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Last Sunday morning about 10 am I walked out onto my front veranda and swore long and hard at the world. Nothing unusual in that, some might say.
But I’ll bet I wasn’t the only one who did that just after France beat the All Blacks in the quarterfinals of the world cup.
A month or two back I was adamant that the All Blacks had the goods on the rest of the world this time round.
But, as I watched the Argentinean French game and realised my TVR pick of Argentina to beat France was about to come true, a sneaking little worry started to form in the back of mind.
If the Argies went on to win their pool, then that would have us playing the bloody French in the quarter finals, danger, danger, danger.
The rest is history now and hindsight is a wonderful thing, the trouble with earning some of your living from crystal ball gazing is that if your wrong you look like a dickhead and if your right everyone thinks you fluked it.
Neither option is that good for the ego, but the trick is really to be right more often than your wrong.
It was great to see the All Blacks get an enormous Canterbury welcome home when they flew in, as New Zealanders we seem to have finally grown up in our attitude to losing a world cup. The way that losing coaches and teams have been treated in the past has been despicable. I watched Rueben Thorne walk out of the Christchurch airport a year or four back, just after captaining a losing All Black team in a world cup and he looked like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders, that should never ever happen again.
A few good things could come out of this world cup and I believe they need to be actioned fairly quickly.
One, Argentina should be in the six nations tournament and based in a French city, most of their players play in the French club competition and the travel would not be such a killer for them.
Two, the three Pacific Island teams should have a combined team in the Tri Nations Competition and based in Adelaide, Australia. The Ozzies would make them feel right at home and the huge crowds they get there could finance their future world cup aspirations.
Three, all of the remaining so called minnows in the world cup, USA, Canada, Japan, Romania, Portugal, Namibia and Georgia should start their own comp. I know the costs may be prohibitive but surely there are enough wealthy backers and potential sponsors in Europe, North America and Japan to get this thing up and running.
Four, by the time you read this, this year’s world cup will be over and we will have just seen an excellent example of how to run an excellent festival of rugby. The hosts, the Frenchmen and women have opened their arms to all the nations competing. There have been none of the ugly scenes that regularly take place when the soccer nations of the world compete at their premier event. I just hope that the organisers of the next world cup in New Zealand in 2011 were taking plenty of notes, if it is anywhere near as good as this one has been, we the rugby loving public are in for a special treat.
As to being knocked out in the quarterfinals, so what, winning “Old Bill” is not ours by right, it is something that takes a huge amount of luck, even with the undisputed best team in the world.
Yes every other nation there is going to be doing everything they can to unsettle us and knock us out early, get used to it. That’s the price we pay for being the best.
If that means they nobble our hamburgers or darken their jerseys so we have to play in the alternative strip, so be it, bring it on. The reason they do it after all, is because they fear us.
Remember this, “Old Bill” belongs to us, it’s our name on the thing first, and whose looking after it for the next four years doesn’t really matter in the long run.
Lets wait and see how many times our name appears on it in 500 years time before we give up the bragging rights of “Really we are the best in the world, you just have the cup for the moment”
And if your still down in the dumps about losing it.
Just ask a Pom when they last won the soccer world cup and they invented that game to.
It was after all, just a game of footy and it had me on the edge of my seat until the final whistle blew.
That bloody ref does need to come for a wee holiday in Canterbury though.
He’d learn the true meaning of being “One eyed” if he took the other one home in a jar.
But then, that is “Just an old truckers point of view”
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