Ka Mate, Ka Mate, Ka Ora, Ka Ora

An Englishman walks into a bar...  He doesn't find any Scotsmen, Welshmen or Irishmen to partake in the joke with him, because they are all still at the Rugby World Cup, whilst the dear Englishman is not...

This has pretty-much been the state of play, since the Australia debacle 2 weeks ago.  It has been 16 years since the World Cup final was played on our final island.  24 years since the final was played at the home of rugby.  As anti-climaxes go, England's failure to negotiate the group stage is quite notable.

Although, in very recent times, English sporting failure has been endemic.  In the past 16 months, Men's World Cups have been played at Football, Cricket and Rugby.  In all 3 cases, the England team's burning dreams of ambition were extinguished by the end of the preliminary group games.  Compare and contrast with Team GB's 29 gold medals in the London 2012 Olympics (I may have mentioned that I wrote a blog at the time of that event, as well)... ;) and with the recent successes of our Women's teams, on the football and rugby pitches.

As for an inquest into what went wrong, I couldn't help noticing a current England player (and rather an arrogant chap at that, I might add) strutting around the Twickenham pitch prior to one of the group games with his dearly beloved selfie stick.  In this age of enhanced social media, it is all too easy to dedicate much energy to appeasing one's Twitter and Facebook devotees, at the expense of a tough training session, or of some quality team-bonding.

Anyway, onto the topic of the latest two games which I attended, where the pre-match rituals thankfully did not involve selfie sticks, but rather involved the traditional war dances of Oceania.  I'm sure we are all familiar with New Zealand's Haka (one of which, Ka Mate, has always been my sentimental favourite), but the below video, which I shot in Newcastle, represented an extra-special rendition of the Haka, intertwined with Tonga's own Kailao dance.  The obvious passion, togetherness and brotherhood of the two competing groups of men really is a sight to behold.

I also had this great view of the Samoan Siva Tau at last weekend's other game.

Amazingly, I only have one more live game to attend, which will be the first Semi Final.  This was originally billed as "Winner of Quarter Final 1" versus "Winner of Quarter Final 2", which has now manifested into New Zealand versus South Africa.  As I said in a previous blog entry, the previous World Cup which I remember with the most nostalgia was from 1995, and this game will be a rematch of that edition's epic final (Invictus and all that...)  Speaking of which, at the Samoa game, I was sat this close to World Cup legends Francois Pienaar & Jason Robinson (plus Ian McGeechan & Mark Durden-Smith)