Posts by giovanni tiso
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You've got an ironclad argument there :-)
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Ah, yes. To paraphrase I can't remember whom: you can't beat the All Blacks. At best you'll manage to score more points than them.
To us, we're still the winners!
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I vote for a fluffy toy.
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So you're against league play then? The idea that a winner is crowned after a certain number of matches.
I'm absolutely in favour of league tables to decide league-style tournaments. The IRB rankings use league tables to find the winner of a non-existing league-style tournament, and that makes no sense to me (or anybody else really).
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can't the rest of us all just agree to ignore the World Cup and celebrate the rankings list?
I guess. It still reminds me a bit of a friend once who after being on the losing end of I can't rememebr what game delivered the immortal line "To me I'm still the winner". He was ten.
...and revived your dream of playing international football?
Heh!
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My mum will be dead proud. :)
She should be. And, for what it's worth, I'm also in favour of the rofflenui spelling.
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**You** think it's important
The NZRFU and the players think it's important. Nobody gives a toss about the IRB rankings (which also exist in football, by the way, and nobody cares about those either). Do you want evidence? People always know who the world champion is, and seldom who's at the top of the IRB list. And there were no celebrations whatsoever - not among players, not among the media, not among fans - when the ABs gor the top spot.
The Rugby World Cup exists because in 1982 NZ qualified for The Other World Cup in Spain
I might as well confess that that's when I found out that New Zealand existed...
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So South Africa are unquestionably the best team until 2011?
No, but arguably they were the best team of the 2004-2007 cycle. I'm not crazy about the all-absorbing power of the world cup, don't get me wrong, but that's the yardstick that the federations have chosen for themselves - and the NZRFU made absolutely no bones about it. Fans may of course feel differently, but since the teams themselves have decided to live or die by that trophy, it becomes difficult to take alternative views. For instance, you may care about the Bledisloe above all else. But it won't change the fact that the players don't.
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Reasons don't really matter, but neither do they take away from the performance across all tests in 2007 (what, 15 or so? if you include all RWC games?)
In bizzarro world you might want to decide the best team like that. In the real world of sports, everybody trains for the games that count the most, and the games that count the most are those that everybody agrees count the most, and the team that wins that particular competition is crowned world champion, and that's that. I'm not taking away from any performances, but we came out second if not fourth best on the day. Which (thankfully) is still what counts.
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I actually think we were the best team last year. And if not we were second best by a whisker.
Yes. We won an abbreviated Tri Nations that nobody really cared about (including us) and crashed out of the world cup against a team who had already lost the opener (at home!) and went on to lose the next game (at home!) against the eventual losers of the final. We were devastating!
After the World Cup they held the #1 status for three games before we took it off them.
Yes, and I remember the cheering followed by the parades when we regained the #1 ranking. It brings a tear to the eye just thinking about those glorious days.