Even My Best ‘Friends’ Now Refer To me As A Mongrel

To those of you who occasionally read my pieces might not know that I am a hopeless tragic when it comes to rugby. I simply adore the game for, as a fan, it provides all the agony and ecstasy one can want, neatly packaged up into eighty minutes on a Saturday afternoon.

However, I have to admit that the last few years the scales have tipped steadily onto the agony side of the ledger as my particular team has performed rather poorly.

Well let’s be honest here, they have been shit!

To add insult to injury, many of my ‘closest ‘friends are die-hard New Zealand supporters who like nothing better than to grind the Australian national team into the ground which they do with monotonous regularity. Not satisfied with their win they take great pleasure in putting the boot in while I lie sobbing on the ground.

However, to offset my pain, I perhaps have been blessed with ability to switch sides at the drop of a hat which, given we are in the midst of the Rugby World Cup quarter-finals can be rather handy!

This anomaly is due to the fact that all my life I have been rather a wanderer by trade, taking up residence in various countries for a few years at a time. The irony is that each of those countries I settled in, albeit temporarily went out of their way to offer me citizenship which I gladly accepted. To make matters even better was that each and every country in which I settled had rugby as their national sport.

Bliss!

Now, while in resident in those particular counties I religiously followed their national teams with the same enthusiasm and gusto as those born and bred there.

That is except one!

One of the first counties I ‘settled’ in was South Africa after my parents emigrated from the U.K.where I spent twelve years as a teenager and a young adult and, while there became a fervent follower of the Springboks.

Each year that team would either travel to or host New Zealand’s national team, the formidable All Blacks. Beating them was was the highlight of every season and each encounter was a battle of biblical proportions.

Basically it was the team one loved to hate and losing to them was painful to put it mildly, leaving the country with a bad taste in their collective mouths.

 ‘Patriotically’ I  guess I should have at least been a die-hard supporter of the country of my birth but patriotism for me over the years has been rather a foreign concept.

A few years spent in France gave me a taste of the Le Bleu’s flair for the game with their unpredictably and Gallic flair which has broken many a team’s hearts, especially those dastardly All Blacks. I followed them with an unbridled zeal that even my French friends thought rather odd!

Ironically, on leaving France I ended up working in the far-flung country of New Zealand where rugby is not so much a game as it is a religion. Each and every Kiwi seems have that wild-eyed fanaticism when it comes to their national game which oozes from every pore! They’re a wonderful lot the Kiwis and they welcomed me with their warmth and generosity like nowhere I have ever been before.

They even gave me a passport!!

Unfortunately, try as much as I could, I was simply unable to get behind the All Blacks and when attending games, I would stand out amongst fans dressed in their traditional black shirts with me wearing the opposite team's colours willing them to put the Kiwi’s beloved team to the sword.

It seldom happened!

I felt adrift without a team to follow and embrace, a rugby orphan if you wish, lonely and bereft and reviled by those around me for not adopting the national team of my new found country.

I was a pariah, an outcast, berated by strangers and even my closest friends as a rugby mongrel scavenging for scraps at the patriot's table. I knew I had to leave and to find a new land where I could cheer lustily alongside passionate fans proudly wearing their team’s colours.

Then, I found Australia, that great southern land over the Tasman Sea which was undergoing a renaissance when it came to rugby. I thought I had died and gone to rugby heaven.

Oh the ecstasy as those mighty Wallaby warriors demolished all before them including (regularly) exacting revenge and grinding those All Blacks into the soil, even on their own turf. Sadly, those glory days are long gone and those dastardly chaps from NZ have risen and risen until most teams now fear them.

So, now, here we are on an auspicious day as we have reached the quarter-finals of the World Cup and today the Australians are up against England and New Zealand vs Ireland. Either way, win or lose I will, as is my wont, jump horses and support one of my ‘other’ teams.

If all comes to nought and my lot are bundled out before the finals I will have to follow the team in my ‘new’ country, Indonesia except unfortunately they prefer badminton to the rough and tumble of rugby.

So, wish me luck otherwise, I will be forced to hunt through the sports cupboard and find the shuttlecocks and take up a new sport altogether.

Paul v Walters is the best selling author of several best selling novels. When he is not cocooned in sloth and procrastination in his house in Bali he occasionally rises to scribble for several international travel and vox pop journals.

www.paulvwalters.net