My Favourite Australians

Today is the day they play the first game of the Tri-Nations series. All Blacks v Wallabies. Rugby union. South Africa make up the rest of the 'tri'. It's going to be great.

As usual, I am wildly confident about the ABs and I know we will win.

This despite the Wallabies having the world's best rugby player in their team, and my favourite Australian, Stephen Larkham. The game changes when he gets the ball. Anything can happen. Kiwis have a grudging respect for this guy, the same way we used to feel about David Campese. Drives us crazy that someone so good should be in another team.

We are going to my favourite Australian pub to watch the game this afternoon. The Oaks in Neutral Bay, northern Sydney, is just a great pub. It's big and it loves sports occasions. It also does very good mussels.

The northern side of Sydney is known as rugby union country, where the rest of the city embraces rugby league. I like that game too, but union is my birthright. Of course, being a girl I can't talk about it much, and even Kiwi blokes think they like it when a girl knows about rugby, but when you start saying things like "we need to concentrate more on getting height in the lineout" ... well, that tends to freak them out a little. My husband challenges the comments I make all the time, but it's only because he doesn't want me going around sounding like an idiot.

I really stirred up trouble the other night by saying I'd learnt a lot about rugby scrums and rules here, because the tv rugby shows we watch here actually take the time to explain some of this stuff. I don't think they do that in NZ - you are expected to be born knowing how a scrum works. To explain it would be belittling your audience. I've been working on writing a Girl's Guide to Test Rugby for years .. so maybe I need to do a section on scrummaging. Fantastic!

The other good thing about northern Sydney is the large numbers of Kiwis living there ... meaning when we go into this pub today (and I'm wearing my ABs shirt already) we will be heavily outnumbered .. but we won't be alone!

The other challenge at The Oaks today will be to get there early enough to get a decent table with a good view of a screen. This will require about three hours of sitting there before the game starts. I'm up for it, just have to go off and motivate a few others now.

Go the ABs.