All the Footy You Want...and a Bit of Cricket Too

Queensland 30, New South Wales 6
When we looked through all the sporting jerseys in one of the many sports stores in Brisbane, State of Origin was the one that most confused us. Brisbane had rugby union (the Queensland Reds), rugby league (the Brisbane Broncos), and AFL (the Brisbane Lions) teams, so where did this one fit in? Once May rolled around, we quickly found out. Origin is the series of three rugby league games between the Queensland Maroons and the New South Wales Blues held between the middle of May and the beginning of July every year. This game pits the best of those that started playing rugby league for a Queensland team vs. the best of those that started playing league for a New South Wales team. Each year, the series alternates between having two games in Brisbane (at Suncorp Stadium), one in Sydney (at Telstra/Aussie Stadium) and two in Sydney, one in Brisbane. These games are by far the biggest sporting event in Queensland every year, and huge numbers of people turn out to support their team.

I managed to grab five tickets, just before they sold out, for the second game of the 2006 series (if you do want tickets to these games, I suggest buying them the day they are released, or else there won’t be any left!). I bought them with the intention of cheering for Queensland, despite all of James’s arguments to the contrary. He is an avid Blues fan, having lived his first nine years in NSW, and believed that since the first place I had lived in Australia—albeit, only for a week for a study abroad orientation—was Sydney, that I should cheer for the Blues as well. I didn’t fall for it, telling him that the first place I had a residence was in Queensland, and dressed in maroon for the game. He not only dressed in blue, but made a huge blue sign as well, reading "Bring Back the Biff" (a slogan from "The Footy Show" meaning "Bring Back the Fights").

When we arrived at the game and found our seats (which were surprisingly good for being the lowest price level), the under 18’s QLD vs. NSW game was on the field. Queensland destroyed New South Wales and James pointed to the score and told us that we should enjoy it, because it would be the last time Queensland would be ahead that night.

Then, after a bunch of sparkler and giant dancing maroon figurine displays, the game began. The crowd was deafening as they cheered for their Maroons. Many people had giant Maroon flags (between our group of five we had two), so whenever the Maroons did anything right the crowd turned into a sea of maroon. There were plenty of Blues supporters with their giant blue flags, but they were by far outnumbered.

The game they were playing, rugby league, is actually referred to as "footy" in Australia. The real rugby is rugby union, something that is played in the Super 14 league and by teams like the Wallabies (Australia) and the All Blacks (New Zealand). The main difference between the two games is that in rugby league, your team is only allowed to be tackled 5 times before they have to either kick or use a final tackle. Either way, the ball goes to the other team. Every time a player is tackled, the ref yells at everyone to get off him and then he has to give the ball to another player behind him. In rugby union, you are allowed to be tackled as many times as needed, so the game is played much more for position on the field—hence why they kick the ball out so often. I won’t pretend to be an aficionado and say I know all the rules of the two games, but I do know that is the main difference.

The first half was awesome. Both teams appeared to have done an about face from the first game of the series, which New South Wales dominated in the first half only to have the Maroons mount a spirited comeback and fall just short of winning. The final score was 17-16 NSW. In this game, the Maroons could do no wrong, and had scored quite a few tries (the equivalent of a touchdown in which you receive 4 points for the try and 2 points for converting the kick) to NSW’s nil by halftime. Every time we scored, everyone stood up and cheered and then proceeded to rub it in James’ face. He was not very happy with his team at all and had gone rather quiet.

This entry is continued in State of Origin II: The Biff (Fight).

Queensland Reds 21, ACT Brumbies 38
By the middle of May in our study abroad experience, my friends and I felt we were running out of time to see any sort of Aussie sports. Every time we attempted to buy tickets, they were either sold out, at an inconvenient time, or entirely too expensive. For the Queensland Reds’ final game of the final Super 12 season (the league expanded to Super 14 in 2006), we again tried to buy tickets, only to find that the cheapest available were $40—slightly more than we were willing to pay for a game none of us really understood. Therefore, we just wrote it off as another missed game.

However, when we went to the RE (the local student pub) on the Thursday night before the game to meet up with other sailing people, we found that all was not lost. One of the guys in the club, James, was asking around about who wanted to go with him and his friends to the game on Saturday. I told him I would love to go, but I had already searched for tickets and couldn’t find any at a reasonable price. He replied that he could get silver tickets for $26 and that any seat in Suncorp Stadium was a great one. My friend and I jumped at the opportunity to go, and even moreso with people that could explain the game to us.

So, we ended up with very good seats, in the corner of the first tier, for much less than the going rate online. I’m still not sure how he got them, but he did. Even better was the fact that James and his friend were willing to explain the game of rugby to my friend and me. For the whole game, James was willing to answer any stupid question I had, like why they kept kicking the ball out, why they kept picking people up to catch the throwins, why there is a 22m line, etc. By the end of the game, I felt that I had a reasonable understanding of the game. This was despite the number of overpriced XXXX beers I had during the game (and I enjoyed the fact that in Australia, overpriced means $5.50AU a beer, not $8.50US!).

The Reds are not exactly the best team in the Super 12 (nor the Super 14), and they got pretty smashed by the Brumbies, who were one of the top 4 teams in the league. This didn’t stop the Queensland fans for having something to cheer about. Wendell Sailor, who has since been traded to the Waratahs and then banned for doing cocaine, is a player people love to hate. It was hilarious to hear the "give it to Wendell" cheers—yelled for the sole purpose of being able to heckle Wendell when he actually had the ball! The cheers just made the game all the more amusing.

Overall, I enjoyed the game so much that I’ve been to 2 more union games and watched as many others as I could on TV! I actually feel like I understand at least the gist of the game now and I can follow it without asking James too many questions.

This entry is a continuation of my State of Origin II: The Maroons Come Out Strong entry.

The second half wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting as the first half, since it was all but guaranteed that the Maroons would win anyway, if it hadn’t been for some interesting off-field events. At the beginning of the half, some obnoxious drunken teenage girls who had been sitting a few seats down from us, one row back, decided to sit just behind James. Then, they decided to take it upon themselves to discipline him for not cheering for the correct team. To begin with, they hit him with an inflatable finger and their flag on a little wooden dowel. He turned around and glared, but they continued hitting him and every once in a while dangled the flag in front of his face so he couldn’t see the game. All of this was coupled with verbal abuse. I don’t understand how, even if drunk (and only one of them really was), they could believe that they could just do this to someone they had never met before.

After a good amount of time, James finally got sick of it and yanked their flag off the dowel and threw it a couple rows down. In response to this, they started beating him with their remaining stick and inflatable finger and grabbed his entire mullet (yes, he had a mullet, as a joke, which I didn’t approve of in the first place) and started pulling. The girls sitting where the flag had landed handed it back to them, but five or ten minutes later turned around and said that, had they known what the girls were like, they wouldn’t have.

This continued for awhile. The girls at one point offered a parody of an apology, which James refused to accept, being slightly angry by this point. To that they started yelling and swearing at him and hitting him more. He ended up turning around and popping their inflatable finger, and at one point I turned around and yelled at them, telling them to leave him alone and that we were there to watch the bloody game. To this, they responded with insults to me, like “Four eyes”, which showed us all just how mature they could be.

James was understandably furious, but I kept telling him to just ignore them and they might get sick of it and find another target. He was more angry than anything about the fact that he was powerless to do anything because they were girls—he had many times reiterated the fact that he would have retaliated long before had they been guys. I lost it finally when James was doing absolutely nothing to them and I heard the crack of a small wooden rod meeting his head. To James’ friends, and probably the crowd around us, this looked very funny because I was incredibly calm, ignoring their yelling, and then all of a sudden I jumped out of my seat, grabbed my three-foot-tall Maroons flag on a PVC pipe, and started swinging as hard as I could. I’m not sure how many of my blows actually connected because all of a sudden a large crowd formed. A cop, cheering for the Blues and sitting 4 or so rows above us, ran down and told James that she had seen the girl assault him and asked if he would like to press charges. He said no, he just wanted to watch the game. A cop, cheering for the Maroons and sitting a row ahead of us with his family, jumped up onto my row and I thought he was going to grab me, but he instead got in the face of the girl that had been hitting James and started yelling at her. By this point I had obviously stopped swinging and wasn’t seeing quite so much red so I got to enjoy the moment that she was removed from the game and not allowed to return.

After the crowd had cleared and her friends had nearly stopped talking all together, not wanting the same thing to happen to them, an event staff lady pulled James and me out of our seats. We were taken down to the entrance area where there was a cop waiting. The event staff lady proceeded to tell me that what she had seen was me just turn around and start beating the girl behind me. James kept trying to silence my as I contradicted her obviously ridiculous claim, but it didn’t matter because the cop said that he had it on the authority of two cops already that James had been harassed all night and I was just defending him. Therefore, we were allowed back into the game—something neither of us thought would happen—and as we started walking back up the stairs, our entire section cheered for us! It felt good to know that everyone was on our side.

Neither of us really paid attention to the rest of the game, we were so angry. Luckily, the first half had been better and the Maroons kept their lead, tying the series at 1-1. I was excited about the win but still quaking with fury. As we left, a couple people in the crowd stopped James, asked him if he was okay and said there was no way the girl’s actions were justified.

I’m very glad I got to see an Origin game, especially when tickets are so difficult to come by, but I’m never going to hear the end of it. None of James’ friends will let me hold a stick anywhere near them, much less stick-fight them!

Brisbane Lions 8.23 (76), Carlton Blues 7.14 (56)
For both of my visits to Australia during the AFL (Aussie Rules Football) season, I wanted to actually watch the Brisbane Lions play at the Gabba. However, the way tickets were sold got us every time: they went on sale on Tuesday afternoons and were gone by the time we got home from uni every time. On my second long trip to Oz, I convinced James to go to a game with me, even though he doesn’t like/doesn’t get Aussie Rules much at all. I don’t either, but I just wanted to go for the experience.

All I can understand about the game of Aussie Rules is that there aren’t many set in stone rules at all. You can run down the circular field with the ball, provided you bounce it every so many steps. You can throw the ball, and if the person catching catches it in a certain way, its called a mark and they get a free kick from the point they caught it. You can pass forwards, backwards, or sideways, or kick it if you so wish. Throw ins are thrown in backwards by a referee facing the crowd so he can’t purposely favor one team over the other. And, there are four posts at the end of the field—if you kick between the middle two, it’s a goal and you get six points. However, if you miss the goal and get it between the middle pole and the outer pole on either side, you still get a sympathy point for trying but not being quite there. Therefore, the scoreboard reads as the number of goals, then the number of points, and then the total score for each team.

The game of AFL is mainly popular in Melbourne, where people are obsessive about it. Most of the team still come from areas around Victoria—Essendon, Geelong, St. Kilda, Collingwood, etc. In fact, many teams were moved out of Victoria to places like Perth to try to spread the fanbase of the game. A lot of the Melbourne-area teams play at the massive MCG (Melbourne Cricket Ground), and if you visit Melbourne it would definitely be an experience to catch a game there. New South Wales and Queensland are much more into rugby league, which is funny because the Sydney team is the one that won the Aussie Rules league last year.

The way we finally ended up getting tickets to see the Lions was through James’ friend. His girlfriend had won tickets to the Lions vs. the Carlton Blues from a radio station booth but none of them were interested in going, so we inherited them. James wasn’t overly excited about going to the game, but he was excited that it was free so he didn’t have to pay for a game he would nearly certainly be bored at.

To get there, we used the free public transport that Queensland Rail and the Translink buses/ferries provide on game days to anyone that has a game ticket. We thought we would have to take the train into Central and then catch a bus to Woolongabba, where Brisbane’s Gabba cricket grounds are, but we found out when waiting for the 10-minute-late train that direct buses run from Roma Street Station. So, all we ended up having to do was get off at Roma Street and hop on a packed bus labeled "The Gabba".

Our seats were pretty good—on the first tier and only 15 rows back—but we decided that at the Gabba, its better to be in the higher-up seats which are more like stadium seating in a theater, rather than old-style cinema seating. This was mainly because there were a few tall people sitting right in front of us that we had to move around to follow the game.

The game confounded the both of us—while we could follow the ball and understand kind of what the rules were behind it, there was no rhyme or reason to it. I’ve found that I like rugby league and union because the rules are very definite and you can tell what is happening (although in union it generally requires the type of penalty flashing up on the screen). Here, it just seemed like mayhem with a few goals scored here and there. I enjoyed watching the game, but I think it’s much better watched on TV where you can see angles and have commentators to make sense of it for you. It was funny to follow Jason Akermanis, the only player I could really recognize on the team because of his bleached-blonde hair, and harass him as he came nearby. Aka, as he likes to be called, is disliked by most people, especially his Lions teammates, because he is just such an obnoxious character who likes to cause trouble. In his day, he was apparently a very good footy player, but he’s getting a bit slower and less reliable now.

The Lions ended up winning the game by 15 points. It was a relatively low goal-scoring game, with only 8 Lions goals vs. 7 Carlton goals, but a relatively high point-scoring game, with 23 Lions points vs. 14 Carlton points. We found out near the end of the game that after the game the public is actually allowed to storm the field, provided they stay out of the centre square. We both found that kind of odd, but apparently AFL player security is not as high a priority as in some sports. We didn’t stay to storm the field though, preferring to rush out of the stadium at the sound of the final horn in an attempt to catch a bus without waiting in line.

Overall, I enjoyed going to the game, although at 25 minutes per quarter it seemed very long. I thought it was a good experience and something very different to see, but I doubt I would spend the money to go to another game.

Queensland 7-136 (20 overs), Tasmania 1-15 (3.1 overs) -- No Result
James’ goal during my summer visit to Australia was to force me to watch as much cricket as possible. After watching the Boxing Day and the ensuing tests against South Africa, and having the game explained multiple times, I actually felt like I was understanding it (at least, better than all those years I had ignored it on the TV at my grandfather’s in England). It wasn’t nearly as boring as I had previously thought, although it is still a common consensus that the best way to watch the game is lying on the couch having a nap in the afternoon.

Partly because there were no five-day tests in Brisbane (or even one-dayers, for that matter), and partly because James didn’t want to bore me completely to tears, we decided to go to a 20/20 match at the Gabba. This is a form of cricket that had just had an Australian league created for it that year. Instead of dragging on for 6 or 7 hours, possibly for five days, this game instead has twenty overs (consisting of six bowls each) for each team. Therefore, the priority is very much on getting runs as quickly as possible.

We didn’t have to buy tickets for the game, instead getting them off James’ friend at work who had extras. The game started at 6:30, but we got there a bit late because a) James didn’t get home from work until 5:30ish and b) we didn’t realize that you could catch a train to Roma St and catch a bus from there, so we instead caught a bus to the Cultural Centre bus station at South Bank and then caught one running down the Busway to the Gabba. We got treated to some excitement on the way though, because as we were standing at the bus station, we saw a bus hit another one from behind. We seriously thought a bomb went off, the exploding sound was so loud.

When we got to the Gabba, we wandered around for awhile trying to locate James’ friends. Since his friend had won the tickets from somewhere, they didn’t have a seat number on them, so they got to choose where they wanted to sit. This ended up being in the second row on the first tier—not a bad view at all, considering players actually came over and signed autographs for the kids yelling out to them (yes, that’s how slow cricket is—the players can sign autographs during the game!).

Queensland batted first, and by the end of their twenty overs they hadn’t notched up a very high score at all, finishing up with around 120 (essentially, one run per ball bowled). Then, it was Queensland’s turn to bowl, but only for 3 1/3 overs, as this is when the skies decided to open up. Cricket is a little more of a fragile sport than say, rugby, where a little rain just adds a bit of mess, so they tried to play for another ball or two before running for cover. We decided to wait it out—after running underneath the drip line ourselves—before realizing as the rain kept falling that there would be no more cricket that evening.

By this point, we really didn’t feel like walking outside because it would have meant instant soaking, so we sat and hoped it would ease off soon. Instead, we sat and watched as the rain poured down, followed by decently-sized hail. Then, the water began rising on the pitch, and before we knew it, bottles were floating past us! As soon as we thought the weather couldn’t get any worse, lightning struck somewhere nearby and all the lights in the Gabba went out. Their emergency generators kicked in, giving the entire place a dull, orangey, eerie glow to it. The power didn’t kick back in for a good ten minutes and the big TV screen never quite made it on again. They kept making announcements about possibly having cricket because the rain looks to be easing up, but they finally stopped kidding themselves and announced the game was cancelled. Around this time, we finally decided there was no way to avoid getting positively soaked, so we braved the rain and went looking for the car.

It wasn’t quite the game I was expecting, but it certainly was a shorter version of cricket, seeing as it only lasted 23 1/3 overs! It wasn’t nearly as boring as I thought it might be—especially when the Gabba flooded—and I would say it was a better sport to watch live than Aussie Rules because at least I had some vague idea of what was going on!

The FIFA World Cup 2006 was a special one for Australia—it was the first World Cup they had qualified for since 1974. This meant that from the point Australia beat Uruguay in a penalty shootout to qualify for the cup up until their disputed loss against Italy, the entire country was gripped with soccer fever (Australia is one of the only countries—the other obvious one being the US—that calls the game "soccer" rather than "football", mostly because of the number of football codes already in Australia). It’s not surprising that, being the most talented sportsmen as a whole on earth, that when the Australians found another sport they were good at they would go absolutely gung-ho for it.

When I arrived in May, nearly a month before the World Cup started, there was plenty to remind you about the Socceroos. Commercials featuring the ‘Roos and Waltzing Matilda were prevalent and the nightly sports news featured their every move in getting ready for the Cup. When the Socceroos played Greece in Melbourne as a "friendly" just before leaving for Germany, the network it was playing on got some of its highest ratings ever and fans absolutely packed the MCG and any other public gathering place they could find.

Even though I really wanted to, I didn’t actually manage to go out to the pubs (or the popular place, Little Italy in Milton) to watch the games, mainly because they were on any time between 11pm-5am and always when I had work the next day. However, I still followed them relatively closely and managed to catch the majority of their games (when I was comfortably in bed). I even got myself a Socceroos scarf (which is really quite a cool design, I might add).

It was great to see all the support the Socceroos had when, on the news every night, they showed packed pubs living and dying on every move the ‘Roos made. Even better were the huge numbers of Aussies that actually traveled to Germany to watch the games. The number of people playing soccer spiked dramatically during this period, and hopefully it stays that way because it’s a great sport to get involved in. That said, nothing was as heartbreaking as watching the Socceroos not score when Italy was a man down for nearly half a game, and then as soon as they start pushing and looking like they could win the game in overtime, having an Italian defender fall over in the box and fake a tackle, giving Italy a penalty shot and thus the game. While it was relieving to be able to go to bed at 3am, I would have much preferred to have watched an extra thirty minutes on TV and at least see the ‘Roos lose fairly and squarely, rather than having the game taken away from them.

I won’t get the chance to see the Socceroos play—their next match is in Sydney and they will be a much different team anyway, without their miracle coach Guus and a few of their star players—but I definitely think it would be well worth it to catch a game of theirs. I’m not a huge fan of watching soccer on TV, but the Socceroos kept me riveted.

Wallabies 49, Springboks 0
Each year, the Tri-Nations Cup is played between the countries of Australia (the Wallabies), New Zealand (the All Blacks), and South Africa (the Springboks). In 2006, two of Australia’s three games on home soil were held at Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane. The South Africa game was the first of the two and the tickets weren’t quite as fought over as the ones for the New Zealand game, so we managed to get decent seats even though we bought the tickets a couple months after they went on sale.

I agree with James when he says that Suncorp Stadium doesn’t have a bad seat—and this isn’t bad, considering the stadium holds 52,000 people! Even though our seats were on the third tier, we could see the field clearly and the only real complaint I had was that the field was slightly distorted. The field looked like a square, rather than a rectangle, because we were sitting right behind the goal posts. This made it a bit hard to judge the ball sometimes.

Even though the game wasn’t sold out, there were still huge crowds of people. People walked past us painted in green and gold (for Australia) or green and yellow (South Africa). Even though the two teams have the same colors, it was easy to tell the difference—Australia is mostly gold while SA is mostly green. The funniest people we saw were the Bundy 16th players—people that signed up and won a place with Bundy to sit in the front row wearing a bright yellow jumpsuit.

We got to the game by train (a short ride on the Ipswitch-Caboolture line (green) line to Milton station) and had to walk all the way around the stadium to get to our gate. Despite the crowds, we made it to our seats in plenty of time to see the pre-game ceremonies, which consisted of the unfurling of giant flags with each team’s logo on them, followed by the singing of the national anthems.

A combination of Australia coming out very strong and South Africa looking confused as to how they ended up on a rugby field led to a very good, if not terribly exciting, game. James’ friend that had come with us was dressed in a South Africa jersey and hat and had brought along a large South Africa flag to wave in support of his team—and he didn’t get to wave the flag once! Everything truly went Australia’s way and we sure got a lung workout singing to the tune of "Waltzing Matilda" or "Land Down Under" (which were alternately played after each try).

Unfortunately, Australia barely missed the 50 point mark, but they still won 49-0. The South Africans in the crowd were surprisingly not bitter after the match, with one of them even proclaiming that the team would have done better had they just not walked onto the field. So, even if it wasn’t the most exciting game, it was still nice to see the Aussies win so soundly.

Wallabies 9, All Blacks 13
The most anticipated game of winter 2006 in Brisbane, after the second State of Origin clash, was the Bledisloe Cup. This rugby union game was the second of three games pitting the Wallabies (Australia) vs. the All Blacks (New Zealand), and tickets for it sold out within minutes of being put on sale. I thought (along with the rest of the rugby union-following population of Brisbane) that this would be a great match with a wonderful atmosphere. Unfortunately, I thought of this a couple months too late and figured there would be no chance of getting to the game.

For a little bit of history/rugby union information: the Bledisloe Cup is not a standalone event, but rather, the name for the series of three games held between New Zealand and Australia in the Tri-Nations series, of which the third nation is South Africa. Whoever wins two of the three matches gets the Bledisloe Cup, named after Lord Bledisloe, the governor-general of NZ who donated the winner’s cup in the 1930s. It is always a fierce rivalry between the two countries, whose relationship is often compared to that of America-Canada; I have found that there are much stronger feelings on both sides of the Tasman than I’ve seen in North America. James would probably kill me if he read this, but New Zealand is normally the much stronger team, and have won more than double the Bledisloe clashes than Australia. This was true for this clash as well; the Wallabies had already been thrashed in Christchurch when they showed a complete inability to tackle anyone in a black jersey and they were definitely the underdogs for this game.

One of the many good things that came out of the Wallabies’ destruction of South Africa two weeks prior to the Bledisloe was the announcement that on the following Monday, the last 1500 Bledisloe tickets would be put on sale. Needless to say, at 9am I was on the Ticketek website, constantly reloading til "Buy Now" appeared. I managed to get 2 tickets for the very cheap concession price of $40. When I called James, he was absolutely amazed to hear I’d gotten the tickets; this wasn’t hard to understand, since when I loaded the tickets page at 9:03, all but single seats in "Silver" had disappeared.

You could tell this was a special game as soon as you reached the train station. Our station, which is on the same line but south of Milton Station, was absolutely packed by 6:45pm (for an 8:00 start). There wasn’t any room at all on the platform, and even less on the train. There was a surprisingly large contingent of Kiwis painted in black and white for the game, although on the train it got to the point that people were calling out "Ok, we’re out of room…so you can only get on the train if you’re in green and gold!"

The herds only increased when we got off at Milton, and it took us a while to get to the stadium. When we finally got around the north end and in, we realized we had missed pre-game festivities, but it didn’t really matter. We saw a bit of singing and a giant Bledisloe Cup being wheeled off the field before they went through the lineups and then unfurled giant flags bearing the team’s logo as the team ran on field. The Kiwis were incredibly loud—the newspaper reported 10,000 of 52,000 as being Kiwis, but it looked and sounded like a lot more. There were a lot of sections where all we could see was black—many more than just straight gold/green section. We sat next to a group of especially loud and annoying Kiwis, but they still joked with us and didn’t cause too much of a problem.

Something I was really excited about seeing, performed just after the national anthems of both countries, was the haka. This is the ceremonial wardance of the Maori, which the All Blacks perform at the beginning of all their games. It was scary for us to see high schoolers performing the haka in Christchurch, so even from high up, to see massive rugby players doing it sent a chill down the spine. I really don’t know how they get their tongues to stick out that far! There had been a bit of controversy about the haka during the first game—the All Blacks had done their controversial "Kapa o Pango" haka, which involved a throat slitting motion and was created to replaced the "too commercial" "Ka Mate" haka the All Blacks had performed for so long. A lot of people, Kiwis and Aussies alike, criticized the "Kapa o Pango’, and the All Blacks surprisingly stood down and performed their original haka at this game, which left a lot of the people in the crowd surprised, including me. Everyone had expected the All Blacks to thumb their nose at the critics, including the Wallabies coach, especially after an Australian TV station offended them in a commercial by putting handbags over their shoulders as they were performing the haka.

The game was a nailbiter, with the Wallabies not playing especially well but still managing to hold on to a decent margin. The All Blacks gave up absolutely nothing defensively and the crowd got on its feet, screaming bloody murder, more than a few times just to be disappointed by the Australians gaining no ground and eventually losing possession. Even with the biased-towards-Australia refereeing that was going on, the All Blacks managed to eke out a 9-13 win after the Australians made one final charge that ended minutes after the final whistle (in union, a play continues until a penalty is called or the ball changes possession).

Even though the Wallabies lost, the game was still much better than the South Africa game. There was much more of an atmosphere and the game kept you watching, rather than having a foregone conclusion (even if it is for the right team). Plus, who can resist joining in on such a storied and strong rivalry?