New Zealand's love affair with rugby

Interesting to hear 81-test veteran Justin Marshall telling The Straits Times that New Zealand's current all-conquering All Blacks rugby team would not cement their place as the best ever until they win next year's World Cup in England.

I'd go along with that. The All Blacks have won the cup just twice, in 1987 and 2011, both times in front of partisan New Zealand crowds. They have never won the Webb Ellis Trophy away from home. It's not something the winningest team in world sport takes lightly.

Since their first game against New South Wales in 1884, they have won 84 per cent of their games and 74 per cent of Test matches against international competition.

Having lost only one of their last 35 tests is remarkable in itself.

Last year, the All Blacks became the first team to win all their 14 matches in a calendar year - including 10 against the other five top-ranked international sides.

Sadly, it wasn't enough to capture this year's Laureus Academy's World Team of the Year Award. That honour went to football team Bayern Munich for winning the Bundesliga, Champions League and German Cup - hardly a measure of global domination.

And just to put things into monetary perspective, Bayern Munich's 24 players boast salaries of between US$3 million (S$3.77 million) and $14.2 million a year. The All Blacks average out at $300,000, with the top handful of players making $515,000 each.

Since rugby went professional in 1996, the All Blacks have won 121 of their 149 games, including nine Tri-Nations titles against South Africa, Australia and, more latterly, Argentina, and qualifying for all seven World Cup playoffs.

They have also been on seven undefeated tours to Europe, including two Grand Slam sweeps of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales in successive weeks, a test-series whitewash against the British & Irish Lions and 30 victories in a row on home soil.

Only Australia, South Africa, France, England and Wales have ever beaten the All Blacks, the latter not having done that since that historic occasion in 1954.

South Africa provides the sternest test with a 40 per cent win record, but much of that was earned in earlier days.

To the great satisfaction of most Kiwis, Australia have won only 39 out of 132 tests against the All Blacks. That more than makes up for the countless times we have been done and dusted by their champion cricket and rugby league teams.

With a population significantly smaller than Singapore, New Zealand counts a senior male player pool of 132,000, compared with England (1.4 million), South Africa (633,000), France (347,000) and Australia (296,000).

Yet 14 New Zealanders are among the 63 players who have been inducted into the International Rugby Hall of Fame, followed by 10 Welshmen, nine South Africans, eight Irishmen, seven Australians and six Frenchmen.

So, spare us a little sympathy, will you? You have no idea what it is like to be the winningest team in global sports. The psyche of the whole country rests on whether the All Blacks win or lose. The more they win, the higher the level of expectancy becomes.

When they lose, horror of horrors, Aotearoa (roughly translated from Maori as Land of the Long White Cloud) becomes, linguistically and figuratively, Aomanguroa (the Land of the Long Black Cloud).

A gloom settles over the land that can only be erased by the team picking themselves up and winning again, the sooner the better.

The country demands it. Mondays after a loss are awful, particularly the crowing e-mails from those enjoying a rare triumph.

Frankly, I don't know how the All Blacks coaches sleep at night, given the unrelenting pressure they are under to produce results week in, week out. Anywhere else, even with Brazil's magical football side, it would be considered wildly unrealistic.

Everything they do, every selection they make is dissected and endlessly debated in a manner that makes even my head swim.

And I've always had the built-in rugby chip in the worst possible way.

I remember getting up with my father at 2am to listen to the short-wave (huh, you ask?) commentaries of the All Blacks playing our mortal enemies, the South African Springboks. He got through a pack of cigarettes and I chewed my nails to the quick.

The number of times I have been back to New Zealand in the past 41/2 decades can be counted in the low double figures. Sometimes I have to stop and think who our prime minister is and what party is in power.

I always know the All Blacks captain, of course. The gold-plated one we have now, Ritchie Mc- Caw, is pretty hard to forget. He has played in 122 tests, 87 of them as skipper with a win ratio of 90 per cent. No one comes even close.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, without satellites or the Internet, I barely saw a game of rugby.

Football-mad Asia wasn't the best place to be if you were a rugby fan anyway. Yet I am as mad about the sport as I was when I left. As burdensome as it may be, there is no question winning does lift morale mightily in New Zealand's often forgotten corner of the world.

English football fans should have long ago given up on the spoiled members of their national squad who regularly lose to teams that in rugby would be the equivalent of Chile.

In the 700 games England have played since 1946, they have won only 388, with 188 draws. Does anyone know how many draws there are in rugby these days because of judicious changes to the laws? One hand, folks. One hand.

thane.cawdor@gmail.com

This article was published on April 28 in The Straits Times.

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