h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Congrats Australia on winning the Tri-Nations and well done New Zealand on playing a fantastic game especially in the second half.

As I am still dumbstruck at how incompetent New Zealand was at lineout time in the rugby Test played last night (Sep 1), I will comment on an earlier one.

Rugby Union Test match, NZ V Australia, August 11, 2001

Any fool could see the All Blacks were doomed. Before the match, captain Anton Oliver revealed that his preferred desert island gizmo would be a pair of nail-clippers. "I tend to be a bit fastidious about dirty or long fingernails," he murmured. And his preferred desert island companions, he lisped, would be Albert Einstein and Sir lsaac Newton.

These revelations were published in a newspaper on the morning of the match, and clearly broke the spirit of the national team. There are certain things that any frontrow forward should keep to himself, but when they come from the All Black captain, they are fatal. What would Colin Meads have made of a bloke who didn't like getting his hands dirty? Did Waka Nathan ever imagine himself conversing with a defunct English physicist? No, of course not. And so look what happened. A bunch of effete intellectuals threw themselves at a wall of frozen Australian mutton, and bounced off.

Tana Umaga had an excellent game, but Tana Umaga had cautioned beforehand that the team wouldn't want "to train like Tarzan and play like Jane". Now that's how an All Black should talk. Jonah Lomu, similarly undistracted by the exact theoretical relationship of mass to energy, barged his way to glory. Can't the selectors see what is going on here?

Murray Mexted had an excellent game: not once did he use the word "egregious' in his commentary. Rugby, in other words, can be saved from creeping cerebration, but only if the offenders are willing to change.

Many cherished national myths died on the day, and none more gruesomely than the myth of Carisbrook. The Australians have never won at Dunedin, the nation kept telling itself. But, as one of the Napier Cosmopolitan Club pundits pointed out, they have never won at Waipukurau either. An excellent point, surely.

The House of Pain, it was said, would fill the Ocker hearts with ice. The Dunedin crowd is rnerciless, it was said: all that cruel Presbyterian repression has to find an outlet somewhere, and what better target than a bunch of sun-loving Aussies?

The scarfies, [university students] it was said, would do to them what they had done to so many other visiting rugby teams: take out their rage at being cooped up in Antarctica. It was a classic case of swallowing your own mythology. The Aussies, said the egregious John Eales, didn't even talk about the Carisbrook voodoo. The Aussies don't think, they play rugby.

New Zealand's halfback, Justin Marshall, seemed to do a lot of thinking on the field: whenever he got the ball, he would think long and hard what to do with it. "Every now and then he does the right thing," said commentator Chris Laidlaw, who prefers to accentuate the positive. Rugby crowds in New Zealand are notoriously sensitive. Once the gloom began to gather, they stopped cussing and cheering and "went to sleep", as one of the pundits put it. That was because the boys were losing, Mexted pointed out. There is no gainsaying this.

Eales, the greatest captain in Australian rugby history, is variously known as Captain Marvel, God, or Nobody, because "Nobody's perfect". New Zealand can comfort itself, then, that Nobody won at Carisbrook. Except, of course, the spirit of Anzac, that ineffable bond of comradeship that stipulates that when war breaks out, we crowd into the trenches together, but in peacetime we will fight each other to bloody death.

It was no comfort to Anton Oliver the Anzac spirit had triumphed once again under his captainship. Interviewed after the game, his brow bruised purple and his eyes glittering with madness, he couldn't find a word to say. But the tragedy and the ruin were all his fault. What is the All Black captain's preferred desert island book? The Oxford English Dictionary.

Awww LÒÒny, I didn't mean to set you on fire...but I did enjoy the second half.

Infinity, this is not just a national disaster, it's much worse than that. The front page 10-column banner headline in New Zealand's biggest and most conservative Sunday newspaper says it it.

The Mourning After

Here's a toast. To a good game ruined by a poor result glug

I don't know LÒÒny, I thought it was a pretty good game all around... I was a bit disappointed that Kefu didn't flick the ball back to Eales just as he was about to go over the try line... there were only about 5 All-Blacks in the way, after all, it couldn't have been too difficult to give Eales the winning try...

*ignorant of all things rugby*

Cafram, no doubt you are a bit of an expert on more girlie stuff. Perhaps you could talk about New Zealand's glorious wins in the netball Tri-series this year

Wow, look at that! You can hardly even see the seams!

Girly stuff?!

Sorry...it's just that I'm the least girly girl that I know

Don't believe her LÒÒny, it's all a cover...

Be nice KC. We don't want it to start the Cri-series

Oh well, SA may have lost the Tri-Nations but we still know how to stir up a pot of Aussies and Kiwis

Good to see you Cafram. I have missed you. It isn't necessary to know a lot about rugby. I like to watch to see who will punch who. Men just can't resist losing their tempers.

So true!!

i resemble that remark

Actually in over 20 years of rugby i only threw one lot of punches and that was in a desperate attempt to stop a guy 3 times my size from turning me into a piece of tenderised meat.

Ahhh. Well Linus not ALL players are aggressive to start with. There is always those who start and those who don't duck 'cause they think ducks only belong to cricketers.

Hi!
Are we going to start on cricket now, or shall we wait until the season starts?,biggrin>

Ah, yet another sport invented by the English which allows the ANZACS (and South Africans) to feel superior.

Wait for the season to start please. Then I'll sit on the sidelines with Cafram and I'll send Eternity in as SA commentator. She's much nicer than me...doesn't stir people up...and she likes cricket.

What do you mean'wait for it to start'. It was only a week ago that we flogged the poms once again