Journalism 101 - The All Blacks Northern Hemisphere Tour and how not to antagonise your hosts

The boys are back in the UK for the now traditional splash and cash of rugby against the Poms, Jocks and Welsh. There's a game in Rome too. Nice for the sightseeing. The lucky Irish have avoided their pounding at home this year by virtue of touring us next year. They seem to be one of the few teams that understand if you ever want to be good at rugby, you need to play it at the highest level consistently. Heading down under for proper tours is the best way to get that experience. I would probably install them as favourites for the 6 nations now due to this (and the others having been handed their asses in a sling by the ABs).

Cory Jane charms some Scot lasses. Lasses means
girls in Scotland.

Anyway, the boys arrived earlier in the week and set about charming the locals. I'm not such a big fan of this but I realise these days that shirt sales are as important as smashing the opposition. And we can't really go back to the dark days of the 2003 RWC where no-one spoke to anyone and we acted grumpy all the time. People take offense at getting destroyed and then you not shaking their hand and having a beer afterwards. Makes it worse when we didn't smash them either. Makes the journalists a bit cross too.

And so we head to NZ Herald journalist, Chris Rattue. Chris has decided rather than enjoy the tour north, he wants to tell everyone how dismissive it is. Unfortunately Chris if we all act like this, no-one will invite us to play against them ever again. In the modern age, we do the following:
- smile
- let everyone know how excited we are to be up in the North
- tell them how we've missed them all heaps
- say we are looking forward to the 'huge challenge'
- pinpoint two or three of their players as super talents (in the hope that they pick those 'talents' and we can smash them into tiny pieces)
- let them know that any turncoats / traitors that have decided to turn their back on godzone and play for another country will be treated the same as anyone else
- point out a few differences in our game vs the norths and how adapting to that makes playing the game a lot harder (when it fact it quite clearly plays into our hands)

What we don't do is call our hosts 'turgid', 'ineffective', 'talentless', etc.

New Sponsor WTF? on the ABs Jersey

I think we can all agree that these regular Northern tours aren't really progressing the game further but while they are happening, slagging them off and the people involved during the middle of them doesn't make us look very nice. What should be happening obviously is biennial Pacific Island tours, incorporating the Pacific Islands into the southern hemisphere cup, and continued spreading of the game to the far flung corners of the world. But the IRB are a bit slow on these things and while our paymasters appear to be based in the UK and we have to wear shirts with stupid letters on them, we've got to do these things.

The AB Enquirer is not going to any of the games. The network has let me down unfortunately. In the UK you can't just buy a ticket off a website like home or dare to truck up to the ground on the day. You've got to know someone, who knows someone else, who has a mate who walks Clive Woodwards dog in order to get tickets to an AB game. This makes me cry. I'll be looking for some dodgy internet stream which will buffer or drop out at key Cory Jane touch down moments. Posh telly (Sky) has ruined sport but that's a whole other post.

Good luck ABs.