RWC and the Election

There’s nothing quite like being on the winning side.

Being on the other side of the globe at the sharp end of a Rugby World Cup is God’s way of telling you you’re about to develop a sudden interest in groin injuries.

Thus we found ourselves, in the small hours, heading to Bleecker St in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village to watch the All Blacks deal to Australia. Two of our party were born in Canada, one in Kent, but we were instantly identified as fellow Kiwis by a woman who came up to greet us. I soon realised she was just happy to no longer be the oldest person in the pub, which was still rocking to a covers band.

Soon enough there were haka, a few drinks and an increasingly morose Aussie in our corner. Result! We poured out into the street and distributed the largesse of victors to a homeless guy, who kindly pointed us in the direction of a diner for celebratory waffles at dawn. I’ve never felt more Kiwi.

There was still the final to go. Finding somewhere to watch involved an increasing frantic trawl of overcrowded San Francisco nightspots with warm beer and all the ambience of Alcatraz. Finally, we discovered one that still had seats.

Admittedly, the seats were in a room filled largely with the opposition. Beside us, an angry French guy kept leaping to his feet, shouting “Allez! Allez!” with mounting despair. They stopped serving drinks shortly after we got there, and it wasn’t easy to watch the second half with my hands over my eyes.

“They will win,” declared my daughter-in-law, with the serene detachment of someone who comes from Mexico. Her husband tweeted disgust from LA as the All Blacks slowed down the end of the game. I couldn’t agree. It was the most instinctual, if hardly the most dazzling, performance I’ve seen. They just hung on with dumb, defensive chutzpah, instead of trying anything clever and, inevitably, fatal in the last five minutes. They didn’t bite off more than they could chew – always a good way to avoid choking. Encore le result!

As we left, angry French guy was devastated. “Ze Kiwis! Zey win by one point!” he railed at his companions. “Yes,” I couldn’t help but call after him as we headed briskly through the night for our car, “we did.”

Post-game we even managed to do our bit for tarnished transtasman relations. In Macy’s department store, again an Australian woman picked us as Kiwis (note to self: stop wearing so much black) and demanded to know who won. “We did!” I beamed. She came over, congratulated us and warmly shook my hand. Deranged with Antipodean bonhomie, I found myself saying, “Your turn next time!” What was I thinking? Still, next time is a long way off. Party Central will be somewhere else. This time, as the PM might say, the Troty was ours.

Now just an election to go and we can all fire up the barbie in a newfound spirit of nationhood and have a beer and a well-deserved lie down. In the first Leaders Debate, the leader to kick off was decided by a simple coin toss. Brilliant. Couldn’t they just toss another one and put us all out of our misery?

It was all very frustrating. TV1’s Guyon Espiner didn’t so much moderate as castrate the debate. And who wrote the questions? Phil Goff was asked if New Zealand was 100% pure. Given John Key’s infamous reply to this question on the BBC’s HARDtalk, this was surely one for him. Goff was asked whether the Christchurch rebuild had stalled. Key was asked a soft question about the ­challenges still faced.

Never mind. We could observe that Goff can still get nervous after all these years. And that Key plays with his hands between questions, perhaps trying to keep them under control after his ­excruciating claw at Richie McCaw.

Still, there’s always the light relief. The night of the debate, 3 News sent Patrick Gower to ask Don Brash about his superannuation policy. “Out came the abuse,” intoned Gower. Cue footage of Brash telling Gower, “You’re a deceitful bastard, quite frankly, and I don’t want to talk to you any more.”

Magnificently unperturbed, Gower replied, “What about the retirement age?” Of course, Brash couldn’t help himself and kept trying to explain to Gower why he was a deceitful bastard, with about as much success as he’s had explaining his cannabis policy. Or anything else for that matter. In his retreat from Gower, the lift doors closed on Brash still explaining. It’s possibly way too late, but someone should tell him about a basic principle of political life, even for members of Act: for goodness sake, think how it will look on the six o’clock news.