s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

So I have watched my first rugby game. Better — I have watched my first All Blacks game (the All Blacks being the New Zealand team, made up of the cream of the players from the various NZ regional teams. Kiwis have the sort of legendary reverence for the All Blacks that Americans haven’t been able to muster for their sports teams since… well, for a long time, anyway).

So rugby. It’s a little like football (American football, that is) — the general idea is for your team to grab the ball and run it down into the other team’s goal area, while the other team is trying to beat the crap out of your team to prevent it, and vice versa. Rugby has a touchdown, called a “try”, and a field goal, which is called a “penalty” if you get to kick it when the other team has broken the rules, and a “conversion” if you get to kick it because you’ve just scored a try. As in football, scoring a try is more prestigious (and worth more points) than getting points by kicking.

Rugby is different from football in a lot of ways, though. Forward passing is illegal, for instance — you can only pass *back* (forward and back being relative to the direction you ultimately want to ball to go, of course). Similarly, if the ball is bouncing around on the ground, you can ony pick it up from “behind” it, or you’re off-sides. That’s the other big difference, and the one that I personally like best: play doesn’t stop unless the ref calls a penalty (which he will always call too often against your side, and not often enough against the other side), or the ball goes out of bounds. If it’s fumbled, then somebody just picks it up and runs with it. If the guy with it gets tackled, he contrives to pass it to one of his mates and they keep going. There are rules to help with this: if you get tackled, you’re not *allowed* to just lie there clutching the ball; you *have* to pass it out, or your side gets penalized. If you tackle someone, you’re not allowed to just flop across them and pin them to the ground; you have to get your feet under you, so the guy you’re squashing can pass the ball out. This looks really funny from the spectator’s POV, to see this big pile of thrashing bodies and the ball come miraculously spooting out from underneath. Apparently, if the guy at the bottom of the pile *is* hanging onto the ball and not releasing it like he should, it’s perfectly legal to stomp on him with your cleats until he does. This leaves me wondering: if the head honchos at work are holding on to the license for my system monitoring software, and not releasing it, can I put on some cleats and go and stomp on them ?

Please ?

Anyway, I enjoyed the heck out of the game, which we watched at my boss’ house in Seatoun (you walk out of his front door, across the street, and down the beach into the surf), despite the fact that the All Blacks lost, it was apparently a terrible game, and I seem to have come out of it with a nasty throat cold. Almost all the scoring was penalties, and the English guy kept making his kicks, while our guy missed most of his, plus the Australian ref “needed to be smacked” (according to my boss’ boss, a generally mild fellow otherwise). Plus, it’s always a hoot to see your co-workers in their cups. One of them kept trying to convince a couple of the women to bet on the game, with the loser swimming naked in the (very cold) bay across the street (they didn’t take the bet, but he swam anyway). I had to keep asking people what was going on, and toward the end of the second half (the only commercials were at half-time, BTW), it was practically a chorus:

*ref whistle*

“Wait, wait, what does that mean ?”

“It means the ref needs to be smacked !”

“If you run the ball forward, but you don’t have control, like you’re kinda fumbling it, it doesn’t count.”

“Oh.”

“…and if they lose, I’ll swim naked !”

*ref whistle*

“*Now* what’s he complaining about ?”

“I didn’t catch that one.”

“Smack ‘im !”

“Swim naked !”

*fweet !*

… and so on.

Chris and Natasha were invited to the party, but didn’t make it, ironically, because Chris had bought a $2 raffle ticket from some school kids and won tickets to see the game live. (Tickets which had been sold out for weeks, of course. This is sort of comparable to a bemused English immigrant winning All-Stars tickets.)

Yesterday, I did some half-hearted apartment hunting in the morning, but was sick enough by the afternoon that I just gave up and read. Today, I’m doing much the same — napping and reading. Bleah.