Empty Vessels Make the Most Noise

This is the most wry and amusing commentary I have read on the verbals in the run-up to Saturday's Australia v England QF (thanks to the UK Telegraph once again). As for Le Francais, I hear Laporte has banned his players from calling the All Blacks the All Blacks, in an effort to de-mystify them and deny them the AB aura. Apparently Woodward did this in 2003. Clearly what matters is the team you field against the ABs, not what you call them.

In other news, I was prevailed upon to make a sporting bet on the outcome of these QFs last night. I'm normally a sucker for betting with heart rather than head and have lost so many matchsticks (cash gambling is illegal in Hong Kong, dontcha know) at spread betting to Callum Nieto over the years that it's not funny. But this time I found a way to use head and heart, in what will hopefully amount to the closest thing to a perfect hedge outside of a Japanese garden. Having been ridiculed by a Welshman for refusing to accept odds of 2-1 on an England victory over Australia (hardly good value, was it?), I eventually said I'd take it if he would take odds of 2-1 from me on the French beating the ABs. Fair enough. Let's just hope the upset doesn't happen in the wrong game. Or I'll be down a lot of matchsticks...


Jonny Wilkinson should put the boot inBy Martin Johnson
Last Updated: 12:52am BST 05/10/2007
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If there was a time when Andy Robinson began to wonder whether coaching England was pushing him closer to dribbling down a bib and waiting for a private nurse to give him his next injection, it was when he found himself uttering the following words. "The thing about England," said Andy, "is that everyone wants to beat us."
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No wonder the job was too much for him. How can you expect to be successful when you're being so ruthlessly targeted? It's an international scandal of outrageous proportions, and unless those beastly Australians can offer an unequivocal assurance that beating the mother country in tomorrow's quarter-final would be a happy accident, as opposed to a cunning plan, they should be thrown out of the World Cup with immediate effect.

We all know, of course, what Robinson was getting at. Max Boyce can commission an entire new album on the back of Wales beating England, and the Scots wind themselves up into such an emotional state when it comes to the auld enemy, you'd think it was an English Act of Parliament which forced them to wear skirts and make a noise like a tom cat with its tail caught in a mangle by blowing into a bag of butcher's offal.
And now we have the Australian Rugby Union's chief executive, John O'Neill, saying: "It doesn't matter whether it's cricket, rugby union, rugby league, we all hate England." It's all historical, and even the Tongans – purely on the basis that Captain Cook once popped in to pinch a few of their coconuts to keep the scurvy at bay on his way home from the colonies – looked ready to disembowel Martin Corry's men during their pre-match haka.
To adapt a line from Monty Python's Life Of Brian, we should ask the Australians: "What have the English ever done for you?" We have allowed them to keep drinking tasteless beer at sub-zero temperatures, turned a blind eye to middle-aged men wandering the streets wearing short trousers and long socks, and resisted calls for the death penalty for exporting such products – in direct contravention of all human rights conventions – as Neighbours.
In fact, when it comes to failing to appreciate just how much the English have done for them, Australia positively oozes ingratitude. They wouldn't have a country at all had we not got them started with free ocean cruise travel, including the provision of ankle straps in stormy weather, and gourmet dining with unlimited weevil biscuits at the captain's table. And all (long before being asked to cough up 10 quid) for nothing more than being asked to pop along to Bow Street Magistrates Court and say: "Guilty, your worships."
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So what is it exactly that inspires this tradition of loathing the Poms? It doesn't happen in reverse, and if some of us have had to fight off an uncontrollable urge to trash the television set when confronted by Rolf Harris warbling: "Jake The Peg With His Extra Leg", it doesn't mean to say that we hate all Australians.
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Nothing sums up Australians' irrational desire to put one over on the English than the 2005 Ashes cricket series which, just in case we have to remind them, they lost. For some reason they then spent the next two years plotting a revenge so terrible that they even took themselves off to a military-style boot camp, where, judging from the subsequent on-field exchanges, they also learned some military-style language.
My, how they guffawed when our leading fast bowler opened hostilities by propelling his first delivery straight to second slip, and they didn't stop until they'd pummelled the English into a 5-0 humiliation. So we can rest assured that Jonny Wilkinson's dropped goal in the 2003 World Cup final has been eating away at them for four long years.
In the entire field of international sport, no one does gloating quite like the Australians, neither does any other country have the same fabled capacity for pretending defeat never happened. If they stuff the Poms tomorrow, there will be fireworks displays off the Sydney Harbour Bridge, but if they lose, you'll need to look for the score in the Sydney Morning Herald (with a magnifying glass) just below the greyhound results.
If the finest sight of the 2003 final was Wilkinson propelling that final drop-kick over the posts, not far behind was the Australian Prime Minister handing out the winners' medals with an expression suggesting that he was suffering from a chronic bout of haemorrhoids.
There is, on all known form coming into this game, not much chance of an English victory, but they said that before Agincourt as well. So 'Cry God for Jonny, England and St George'. What a joy it would be for England to play really badly, but for the Wilkinson boot to pull it off again (preferably after the referee has missed a blatant England knock-on) in the dying seconds. Bring it on. And may the best team lose.