The blooming looming rugby world cup

The blooming looming Rugby World Cup is now fewer than 28 days away. It’s unstoppable. NZ Post Philatelic has just announced its first ever 3-dimensional stamp at $15 a lick. The image is a closeup of the Cup itself in all its glory, and in 3 dimensions. Oh, joy. You can also have a solid silver commemorative coin for about $135. This depicts a few beefy All Blacks in their haka.

Some Aussie rugby writer, pathetic and peeved witless at the All Blacks’ latest 30-14 defeat of the Wallabies, says the haka immediately prior to an All Black game should be disallowed, as it gives them an “unfair physical advantage”. The whole game of rugby is about male dominance over another man, and they're yelling and screaming and threatening and you've to sit there and go: 'Umm, this'll be finished soon’, said this bloke. Oh dear, how sad, never mind.

It seems that we are sending less than the All Blacks full strength to South Africa next weekend, so as to conserve some of the top players. (I had to do a little research to find out what is happening in South Africa -- something called the Tri Nations.) We are constantly updated on the players’ joints and groins and other important places, and I entirely agree that wherever possible they should reduce the tearing of tendons, rippage of nerves, fracture of bones. The sight of one of these hulks, in clear agony, being helped off the paddock is less than edifying. Of course they are in a tradition which tells of one historic rugby icon, injured in the game, who refused help, insisted on playing on, and it was only at the end it was discovered he had dislocated his shoulder. This sort of stuff is admired.

Down at the Viaduct in Auckland they have installed a couple of immense TV screens in The Cloud, the strange sluglike edifice that seems to have beached itself like some slow primeval amphibian vertebrate. These screens are the size of half a footy paddock, presumably in case any of the devotees are short sighted. They cost about a million dollars we are told.

We are now emerging, everyone hopes, from the latest pre-tournament crisis. Adidas was charging a truly extortionate $220 for the official RWC All Black jersey. Some Whakatane retailer realised that customers could buy the jersey on line for much less, and promptly dropped his price. He said, it was not only to achieve sales, but also in defiance of the greed of Adidas, in which cause he was prepared to take a loss.

The question then was whether Adidas would drop their price or tyrannize the retailers -- and they blundered straight into a stunning PR disaster which surely has their American bosses incandescent. I don’t personally care about any of this, but it’s delicious to watch. The Rugby Union bosses, caught between their indignant fans on the one hand, already having paid through their bleeding noses for seats at the games, and Adidas’s serious sponsorship money, simply gibbered. Not what you want, less than a month out from the RWC.

It’s interesting to me from listening to the Adidas bosses, that their generous sponsorship of rugby year by year was always actually dependent on Adidas making money from rugby sales of their gear. So it was never altruistic, and I was simply naïve to assume it was. Of course, Adidas’s donated millions are an investment to make money for their shareholders. How silly of me. These gents will pull the plug whenever it suits them.

However, none of this solves my problem -- how to escape the hype, the hysteria, the rivers of booze, the excruciating “values” of professional contact sport and machoism, the endless mindless prognostications about imminent games, the hassles about public transport, the huge demands on the police and others, the endless environmental consequences of all the world travel, the bondage and obsequiousness of the media and its sports writers, the relentless dumbing down of our culture…

And the sheer noise. It may be only faintly audible here at Algies Bay, except on radio and TV. I can get the Concert Programme on Sky much better than by radio, so that’s good. I have plenty of books. For food we need go no further than Warkworth.

The best thing would be to go to Niue for maybe 4 weeks -- but of course, that’s not going to happen, idyllic and all as it would be. Yesterday morning the Concert Programme suddenly and delightfully played Eric Coates’s By a Sleepy Lagoon, a Tropical Moon… I do have a couple of commitments here. Anyway, in Niue they would probably all be sitting around a kava bowl in front of a giant TV screen generously supplied by the Chinese consulate…