KEY POINTS:
When the All Blacks are on tour, sleep is the goal and snoring the opposition.
The Paris diaries on the All Blacks website are full of fascinating glimpses of life behind the black jerseys.
Leon MacDonald leads off with the fact that he slept in until 8.30am yesterday
- his strategy for staving off Mr Sandman for 9pm test matches. His diary includes an in-depth analysis of the sleeping patterns of room-mates.
Tony Woodcock is "one of the biggest sleepers I've roomed with", but there's a conflict because MacDonald is early to bed, early to rise, while Woodcock is the opposite.
He also has sleep envy over Joe Rokocoko, another renowned sleeper. Byron Kelleher got a growling for having his cellphone on all night. Sitiveni Sivivatu declares himself snore-free. "Snoring is the worst thing to have in a roomie and I see they have started putting all the snorers together."
Anton Oliver hasn't been sleeping well at all. He wakes up at 5.30am and is left only to hope "maybe some liniment and the sound of sprigs on concrete might wake me up a bit".
He gets quite lyrical about the business of waking up, remembering his loft high in the trees in Dunedin, where "every morning I get woken by a blackbird singing his song. He's a lovely chap, especially when he starts up at 4.30am."
In the time the All Blacks have managed to stay awake, MacDonald has bought some Mickey Mouse souvenirs from Euro Disney for his kids. Sivivatu bought a bull-mastiff dog on Trade Me. He has named it Lyon, after the city where the All Blacks smashed the French last weekend.
Sivivatu has done a comparative study on train services, in which the Overlander comes out the worse for wear. "The trains here are pretty flash; I once jumped on a train from Auckland to Wellington and that was a bad experience, too loud for one thing. And we don't have passenger trains in Fiji, just trains to carry the sugar cane."
On the game side, MacDonald reveals the pomp and fanfare when coach Graham Henry tells players whether they're in the team: "I'm playing fullback this weekend and I was told in the gym on Tuesday morning by Ted [Henry]. He wandered by and said, 'You're playing, Leon', and then kept on walking."
After sleep comes food. Sivivatu had bacon and eggs for breakfast, but just a wee bit of dessert for dinner because he puts on weight easily. All that food can make you sleepy.
