By GREG ANSLEY in Melbourne
So this is where it starts to get really serious, among the terraced homes and low-rent shops of Abbotsford, on the fringes of downtown Melbourne and far from the glittering Telstra Dome.
The All Blacks were there training yesterday morning at Victoria Park, a stadium in
need of much TLC, where an industrial smokestack rises above the peeling paint and tattered hoardings of Ryder stand.
It is old Melbourne, yet to succumb fully to gentrification and boasting more grand old Edwardian corner pubs than you can poke a schooner at.
But there is a sense of home about it. They're Collingwood AFL supporters at the Victoria Social Club, wearing black and silver jerseys amid the banks of pokies and not sure whether to smile at the Australian similarities drawn between their club and the All Blacks: most people expect them to win but don't want them to.
Reporters and camera crews are gathering early at J (for journalists?) gate, chatting and mingling in the relaxed, familiar way that touring press corps tend to do, exchanging jokes and jibes with All Black officials guarding the entrance.
A group of team sponsors is ushered through, lucky to be watching this. They had been confidently booked into Melbourne, but started to look shaky as the Welsh team came close to sending New Zealand to Brisbane instead.
"We were always confident," says one, but with a wry smile.
All stops when the All Blacks arrive in a white touring bus, dismounting and passing in silence and for the most part unsmiling through a corridor of cameras.
Then the scramble for entry as team media manager Matt McIlwraith demands accreditation - "No accreditation, no entry, that's the rules" - forcing groans of anguish and frustration from those who forgot their passes or didn't have one.
For 20 minutes or so the All Blacks warm up, stretching and trotting a few easy passing runs for the cameras before the media's time is up, we are expelled and the team gets down to real work in secret.
