On Saturday, Australia played Wales at rugby, and New Zealand played England at rugby. Australia beat Wales. New Zealand beat England. Are you following so far?
After the games, English people weren’t very happy. Welsh people weren’t very happy. This is pretty understandable, as their teams had lost, and losing is an unhappy experience.
The funny thing is that, after the games, a lot of Australian people weren’t happy either, and a lot of New Zealanders were positively miserable. Not all Australians and New Zealanders, and probably not the actual players – they all seemed pretty chuffed. But a lot. A lot more than you might expect to be unhappy after a rugby game their team had won, since winning is traditionally a happy experience and, according to the laws of the game, technically the whole point.
For evidence you may look at various articles written about these games and, in particular, comments on those articles. Though there’s certainly a modicum of good cheer around, there’s also hefty helpings of gloom, anger and dire foreboding being served up in the rugby community. What’s more, the unhappiness seems so much more intense than the happiness: happy fans seem to be in the “god that’s a relief” camp, whereas unhappy ones are spiralling all the way down to “the unremitting hell of existence is once more proven real”.
(Photo by Jason McCawley/Getty Images)
Now, a wise man once said to me that happiness is a choice, and this is quite good evidence for the proposition that sometimes wise men talk utter bollocks, because of course it’s not. You can choose happiness as hard as you like, but if your house burns down or your wife leaves you for your father, your choice will be as dust in the wind. Every reader of The Roar knows that happiness is not a choice, it’s a matter of what your football team did on the weekend.
The curious thing about rugby, though, is that for many devotees of the game, happiness is not a simple function of winning. Something about the rugby fan craves more than a win, finds mere victory insufficient to quell the ineffable hunger that twists his soul. This is not something I have just noticed this week – over a long period of watching Australian rugby union, I have found my fellow fans, far more than fans of other codes, unusually resistant to joy.
I am fairly sure that when the Wallabies won the World Cup in 1991 and 1999, pretty much every Australian fan was happy. In 2003 when they won the World Cup semi-final, they were happy too – which was ironic because all that win did was facilitate the greatest moment of pure misery in history, when Jonny Wilkinson kicked his vile drop goal the following week.
And I suppose since 2003 there have been moments of relative happiness, but it feels like there haven’t been that many. Crucially, it feels like, although victory hasn’t been all that common for the Wallabies in the last two decades, fan happiness has been even less common.
Why is this? Why do we find it so hard to rejoice when our team does well? Why is it that victories like that on Saturday are met with far more focus on what went wrong, what needs to change, and how disastrous the future will be if huge improvements are not made, than on the simple fact that we won, they lost, and hooray for the green and gold?
You’d think that last year’s World Cup cataclysm would’ve made us so grateful for any glimmer of success that we would gulp down the joy of victory like a man finding a bottle of Evian in the Sahara. Instead we sip with wrinkled nose complaining that it’s lukewarm and pour the rest out onto the burning sand, declaring that unless we find some much nicer water soon we’ll be in real trouble.
The dissatisfaction of All Blacks fans, though slightly perverse, is a bit more understandable: when you’ve grown up in New Zealand, seeing your team win by a solitary point is like going to see your favourite band after all the original members have left. Sure, you’ve technically just watched a Thin Lizzy concert, but it just doesn’t feel the same.
All Black Head Coach Scott Robertson talks to the press following the International Test Match between New Zealand All Blacks and England. (Photo by Joe Allison – RFU/The RFU Collection via Getty Images)
But Australians? A 25-16 win over Wales should have us dancing in the streets. There have been times – and a certain stretch during 2023 comes to mind – when a 25-16 win over Wales would’ve seemed like a dream too wonderful to be real. We had visions of 25-16 wins over Wales and burst into tears, knowing that such ecstasy was not for the likes of us.
So, what does it take to make us happy? I think a few things are necessary to get the entire Australian rugby public to actually feel good after a Wallabies game:
- The Wallabies have to win. As depressed as many of us get after a win, it still remains true that losing is even worse.
- There can be no areas of weakness in the team. A strong scrum, a perfect lineout, efficient at the breakdown, crisp and fluid backline play and impenetrable defence all need to be present and correct. If one element of the team’s performance is subpar, the howls of grief will be deafening as we reflect on the fact that victory is simply illusory and the house of cards we’ve built could be blown down at any moment.
- Every player must perform flawlessly. Any player found knocking on, turning the ball over to the opposition, making an ill-judged pass or ineffective kick, or jogging behind play when he could be sprinting at top speed, will be ruthlessly cast as a woeful hack who has never been up to the requirements of Test rugby. The victory will therefore count for nothing, because the team will be seen to be full of frauds who are about to get found out by a superior opposition.
- The opposition must score no points. If the other team scores, it is a sign that either our defence is suspect, or our discipline is unacceptable. Either way this proves that any slight increase in pressure from another team, and all will come crashing down like a dictator’s statue in a revolution.
- The team must score points at every opportunity. If at any point our team visits opposition territory and comes away without scoring, it will stand as proof positive that we have no clue how to break down a good defence, and that doom lies before us.
- The opposition must be either New Zealand or South Africa. Beating any other team is worthless, because no matter how easily we win, we know that playing like that against New Zealand or South Africa will see us annihilated.
- The win must be the latest in a long streak of wins, preferably ten or more. Otherwise all we’ve proven is that we can win the occasional match. Good teams win EVERY game, and anything less is a sign of inconsistency which will surely come back to bite us.
- The win must be watched by a sellout crowd and millions on TV. Because if millions aren’t watching, who even cares if we win – rugby is dying anyway and the game we love will soon be no more.
Apart from those, of course it is helpful if we, play in, a manner both daringly flamboyant and brutally physical, that could roughly be termed “the Australian way”, bearing in mind no questions will be taken re: what that phrase actually means. But we won’t quibble over that. Let’s just try to get those eight points satisfied, and then we can crack a smile.
Until then, I’ll be watching Saturday’s game over and over, crying bitter tears over the disgrace to Australian rugby that a Wallabies victory inevitably must be.
Ben Pobjiehttps://https://ift.tt/PHk6eQS Wallabies and All Blacks both won: Why are so many of their fans still miserable?
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