Down under and out
FRANK KEATimi By nice fluke, there has been a heady clash of cultures over the past few days, with comparisons anything but invidious. The intriguing bundle of important international football matches has converged precisely with both rugby league's grand final and the closing stages of rugby union's World Cup in France. The ubiquitous radio phone-ins and the letters pages of the public prints have been enthused with discussion on each code's relative merits, particularly on the simplicity or otherwise of the respective rules and the discipline, chivalry and civility of the players. The pros and cons, the cut and thrust of the polemic in many cases has led to penitent crossover and even total conversion. Siding with both apostasy and proselytism, the columnists have naturally been fanning the flames.
The Guardian's ace interviewer and diehard football nut, Simon Hattenstone, dived headfirst into the confessional: for 35 years, the Mancunian admitted, he had contemptuously scoffed at rugby as legalised assault by cauliflower-eared, double-barrelled toffs. No more, not after the World Cup (look away now, good Rod L): 'Everything about rugby union seems better than football — the drama, the pace, the one-twos, the passion, skill and muscle, the deadly grace and savage beauty of it all . . . God knows how good it gets when you understand the rules.'
If England vs Russia at football was a seminal encounter in Moscow this week, so had been the two rugby games which provided ecstatic European rugby glee as the two cocksure and preening Anzac squads were dispatched to their distant homes as early as the quarter-finals by England and France; both contests could have been described by precisely the same sharply alliterative tabloid headline: BATTLERS BEAT BOTTLERS. The New Zealand and Australian players will be grey-faced spectres at the feast on Saturday as the compelling narrative concludes in Paris's Stade de France; their doom-laden supporters are actually still clogging up the boulevards, never having seen their teams play once, and mooching from bar to bar, gloomily fingering their fortnight's return-flight tickets prebooked with overweening certainty only for the semis and the final. Oh, vaulting ambitions.
Australia's self-proclaimed global sports supremacy is a bit of a myth, to be honest; the brighter Aussies admit it. OK, its (rapidly ageing) cricketers are still the tops, and obviously all those beach bums can still swim fairly fast, but in reality their winter team games have never added up to much in world terms; of late, they've scarcely been as good as Brits at boxing, horse-riding, or even tennis; to be sure, over the last, say, dozen Olympic Games Australia haven't won a fraction of the seriously significant medals as the British; and at rugby, England have now dumped the Wallabies unceremoniously from three of the last four World Cups (and Wales beat them in the first one). Aussies pretend otherwise, but they are well practised at losing.
But New Zealand aren't, not at rugby, their one and only True Faith. Land of the long black cloud. Even the smallest one-horse town in New Zealand seems to have a main-street Museum of Rugby. What artefacts to put in from the last five World Cups? Nix. No team has ever turned up with more disdainfully lofty confidence than 2007's. Second favourites? Our 2nd XV, they boasted. The Prime Minister flew in to see the Blacks bottle it against France. At the final whistle, a cataleptic Kiwi pal of mine could still voice seething collective vengeance: 'She hasn't a remote prayer at the next election.'
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