For the last couple of years, the man in charge of the 2011 Rugby World Cup has been preparing the host nation for defeat. "I have been keeping a public debate bubbling along, along the lines of: 'What's more important to us – the All Blacks winning the trophy, or us successfully hosting the tournament?'" says Martin Snedden, a former New Zealand cricketer. "The All Blacks, yes, haven't won it in 24 years, but if we don't win it this time, we'll get another chance in 2015 and 2019 and so on. We'll never get another chance to host the thing."
Fine words. But chances are most New Zealanders stopped listening after "24 years". Not since the last time the Webb Ellis Cup was contested in New Zealand, in the first tournament back in 1987, have the All Blacks triumphed.
And with every World Cup that goes by, 1987 becomes to New Zealand rugby what 1966 is to English football – if anything with more anguish, given the smaller pool of nations at the top level and the inescapable difference that New Zealand typically enters the tournament as one of the most fancied sides, if not the most.
In 2011, with home advantage again, the All Blacks are favourites again, despite losses in the final two games of the Tri-Nations. The first of those defeats, with a weakened side away to South Africa, was tolerated. The second, a 25-20 defeat in Brisbane that handed the trophy to Australia, burned. Yes, the All Blacks came close to pegging back the Wallabies early onslaught, outscoring them by 12 points in the second half. But it was, all the same, a "wake-up call" or a "reality check", in the rasps of the country's lumpen media.
Paradoxically, the national angst might have been greater had the All Blacks won those last two games. Since the Tri-Nations began, in 1996, New Zealand have won the title in every World Cup year. At the very least, as the All Blacks head coach, Graham Henry, was quick to point out, any fears of complacency have been extinguished.
Since 1991, World Cup postmortems have proffered plenty of explanations: disharmony, bad refereeing, too much rotation, too much fancy stuff, more bad refereeing. Many New Zealanders still curse "Suzie", an almost certainly apocryphal South African waitress, for poisoning the team before the 1995 final. But New Zealanders have also wondered, increasingly, whether there is some endemic tendency to choke.
Each exit has also entailed an almighty dirge, a great national sulk – the public "bloodletting" that Snedden hopes to forestall. Could it happen again? In fairness, recriminations were more tempered than many expected after the 2007 defeat, to the extent that Henry could be (bravely) reappointed, but fears for 2011 are such that a national broadsheet newspaper recently saw fit to seek a psychologist's advice on coping mechanisms, and the website Wait-of-a-nation.com captures something of the mood in its sardonic forecast of "a tailspin of depression" at New Zealand's inevitable capitulation. Its way of coping? "Amplify the woe. Fixate on and obsess about our World Cup frailties."
If the World Cup were awarded for volume of coverage, New Zealand would have it sewn up. The tournament will be broadcast on four terrestrial channels as well as satellite TV; the final seven games will air simultaneously on at least five channels. Rugby stories have trespassed into the front parts of newspapers to the extent that news and sports sections are almost indistinguishable. Libya? Forget it, mate, there's a World Cup around the corner.
The lead-up has witnessed a host of rugby-focused exhibitions, a series of lectures on "New Zealand's Rugby World" at the University of Auckland, even a "rugby comedy festival". The TV soap opera, Shortland Street, is planning to record extra scenes to slot into nightly episodes, reflecting the latest results.
The depth of feeling for rugby union in New Zealand is such that a (female) television newsreader can say of the country's relationship with the national sport, and without a hint of irony, "rugby's what we are". As Snedden puts it: "Rugby is part of our DNA." Were it not, he says, such a tiny and distant country would not have a hope of hosting a competition of this scale.
"We do sort of put all our eggs in one basket when it comes to national morale," says Lloyd Jones, author of the rugby novel The Book of Fame and the Booker-shortlisted Mister Pip. "It has a big influence, like the weather, on how we feel about everything."
Why? "I think it's one of the few areas of local expertise that has a legacy. We're bloody good at farming, but there are no Olympics for farming. It's not on any visible stage out there in the world, but rugby is. We're good at it, for various reasons, and the rest of the world has said 'Yes, you're very good at it', and it's kind of confirmed in our minds something that we're not usually that confident about: our ability at something."
In international rugby union, the young colony of New Zealand found a stage to display its increasingly independent sense of itself. The team that travelled to the British Isles in 1905 – the "Originals", the first side to be called the All Blacks – forged a new national identity. They almost went unbeaten: the only loss in a long tour was a controversial one to Wales which amounted, as one historian has put it, to a "major episode in the mythology of New Zealandism", not least because the referee was deemed to have awarded an unjust try.
The two sides of rugby's bind to New Zealand culture and politics are most vividly expressed in its relationship with race, in its inclusion of Polynesian players and embrace of Maori tradition. At its worst, the sport has been a compliant friend of apartheid.
For decades, New Zealand complied with South African demands that no Maori players be included in All Blacks touring parties. The divisions around the tour of 1981 "really tore New Zealand to bits", says Anton Oliver, a former All Black captain. His memory is as sharp as anyone's: his father, Frank, played for the All Blacks in the controversial series.
In 2011, the Maori and Polynesian traditions are as inherent to the All Blacks as the silver fern. Mealamu, Nonu, Weepu – Polynesian names are as commonplace on the All Blacks team sheet as they are on an Auckland school roll. But nothing encapsulates the attitude change quite like the haka. Only a few decades ago the pre-kick-off All Black haka was an awkward, tokenist flap: like a crowd of drunks swatting at flies. The ritual has transmogrified into a visceral, totemic articulation of national pride.
Oliver, who retired from internationals after the 2007 World Cup, and now works in the renewable-energy industry in London, found himself exploring the cultural import of the All Blacks when he was part of a group of players who crafted a new haka, Kapo-o-Pango, in 2005 (yes, the one that ends, or did in its first form, with that throat-slitting gesture).
"What had become the All Black haka didn't really represent us any more; it didn't represent what the All Blacks were about in the new millennium," he says. "So we started to unpick that and think, 'How do we want to express who we are?' We're sort of trapped by the past – in some ways it fortified us, and in some ways it hindered us … We had to re-interrogate the question of legacy and make it work for us, so we weren't weighed down with the burden of all those that had gone before us.
"So when we were asking ourselves about New Zealand now, it was clear: well, it's far browner, it has far more of a Pasifika feel; it's less truly agrarian – it's more urbanised. The All Blacks of the 50s and 60s were basically all white farmers. If you look at the team today, apart from Asians, most New Zealanders are represented in the All Blacks."
Recent decades have seen another dramatic change in New Zealand rugby, and the global game: professionalism. The hastily arranged 1987 tournament was contested between 16 amateur sides. "I think there was still quite a lot of doubt, or conjecture, about how significant the World Cup was," says Richard Boock, a leading New Zealand sports columnist. "There had been quite a lot of opposition to its introduction. A lot of people thought we were wasting out time. Now, it's unanimously accepted as the pinnacle of rugby – bigger than any series."
Chris Laidlaw, an All Blacks scrum-half in the 1960s turned diplomat turned broadcaster, is among the most vocal critics of the professional tide. The cover of his 2010 book Somebody Stole My Game shows a battered leather rugby ball, lying deflated on a bed of banknotes. The "essential spirit" of the game, he wrote, will not survive if "we continue relentlessly down the path to total, soulless professionalism, with the amateur dimension quietly dying in an impoverished ditch".
In an August 2011 lecture, Laidlaw warned the World Cup could exacerbate the divisive trend. "As the high-flying corporate visitors flood into the stadium lounges, boxes and best seats, another nail is driven into the coffin of rugby's, and perhaps this country's, traditional egalitarianism," he said.
That threat is not lost on supporters. Along with the many rugby-related trivialities that have been promoted to the front pages in recent months has been one story that amplified a growing disquiet among New Zealanders. The news that the Adidas official All Blacks shirt was available abroad for half the NZ$220 (£115) price tag at home became a lightning rod for a debate about the commercialisation of New Zealand's national passion.
"The jersey thing was a catalyst," says Boock. "It's brought into sharp relief the fact that the fans are now part of the brand. And it's sort of been a takeover by stealth."
The players, too, have been alert to the risk of professionalism eating the old values, says Oliver. "I think there was a real danger with the onset of professionalism that the fundamentals of playing for the All Blacks would be lost, especially when all of the experienced players who had played in the amateur era had retired and a new type of player, commencing an All Black career entirely within the professional age, took over."
Again, he points to the process of making a new haka. "That self-appraisal and self-examination ... has been crucial in educating that generation about what the black jersey stands for, the legacy that they now belong to, and the expectations that the jersey demands of them. It's been instrumental in the All Blacks' incredible win-loss record over the last eight years under Graham Henry, [and the assistant coaches] Steve Hansen and Wayne Smith. It pushed money and contracts to the background and brought a sense of culture, belonging and ownership of an identity to the foreground."
Still, 24 years: 1987 and all that. In a cruel reverse-alchemy, every time another nation's name is etched into the Webb Ellis Cup, expectation turns into anxiety. And it is a malady opponents are alert to. Alastair Campbell, whose distaste for New Zealand rugby stems from his experience as press chief for the whitewashed 2005 British & Irish Lions, delighted in telling readers of the Sunday Times after the All Blacks' unexpected quarter-final defeat by France in 2007 of a text he had received from an old Lions colleague. "They do the chokey-chokey and it's ooh-la-la, that's what they're all about." Even then, Campbell, when he had finished "rolling around the carpet giggling" was eagerly forecasting "the humiliation of all humiliations, a choke on home territory".
More troubling than the sight of a former spin doctor's schadenfreude, however, is a sense among supporters that their fretfulness is shared by – or radiating to – the players. Against France in 2007, and against Australia in 2003, the All Blacks resorted to "trench warfare", says Boock. "You could actually see them getting anxious and wondering where the next point was going to come from."
But Oliver is bemused at the suggestion that supporters' angst might affect the players. "Well, I didn't feel nervous, so there you go," he says of the 2007 defeat. "We lost for all sorts of reasons that I don't think were to do with nerves. I think that is a projection of mass anxiety that possibly doesn't exist when it comes to the players. All I can say, for myself, is that I didn't feel that. As a player you prepare well, you've done all the training, physically and mentally. You get to the game and you just go on autopilot and you perform. You can unpick the reasons why we didn't win on that day, and I don't think it was because we hadn't won a World Cup. I just don't think we were battle-hardened."
The second World Cup to be played in New Zealand arrives after a remarkable and exhausting year. In November 2010, 29 men were killed in an explosion at the Pike River mine on the South Island's west coast. Three months later, the most severe of a series of earthquakes struck Christchurch, on the opposite coast, killing 181. "The country has taken a hell of a hiding in the last 12 months," says Jones. "We need some good news."
Among its many more severe hardships, Christchurch lost the seven games it had been scheduled to host. The Canterbury region's refurbished stadium, like so much of the city, had been cracked and contorted. "By far the saddest thing thing has happened to us," says Snedden. "We could tell fairly early on that it was massive; instinctively we knew that there wasn't a hope in hell of the Rugby World Cup staying there. The Christchurch preparations had been fantastic ... For those people it was enormously gut-wrenching to lose that."
Twelve of the 30 players in the All Blacks squad come from the Canterbury-based Crusaders, who played this year's Super-15, reaching the final, without a home ground, hosting matches as far afield as Twickenham. The All Blacks captain, Richie McCaw, and vice-captain, Dan Carter – a forward and fly-half every bit as important to New Zealand in 2011 as Martin Johnson and Jonny Wilkinson were to England in 2003 – are based in Christchurch.
There is bound to be an impact on Crusaders players, says Oliver. "Look at what they've gone through this year, what they are still going through – you have to remember some of their homes don't exist any more, or if they do exist then their families, their mums, dads, friends – their houses are stuffed, their kids can't go to school, they're still queuing up for food. All those things, they weigh heavily. They affect your condition."
And what of the All Blacks' home advantage? If New Zealand's World Cup record is a parade of disappointment, it is equally true to say that New Zealand are unbeaten in World Cup games at home. "It could be either a positive or a negative," says Oliver. And he, too, hopes the country can hold its nerve.
"I'd just like to think that New Zealand supporters and the media are all going to be inside the tent pissing out, rather than on the outside pissing in," he says. "When things get difficult, that's when your true colours get shown. Are you actually in this together, are you supporting, or are you just going to jump ship and say: 'I told you so'? I think that's where human character gets revealed."
Source: www.guardian.co.uk
