The Rugby World Cup is delivering cutting-edge entertainment – mostly off the field.
Natalie Slade/NZH
Fizzing with hubris after annexing a swathe of downtown Auckland and making the trains run on time, Rugby World Cup Minister Murray McCully reckons we should have another crack at hosting the tournament. You can see where he’s coming from. Those who campaigned against New Zealand’s bid to host the tournament in the belief that we’d put on a cheesy anachronism are now having to scrape egg off their faces: this World Cup is delivering cutting-edge entertainment with something for everyone.
Where to start? Perhaps with the grotesquely inappropriate Holocaust analogy tweeted by Samoan player Eliota Fuimaono-Sapolu. For good measure, he also compared the scheduling decision that gave Wales seven days between games to Samoa’s three to apartheid and slavery.
What Fuimaono-Sapolu omitted to mention in his Twitter tantrum, which had the saving grace of being too silly to be offensive, was that Wales were coming off a clash with the heavyweight Springboks, while Samoa had played everybody’s favourite roadkill, Namibia. Believe it or not, this isn’t the first time a sportsman has played the slavery card. In 2008 soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo described Manchester United’s initial refusal to grant him early release from a contract worth more than $300,000 a as “modern slavery”.
Fuimaono-Sapolu then took cover behind political correctness, pointing out “it’s not like I was throwing dwarfs around”. Ah yes, the dwarfs. They provided a surreal Fellini-like backdrop to the scandal that erupted when England’s Mike Tindall, fresh from marrying into the royal family, was sprung cavorting in a Queenstown bar with a woman who’s either a mystery blonde or a dear friend of the family, depending on whether you believe the tabloids or the spin doctors.
If the word “cavorting” didn’t exist, the tabloids would have had to invent it. It covers a multitude of things that can either be sins or harmless fun: you be the judge. In this case it involved the blonde’s planting a kiss on Tindall’s forehead while his nose, which could have been designed by Picasso in his proto-Cubist period, hovered enigmatically over her cleavage.
The CCTV footage duly found its way onto the internet, accompanied by a nauseating commentary accusing Tindall of letting down the following: his wife, his team, his nation, the Queen and God. It was only a matter of time before human headline Sonny Bill Williams got in on the act, bursting out of his jersey mid-game like the Incredible Hulk. Having sent his legions of female fans into a tizzy, SBW then rather brutally deflated them by letting it be known he has a new girlfriend.
The Aussies haven’t been having a great time of it, which has hardly diminished the feel-good factor. Monstered on the field by a rampaging Irish forward pack and off it by feral Kiwi fans, all they could manage by way of a counter-attack was some tissue-thin gossip about a New Zealand Cabinet minister behaving badly in a corporate box. The Aussies were too busy bleating about how beastly we’re being to them to acknowledge that some of our media outlets went out of their way to treat this piece of fluff as an actual news story.
While proceeding smoothly through pool play, the All Blacks did generate a couple of oddball talking points. First, the sensationally loopy notion that because Graham Henry is so spooked by criticism of his selection tinkering, Richie McCaw and Dan Carter had to fake injuries before they could be rested for the Japan game. Then there’s the ongoing drama over whether Mils Muliaina will miss out on becoming the second All Black after McCaw to play 100 tests now he’s ceded the starting fullback position to Israel Dagg.
Some are seriously suggesting Muliaina should be shoehorned into the match 22 during the knockout phase to enable him to achieve this personal milestone, even though it’s only an issue because he has chosen to quit the All Blacks after the World Cup to take up a contract in Japan.