The best game-changing sporting moments from the week just been.
Video / NZ Herald / @wimbledon / @newssportau / Photosport / Getty
OPINION:
New Zealand, so the brochure should say, is a beautiful country marred only by the number of angry trolls who come out from under their bridges whenever there is a big game of rugby played.
This is not because rugby is the national sport, but because whining about rugbyreferees is – and New Zealand might have to wake up to the fact that its greatest barrier to achieving global respect is not that it is small, but that it is small-minded.
Maybe no one cares, but New Zealand fans have a terrible reputation overseas. No one likes them much, primarily because New Zealanders, time and again, have shown themselves to be ungracious losers.
The inability to lose with grace has cast a dark cloud over Kiwi fans, as it has become their default now to react to any defeat by blaming the officiating and then deriding the opposition as cheats.
Plenty of New Zealanders will laugh that off and say that the real villains are the English fans whose public school upbringings have burdened them with a ferocious sense of entitlement and that they still see rugby as a means to exert their colonial dominance.
But how wrong this is has been demonstrated several times by the gregarious nature of the thousands of British and Irish Lions fans who travel the world every four years, expecting nothing other than to have a good time.
The bulk of Lions fans are English and, like their Celtic friends from Scotland and Ireland, they have no propensity to sulk when they lose and nor do they stick two metaphoric horns on the referee to try to make sense of it all.
For fans everywhere other than New Zealand, the game is just the excuse to travel, to meet new people and have a little craic.
No one has ever met a Scotsman or an Irishman doing it tough after a defeat and the prolonged referee character assassinations that are part and parcel of the post-match analysis in New Zealand don’t happen anywhere else.
And so New Zealand’s mixed gift to the wider rugby fraternity is brilliant and mostly humble All Blacks and a mostly insular, bitter, somewhat spiteful and sour fan contingent that harangues referees with a Donald Trump vigour.
In fact, Kiwi fans borrow heavily from the Trump playbook, promoting bombastic, untruthful narratives as a means to rewrite history.
Just as Trump supposedly didn’t lose the 2020 election, he was “defrauded out of it by corrupt voting machinery”, nor were the All Blacks beaten by France at the 2007 World Cup - they were cheated out of it by an incompetent referee.
Just as, it would seem, the Chiefs were supposedly denied their rightful championship this year by Ben O’Keeffe and his fellow officials.
Ben O'Keeffe speaks to Chiefs players during the Super Rugby Pacific final. Photo / Photosport
For all the world it looked like what did the Chiefs in was the power of the Crusaders forward pack and their ability to exert almost intolerable pressure through their collision work and driving maul.
In those big moments, the Crusaders went back to what they do best and used their big men to relentlessly crash and bash and induce mistakes from the Chiefs.
It’s an age-old formula and under pressure the Chiefs couldn’t maintain their discipline and hence were on the wrong end of a 15-8 penalty count.
That was the story of the night - the Crusaders responded better in the big moments, and they won. Just.
There was no conspiracy working against the Chiefs and, yes, they were hard done by when the officials somehow missed Jack Goodhue’s forward pass that was close to landing in Auckland, but so too were the home side wildly fortunate that Anton Lienert-Brown wasn’t red-carded as he should have been.
It was an epic contest and a shining light for a competition that blunders around in the dark more often than it should and an opportunity for the people of Hamilton, however hard it may have been, to acknowledge that, fair and square, their team was beaten by the most powerful dynasty the competition has known.
No one outside of the upper South Island needs to love the Crusaders, but they should respect them – admire the resilience, consistency and quality that have been the hallmarks of their success for decades now.
Sport is a tool designed to enforce its participants and followers to accept the good and the bad, otherwise what’s it really for?
It doesn’t cure cancer, eradicate poverty or clean up the environment and so its only value is to serve as some kind of metaphor for life and a means by which a values system can be developed or enforced.
Instead, the home crowd booed the officials when they accepted their medals and then took to social media to unleash on a referee who, aforementioned errors aside, handled things well.
The trolls need to get back under their bridges before New Zealand finds no one in the world wants to referee rugby matches here.
