WAR IN JAPAN
IN A WORLD CUP THE WALLABIES ARE PART OF A GLOBAL CONVERSATION THAT LEAGUIES AND AFL TYPES COULD ONLY CONFECT. EVEN VICTORIANS BACK ‘EM.
RUGBY in Australia needs success at the 2019 Rugby World Cup in Japan like Burke and Wills needed to listen to locals and find a waterhole. The game – by which we mean the pointy, professional end of rugby as opposed to the one people play for fun – has known several years of malaise. It’s been a mini-dynasty of malaise, of dipping interest, of ambivalence. And that’s among the game’s rusted-on fans, much less the greater populace of our nation state of disparate former colonies. Rugby needs an enema. A strong showing in the World Cup would be that enema. The Rugby World Cup is the world’s third-largest sports event after the carnivals run by the chancers in the IOC and FIFA. And on such a stupendous stage, the Wallabies, like our cricket team, Socceroos and swimmers, are Australia’s team. In a World Cup the Wallabies are part of a global conversation that leaguies and AFL types could only confect. Even Victorians back ’em.
Same thing happened with the America’s Cup in ’83. Few Australians actually gave a stuff about rich people and their 12-metre yachts. But that boat was Australia. And you don’t have to know Israel Folau from Folau Fainga’a to know the magnitude of beating the All Blacks in Japan, as we did in Perth, if not Auckland …
Not to say great legions of Weet-Bix kids raised on the deeds of the West Coast Eagles, Wests Tigers or Western Sydney Wanderers will suddenly up and squawk at their parents to deck them out in the golden livery of Bernard Foley’s No.10. That is unlikely to happen, in part because Foley’s no lock to wear the number (more on that later), and
