Rugby World Cup 2015 final - All Blacks v Australia: Nobody winds up Kiwis better than the Aussies

Fans boo as Quade Cooper is sent off during the Bledisloe Cup match in August. Photo / Getty Images

If one detects an undercurrent of ill will among the All Blacks towards their tormentors in green and gold - and it was telling yesterday that Jerome Kaino could not even recall David Pocock's name - then it might be explained by an unerring Australian tendency to snag anything that Kiwis deem rightfully theirs.

Take Phar Lap, the champion thoroughbred who won the 1930 Melbourne Cup and became celebrated as Australia's greatest racehorse. Conveniently excised from the narrative is the fact that he was foaled in New Zealand.

Or consider the 2012 London Olympics, where Australian athletes performed so abjectly that one Sydney newspaper ran a medal table featuring the country 'Aus Zealand', mischievously combining three Kiwi gold medals in rowing with the lone gold that their own had contributed.

These subtle annexations do not stop at sport, either. Look at Russell Crowe, who grew up in Auckland and did not file for Australian citizenship until 2006, but who has come to be perceived in his Oscar-winning guise as more authentically Aussie than Paul Hogan in a cork hat.

Not even the most fleetingly famous bands are safe. Crowded House, who achieved a brief incursion into British consciousness with their tune about the weather, recently found themselves in a list of the top 10 Australian singles. It was a curious feat, given that lead singer Neil Finn traced roots to the North Island of New Zealand and was so wedded to native heritage that he wrote a song about Te Awamutu, his childhood town. Throw in a couple of Australian guitarists, though, and they were ripe for appropriation across the Tasman Sea.

Russell Crowe: Kiwi or Aussie? Photo / Getty Images

The relationship, in sport and beyond is roughly akin to that between two squabbling teenage siblings, where big brother Australia devises ever more playful forms of antagonism and where little New Zealand unfailingly takes the bait. When one gentleman from Brisbane put New Zealand up for sale on eBay in 2006, at a starting price of one cent - listing such attractions as "the dodgiest America's Cup win in history, plus very ordinary weather" - the result was almost a major diplomatic incident.

Not that the Kiwis are innocent of reverse provocation, however. Robert Muldoon, their former prime minister, stoked outrage by quipping that the increased emigration from New Zealand to Australia during the Eighties was "helping to raise the IQ of both countries".

Australia claims Phar Lap as its own but the horse was actually raised in New Zealand. Photo / Getty Images

Spool forward to 2015 and these tensions, never more raw than when the matter of a World Cup is at stake, still smoulder. In the aftermath of the Wallabies' semi-final victory at Twickenham, the stadium announcer declared that they had sealed a confrontation with their "sworn enemies".

Granted, it is a rivalry with a few sinister subtexts. Many in New Zealand have never forgiven Australia's cricketers for Trevor Chappell's notorious underarm delivery in 1981, depriving batsman Brian McKechnie of the opportunity to hit a six off the final ball to win.

Now as then, it is regarded as one of the gravest slurs ever perpetrated against sport's Corinthian ideals, cementing in Kiwi minds a suspicion of their neighbour's capacity for dastardly chicanery when it suits. Muldoon (yes, him again) thundered at the time that the Australians were nothing more than a bunch of wretched poltroons, and that it was "appropriate they were wearing yellow".

Michael Cheika has made light of reports that Australia won't say "All Blacks". Photo / Getty Images

Michael Cheika, at least, appears to have forged a Wallabies squad above such cynical sabotage. He must just hope, for the remaining 24 hours, that TV channels in the homeland follow his example. Trans-Tasman relations continue to be frayed by an infamous Australian advert lampooning the haka, the All Blacks' sacred war dance, by superimposing upon each player a designer manbag. The ensuing consternation in

New Zealand was of an intensity that required Kofi Annan levels of diplomacy to defuse.

Last year, I found out for myself the Kiwis' habit of bruising easily, when a column likening the haka to Cirque du Soleil subsequently led their national news bulletins. So, when we talk of sporting enemies, it is salutary to note that the animosity tends to flow in one direction. An Antipodean colleague suggests that hate, on the New Zealanders' part at least, would not be too strong a word. It is an enmity sharpened by a dreadful record against Australia in major finals, where the abacus since 2013 reads: played three, lost three.

Australian papers have not been kind to the All Blacks in the lead-up to the final. Photo / Getty Images

Vanquished emphatically in rugby league, netball and cricket, they turn to their beloved All Blacks to correct the balance. Only in World Cups, there is not much solace here, either. The scars of a 22-10 semi-final defeat in Sydney in 2003 continue to cut deep. And yet the hostility is, ultimately, a mere distraction from two young countries' mutual recognition that the forces uniting them are far stronger than those that tear them apart.

Anybody buying too deeply into the pantomime conflict of their Bledisloe Cup battles should have paused to witness this year's moving ceremonies before each match to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Gallipoli, where the Anzac soldiers fought and suffered appalling losses as one.

Each year, a dawn service on that desolate strip of Turkish coastline unfolds in a mournful silence to render any sporting duel a mere frippery. Much as the adversaries at Twickenham might seek to persuade us otherwise, theirs is a phoney war, rooted far more in laughs than loathing.