November 14 - 2009. Going to Africa.

November 14, 2009.

Everyone knew the home leg of the All Whites inter-continental playoff was going to be a sporting occasion. I don’t think anyone, in their wildest dreams, thought it would end up like that.

Everyone knows the sporting story; the All Whites win 1-0 thanks to a Rory Fallon header. Mark Paston saves a penalty. The whole country goes potty. That’s the bit everyone knows and everyone appreciates. However there are only 37,000 people who will truly know what that night was like. Luckily, I was one of them.

Wellington had become the Nation’s football capital through its support of the Phoenix. Yellow Fever had grown and all of a sudden an ‘active support’ culture was developing. Supporters of the Kingz and Knights would argue that it already existed, Yellow Fever, as far as I am concerned, made it mainstream though.

Wellington got awarded the rights for the match following a pretty comprehensive tender process, the easy thing for NZF to do would have been to take it to North Harbour. They normally took the easy option, and it normally turned out to be the wrong option. It was now up to Wellington to support it.

I am trying to write these pieces from feel as opposed to doing any actual research, so some of my dates and timelines might be off. We played the first leg of the qualifier in October. At that point sales had been steady, I seem to remember a rush on the Thursday before the first leg to buy White Noise zone tickets as the zone had almost sold out. I can’t remember if it was true or not but it was indicative of what was happening just below the surface in the build-up to this game, people were excited.

I watched the first leg at some ungodly hour of the morning at Four Kings, it was that time of day when you had to make the decision to either stay up all night (as many at Four Kings seemingly had) or get up early and ruin a perfectly good Sunday morning sleep in. I went with the latter, picked my Dad up from the hotel he was staying at for the weekend and off we drove to the Kings. It was pretty chocka and the crowd rode the game like the All Whites rode their luck. It wasn’t pretty but a 0-0 job got the draw done and made Wellington very very real. I guess there were plenty of people who thought we would get smacked in Bahrain and Wellington wouldn’t matter, I was probably one of them. Now people believed.

Again, this may be my memory making this up but I think the game had sold out by the middle of the week after. ‘Football fans’ whinged that people had bought the tickets and all of a sudden those same tickets were on TradeMe. They, the real fans were therefore missing out, ummmm….if you were a real fan, you would have bought your ticket before the Bahrain game!

Anywho, November 14 rolled around. It had been a pretty eventful week for me. I finished University on the Thursday and had our End of Season awards do on the Friday night, I managed to keep myself under control on Friday night as feeling iffy on the Saturday simply wasn’t an option.

We kicked off the day with a BBQ on our shittly  little charcoal burner at our flat in Thordon, from every room of the house we could see into the stadium. So calm, so peaceful, so nervous! A mid-afternoon visit to Four Kings was required as well as some cash outlaid in novelty shops to buy anything white we could get our hands on; white sheets, silver fern stickers, NZ sweatbands. We had them all. We were ready… but it was only 4 o’clock. A nervous few ales on the Terrace before heading to the Backbencher and it all started to get very real. As we walked around the front of Parliament buildings we came across a group of Bahranians, the king/sultan/dictator or whatever he is/was had chartered the biggest plane to ever fly into Wellington and had bought the team/fans/journalists into town, they were singing, clapping and what not across the road from White Noise spiritual home – The Backbencher. The atmosphere at the pub was amazing, a couple of renditions of the National Anthem as well as a few other goodies and we were on the way to the ground.

We had decided to go in to the ground early and it was probably at this point that the magnitude of the occasion dawned on me. Already, the ground was a third full perhaps and everyone was in white, not just a few people had got behind the ‘white-out’ campaign but almost everybody had – it was simply amazing. The All Whites were already out on the pitch warming up and 10-minutes after we arrived the ’82 All Whites were wheeled out. They did a lap of the ground and the place went mental, the team fed off the crowd and the crowd fed off Rufer, Sumner, Malcomson etc etc. I remember seeing Ricki and Brian Turner head over to the boys and share an embrace with all of them pitch-side. Everyone got what was at stake; everyone got what the occasion met. The lap of honour must have taken 20-odd minutes because by the time Rufer (who was straggling, doing it his own way…) was back in front of the Fever Zone it was pretty chocka. He worked the zone into an absolute frenzy, it was amazing. Rufer polarises a lot of people and has burned a lot of bridges in New Zealand Football but that night you could see how much the national teal meant to him. The ’82 boys formed a guard of honour as the team left the field after warm ups. By this stage the stadium was almost full, literally everyone was in white. It was an amazing effect. I can’t imagine the psychological boost it gave to the All Whites, it must have been the most ridiculous feeling for guys that so often played in front of 7-8,000 in the same stadium.

There is YouTube footage of the two teams in the tunnel before they walk out, Rory Fallon and a couple of the other boys are talking some smack, trying to get in the head of the Bahranians. It’s always easy to say in hindsight but Fallon and others have said that when the Bahranies wouldn’t look them in the eye in the tunnel they knew they had them. Fallon can talk a good game, that’s for sure. Watching that video you can hear the crowd in full voice, that couple of minutes as both teams waited in the tunnel and emerged onto the field only reinforced the earlier perceptions of what the night had become and what it was likely to turn into.

The atmopshere was more than just a wall of noise; you could sense that it was more than that. Saying the atmosphere is electric is a cliché, but that night it was. All over the ground you could hear pockets of people starting chants. One of the vividest memories I have was watching Bahrain take a corner in the opposite corner to the Fever zone (normally a sea of yellow seats), the crowd raise and in unison gave him the “Who r Ya”. It was quite remarkable. They key moments of the game are a bit of a blur, the one thing I do have a strong recollection of is the header before we scored. I saw it come off our head and go towards the goal, I couldn’t see the keeper and assumed it was going in. I was in celebration mode and couldn’t figure out why no one around me was going off. Turns out the keeper had made a miraculous save. Didn’t matter, we scored minutes later and the place went bonkers. At that stage we were going through, it may sound horrific but I still figured they would score and we wouldn’t go through.

I guess that’s why the penalty that Lochy conceded had an air of inevitability around it, ‘oh well, it was fun while it lasted. We’re not going to the World Cup, I don’t know why we ever believed’. I guess that point is where Fallons comments about them not being up for it comes through, the penalty was simply simply awful. We were still 1-0 up; we were still going to South Africa. They hardly fired a shot in those last 35-minutes; in fact we probably should have got 1 or 2 during that period to really put the thing to bed.

By this stage the whole crowd realised how big and how special what was happening was, at 80-minutes the Fever Zone took their shirts off, as is our tradition. Looking around the stadium though, people everywhere had their shirts off. A mate of mine, who isn’t a massive football fan but loves a good sporting occasion (as so many people could have been described that night) described to me he and his Dad standing on their seats for the last ten minutes with shirts waving round their heads. He still couldn’t talk on the Monday. Like a few other events that I will write about during this series of posts; I don’t remember the last five or so minutes. I recall the Smeltz shot, which looked for so long like it was going in but I don’t really remember the whistle blowing.

I danced around, hugged the people behind me (who had been quite annoying all night), hugged my parents and danced around some more. The music started blaring and continued while the All Whites did their lap of honour, it took them a while to get to us but it was utter pandemonium the whole time. Nike had produced some “White is the New Black” t-shirts which while funny were an unnecessary cheap shot which told you quite a lot about the psyche of many New Zealand football fans, something that I have watched in the last few years. Looking around the zone, I felt so awesome for some of the football-tragics I had met over the last few years. People who had ridden the ups and downs of NZ Football as much as the players, nights like that were for them. We stayed around the ground for a while before heading into town. Four Kings was a no-go at that stage as the lines were simply to long so we ended up at our local – the Kumara. The band was changing the words of songs to fit in with the theme of the night, I seem to remember getting most of the bar to sing a version of “Que se ra se ra – we’re going to Africa” while people dressed as sheep and first years trying to get laid mingled and shared stories about the night.

After one member of our group had fallen to sleep and been kicked out we decided we would try FourKings, by this stage the line was manageable so we head in and found ourselves a pretty good spot. They already had a replay of the game on and they turned down the music so we could listen to the commentary of the goal, the pub went mental. About this time a few of the guys who I mentioned before, people who had been with Football through all the shit showed up. I had a quick chat to them but by this stage they weren’t in much of a state for a chat. If anyone deserved a hangover that night, it was them.

As it turned out, November 14 was only the start of a pretty remarkable journey the All Whites would take over the next few years.  If you had said to me five years prior what being there on a night like that would mean to me I would have laughed. Sure, I liked football and I would support New Zealand in anything they did but the notion of New Zealand even being in a position to play a game like that was unthinkable. Australia moving to Asia changed all that. People will say that’s the best sporting atmosphere they have ever been it, yeah it was amazing. Yeah, it was a great occasion. But what I have learned over the last few years is that all sporting occasions are different and are awesome for different reasons.

It set pretty high expectations for the next inter-continental playoff (should we make it). I think people will need to be careful, don’t try and recreate November 14, 2009. You simply won’t be able to, the backstory – 28 years of hurt, Fallon scoring the goal, the penalty save – none of that will happen again. But should we qualify it will be just as special to think that we are actually turning into a football nation.

November 14, whatever happens will always be one of the great New Zealand sporting occasions. It meant so much to so many and to others it simply meant a good night out. But what a good night it was!

My Sporting Bucket List – been, gone and still to come.

I walked into Wembley last night to watch England play Ukraine in a World Cup Qualifier. Four hours earlier I had been walking through Twickenham. Two sporting cathedrals. Two places I had dreamt of going to as a kid. Two places that I could tick off my sporting bucket list.

What was on my list and what I had already done wasn’t something that I spent a lot of time thinking about. Recently however, with a lot of extra time on my hands, it has been something I have been giving a little bit of thought. It all stemmed from a conversation with a mate last Friday night. ‘What’s on your sporting bucket list?’ he asked.

After talking it through, I realised I had already done a lot of the stuff that I had wanted to do. Seen the games I wanted to see. Cherished the live victories that I wanted to be a part of. So I thought, with the aforementioned extra time on my hands, I would write about the big sporting events and great experiences I have been a part of.

I’ll go through them post at a time, in chronological order. Some of them are obvious, some of them are more obscure sporting ‘experiences’ that I wouldn’t have changed for all the money in the world.

15 August 2004

70 odd minutes gone, Eden Park. Bay of Plenty vs Auckland for the Ranfurly Shield.

The same place where we had conceded a tight-head in 1997, Auckland had thrown it wide, scored and Matt Carrington (anyone remember how mediocre he was?) kicked the conversion to break Blue and Yellow hearts.

Not today though, today there would be no mediocre provincial journeyman to deny us our date with destiny. Today, it would be our own mediocre provincial journeymen who delivered the kind of glory an 18-year old Steamers fan could simply not understand.

As I remember it we were up by one. The ball goes wide to Anthony Tahana (see, provincial journeyman!) who somehow gets the ball down in the corner. I can’t remember if we had video refs back then, or if it just seemed to take an inordinate amount of time for the referee to consult the touch-judge, but eventually the hand went up in the air. The try was awarded and BOP was up by 6. 6-points with 5 or so minutes to go (as an aside, I can’t find any footage on youtube!). Still plenty of time for us to choke, as we would inevitably do. The conversion was from the sideline, we just assumed it would miss. Jacko was having a good day (hell, he was a genius that day) but it was windy and pressure didn’t come much bigger than this. How wrong I was, Jacko kicks the conversion and we were up by 8.

By this stage I had moved from my seat in the Old South Stand to pacing the aisle, I think at some stage my Dad joined me and we paced together. The moment that will always stick in my mind from that day, more than Jackos conversion or Wayne lifting the thing, was the realisation that it was ours. That we had done it. It came when Auckland were awarded a penalty, with time up. Eight points, that moment of realisation should have come long before then but alas, remember Matt Carrington my brain kept saying. Daniel Braid was the Auckland captain – eight points down, time up on the clock, the Shield up for grabs. What does he do? He points at the sticks, of course he does. The penalty would get them within 5, a bonus point. NPC points mattered as well. Not to us they didn’t, that pointing to the posts only meant one thing. That heavy, unwieldy wooden monstrosity which had so long eluded us was ours. I can’t remember if the kick went over, I don’t think I was watching. By this stage, the pacing in the aisle had become jumping and dancing with my Dad, I think even my Mum may have been on her feet by this stage. Everyone in our colours around us was on their feet by this stage, including as it turned out – the coaches wife and new born baby. We had won the Shield, the trophy that still means the most to New Zealand rugby fans.

I had been there to see my team do it, those kind of days are always made that much sweeter by remembering the days that weren’t sweet in any way. I distinctly remember watching us play Thames Valley in a random Division 2 game, the day we got smashed by Counties (92-93?) at Rotorua when Counties fans outnumbered BOP fans by about 2-1 with promotion was on the line, the day we played the Central Vikings in a semi-final at Rotorua and got humped, year after year of having to play Hawkes Bay in those promotion-relegation playoffs which so favoured the incumbent. None of them mattered, not any more. It turns out this isn’t what Florence and the Machine say, but it sure sounds like it “The dark days are over”. They were, we had a trophy.

I don’t really remember much of the presentation, not sure I could see huge chunks of it but I seem to remember it took an age (because of TV). The players did the lap of honour, the front railings of the whole ground were lined with the Blue and Yellow army by then. It got to us, I think it may have been Bernie Upton carrying it by that stage but it didn’t matter. It was a moment for the fans, those of us who had gone through so much with that team.

As it turned out, we defended it once, against Waikato. I seem to remember David Hill having one the worst games I have ever seen a professional rugby player have. Who cares though, we kept it! Until…. Next week. Canterbury came to town, All Blacks in tow and beat us. We put up a fight but the Shield was leaving. If we had beaten Canterbury it didn’t get much easier. The next two challenges would have been Otago and Wellington. As it turned out we beat both of them! We went onto make the semis where we came up against Canterbury again, got humped. But it didn’t matter. We had won the Shield; I had been there to see it. I had been able to share the experience with my Dad, he who had sat through just as many dire BOP occasions as I had all because I had wanted to go.

As it turns out the Ranfurly Shield would come to play a much bigger part in my life further down the track but that’s for another post.

Bay of Plenty won the Shield, when was the last time you did that Hawkes Bay?