By Seamus Boyer
It can be a miserable thing watching New Zealand sporting teams coming up against their Australian counterparts.
Invariably we lose.
This weekend was no exception, with the Kiwis going down 26-6 to the Kangaroos in the league test in Perth on Saturday.
Just hours before the Silver Ferns had also been well-beaten by our Trans-Tasman foes, losing 62-50 in the third match of the Constellation Cup in Auckland.
It can be pretty agonising watching, as often the Kiwi teams will start strongly only to be pipped when it counts.
Think of the Black Caps at the last cricket World Cup, going all the way to the final only to be roundly beaten by the men in gold.
That’s what happened in the league on Saturday, the Kiwis had bravely battled back into the contest after a slow start to trail by just 8-6 at halftime.
On other occasions it’s one-way traffic from the start, or almost the start, as it was in the netball.
If we put all our sporting codes up, one by one, and discovered their last result when playing against the Australians, I’d imagine we’d be on the losing side on at least two out of three of the occasions.
As I said, it can make for pretty grim watching.
But luckily we have the All Blacks.
Because while they may be just one New Zealand team among many, they are so dominant over our cousins across The Ditch that they almost make up for all the losses elsewhere.
So good are they, that whatever the Aussies say (about any sport) we can always point out that we have the All Blacks.
Of course, it wasn’t always so.
Anyone who was an All Blacks fan in the late 1990s and early 2000s knows it was awful there for a while.
Think John Eales, Westpac Stadium, year 2000.
But with our form over the last decade, all that is now ancient history.
So let the Aussies have their league and their netball victories (and all those other sports they beat us in), we’ll keep on winning in the only game that counts.
At least that’s what we’ll tell ourselves.
