbon. Now he can share the load. There were questions about the worthiness of some Origin selections - primarily Peter Wallace and Ben Cross - but the general reaction to Fitzgibbon's selection was: "Ah, good on him." He has earned respect.

"I never gave up hope of playing again," he says. "I was just happy to be playing for Country again.

"If the end of my rep career was playing with Country, that would have been fine. I was out of the loop for a while there when it came to Origin. But Origin jumpers should be hard to come by. It's just rugby league. It's such an up and down ride and you have to ride through a few lows. When you cop an opportunity, you have to try to take it. I was just stoked NSW gave me an opportunity."

Fitzgibbon turns 31 next month. It was assumed this season was his last hurrah. The assumptions were wrong. He's leaning towards another season. Roosters chief executive Brian Canavan, describing Fitzgibbon as hard-working, honest, humble and a high-level thinker, before running out of superlatives that start with h, says, "It's a given we want to keep him."

Fitzgibbon recently gave a talk to a group of executives doing a leadership course. The next week, he turned up to take a seat and start doing the course himself. He's one impressive individual. Not because of all the good things he's doing now, but because of the same things he was doing back when nobody cared to notice.