CUP FEVER

It wasn’t always like this, you know. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when rugby rose to being of at least equal importance as my two other great passions, music and food. There was a time I couldn’t have given a single, solitary shit about the Rugby World Cup, and would essentially have thought that anyone who subscribed to the “it’s not life and death – it’s much more important than that” – tenet was a brainwashed, Kool-Aid-swallowing, nationalistic buffoon. But my, oh my, that seems a long time and another world away now.

Since then, there have been moments when those passions have flared: the time when Ma’a Nonu turned up when I was meeting my musical hero (Johnny Marr of the Smiths), and I felt very conflicted; the time when I met a friend’s mum’s new husband at a wedding who was “very interested in rugby”, and I talked so intensely at him that he slunk off and avoided me for the rest of the night; the uncharacteristically understated way I shook Wayne Smith’s hand at a Wellington traffic light and thanked him for his role in the 2015 World Cup triumph; and the time just a few weeks ago when I met Australian-based, New Zealand-reared rugby oracle Spiro Zavos and (mostly) kept it together.

I can recall just a little of that inaugural tournament, here in New Zealand in 1987 (which we won), and not very much at all of the subsequent event in 1991 (which we did not). I have distinct memories of the 1995 World Cup, when the All Blacks lost to the Nelson Mandela-inspired Springboks (seemingly just so Hollywood could make a terrible movie, , about it, with the tiny Matt Damon playing hulking Boks skipper Francois Pienaar. The rugby scenes in it are so dreadful they make me wince, and there is no mention whatsoever of the All Blacks food-poisoning scandal. I also remember watching the All Blacks