Zen & The Art of Stuffing the All Blacks

Ben Wildsmith

The train from Uttaradit to Bangkok was delayed, so I almost missed it. In the end, though, I had the delicious pleasure of watching the game amongst Welsh expats and a couple of Kiwis.

They pride themselves on being taciturn, don’t they, New Zealanders? Well, these certainly were at the end of the night. Staring flintily into the middle distance, the vowelless unfortunates were having difficulty absorbing the dawn of a new reality as unbounded joy erupted around them.

English patrons in the bar became more British as the minutes ticked down, insisting that they had always had a deep affection for all things Welsh.

Ferchristsakesmun, I still can’t believe what we witnessed. Isn’t it often the way that our most fervent desires are only fulfilled when we give up hoping for them?

These orange-robed monks around here would smile seraphically and stress the inadvisability of attachment. The bookies, meanwhile, were quoting 16/1 on Wales yesterday. Some 20,000 seats went unsold, and the online discussion was of boycotts rather than selection dramas or tactics. The only seeming variables were how much we would lose by and who we would blame.

Blaming the WRU for stuff is such an ingrained habit for me that I suspect it’s become part of my emotional defence mechanism for life in general. You don’t need to get your head around any complicated nuances when it comes to the blazers.

If something has gone wrong in life, you can always distract yourself by venting at whatever egregious balls-up they’ve managed to perpetrate that week. Whoever within that organisation, however, came up with the startling, red-mist lighting response to the haka yesterday deserves a medal.

The All Blacks have a right sauce insisting on quiet acquiescence to this tradition. Remember when they did it in the changing room in 2006 because we wanted to sing the anthem after it?

Yesterday’s sinister backlighting of the Welsh side, rendering them as silhouettes, was simply epic. The All Blacks looked genuinely rattled and the sight will stay with all of us, especially them.

So mark it in your diary. The WRU did something right – that’s a record stretching back further than 1953 that’s been broken.

If that had preceded the drubbing we expected, we’d have had to carry the shame of hubris along with the loss.

Belief

Yesterday, though, was all about belief, and Dewi Lake’s insistence that this young side are always convinced they will win carries a ‘told you so’ authority now.

We’re living through such awful times. The cost of living, wars, political division and environmental crises have us lurching from one precipice to the next. I even went and got our three-day ration kit the other week. I mean, what was all that about? The impression that nothing is going to improve for us is reflected in the coarsening of our politics and a pervasive pessimism that goes beyond the semi-serious moaning that we’ve always enjoyed.

So, I don’t blame anyone for losing interest in rugby. It’s the first time I’ve written about it in a long while. Dealing with all of the above leaves few emotional resources to invest in something that means so much but has delivered so little of late.

Now, though, it has raised its hand and reminded us of what this game can be for us personally and as a nation.

Conviction

It seems that within that young squad, a mad conviction has taken hold in the big seas of their dreams. Closeted away in their weird, monkish bubble of nutrition and psychobabble, they have found a daring that many of us have lost.

Even right at the end, as they picked and drove their way to victory, I couldn’t find that resource in myself. Something will happen. It always does…

Well, shame on me. They shaped their moment and changed the story of Welsh rugby forever. Things can get better, see?