By STEVE MASCORD via League Weekly
WHILE the World Cup plays out, there are two other epic endeavours running parallel.
Englishman Robbie Dolan set off from AAMI Park in Melbourne a week before the tournament started and is running to Brisbane for charity. You read that right: he is running to Brisbane.
On the weekend, he held a fund-raising dinner in Sydney. “I’m halfway,” he said to me in an email. “But games aren’t won in the first half.”
Meanwhile, Fox Sports statistician Aaron Wallace bought a mini-bus a few months ago. He and a group of Wigan fans drove to Perth for the double-header at nib Stadium yesterday.
I’ll say that one again, too. They drove from the east coast of Australia to Perth, across the Nullabor, a distance of 4000 km or 41 hours if you did it at a stretch.
They filmed parts of their journey spectacularly with a drone and I have to admit, as recently as Saturday morning I wished I was with them.
World Cup Touchstones chose a different route, of course.
I’m accredited for the tournament. I’ve seen 12 live games so far, attending 24 post-match media conferences and travelled to Melbourne, Townsville, Cairns, Canberra, Sydney and now Hamilton and Perth. By the time you read this, I’ll be in Darwin.
Now, I’m being paid by the Sydney Morning Herald to do this. But they are not contributing much to my travel. The money just keeps me on the road.
As I wearily watched the bags get loaded onto QF 141 from Sydney to Auckland on Saturday, I dearly wished I was out there on the Nullabor with ‘Wally’ and his mates.
With strict accreditation procedures and over-zealous security, covering matches had been something of a sterile experience. You need to be escorted everywhere but the toilet at venues and the opportunities to get something different from the pack, the lifeblood of a reporter, has been few and far between.
I could have got away with writing columns etc for Fairfax and still gone trekking with Wally, I figured, and saved myself a lot of money.
But roughly an hour after landing on the other side of the Tasman, I wasn’t asking ‘where’s Wally?’ anymore.
At first it was difficult to figure out while the road from Auckland to Hamilton was so jammed that the normal 90 minute travel time as clearly going to more than double. Then it became apparent. The Tongan flags hanging out of the windows was a dead give-away.
In New Zealand, charmingly, it is still possible to just drive up onto a footpath near a stadium, get out and come back to find your car still there with no ticket.
I had budgeted to get to Hamilton two hours before the match. I actually arrived 15 minutes before kick-off and rushed from gate to gate, making a poor PR person come out and collect me.
You know what happened next. The eye-to-eye hakas, David Fusitua’s three tries. The glass ceiling of tier one countries never being toppled in a World Cup, shattered into a million pieces.
Let me tell you some things you may have missed. The grandstand actually shook, as in an earthquake, several times in the final 20 minutes. The hymns that broke out when Tonga snatched the lead were otherworldly and beguiling.
On the press conference audio, you can hear – through two walls of concrete – people screaming at the top of their lungs at players they could not see, in unbridled jubilation.
I wrote that the first night of Origin in 1980 must have been like this; a public that felt gypped by economic migration (back then, of its players to wealthy Sydney clubs) finding an identity and respect with a rugby league game.
While you were dreaming of your club winning the Cup or the Championship as a kid, I was dreaming of new countries to our game beating the ones I knew. I was dreaming of world leagues and matching other sports for international presence.
To see this and the birth of the Toronto Wolfpack in person in the one year leaves it very hard for me to employ any cynicism in my view of rugby league – despite bitter old age. My childhood dreams for the sport are starting to come true.
On Friday night I had driven to Canberra for Fiji-Italy, returning home at 2.15am and being woken up by Kiwi radio at 4.45am before heading to the airport to dump the rental car and come to New Zealand.
Then it was another two and a half hours to Hamilton, the match, media conferences and trying to find that car again in the dark. You know what? At 11pm there was still a traffic jam of Tongan fans going back to south Auckland.
Deciding against a hotel, I hung out in Auckland airport for six hours overnight. It’s amazing how many people sleep at airports. Then it was onto Brisbane, with a connection to Perth.
In Auckland I had a coffee with Kiwis team manager Shane Richardson before boarding my flight. After a rushed connection in Brisbane, his brother Perry sat in my row for the onward sector to Perth.
That’s right. Sydney to Canberra by car, return which is seven hours. Australia to Auckland return by plane, another seven hours. Auckland to Hamilton by road, return, which was another five hours. Then Auckland to Perth via Brisbane, 10 hours.
And I’ve done it all in three days, having slept just three hours in a bed during that time. I’ve gone roughly a quarter-way around the world for four rugby league games. I sit here in my Perth Hotel room having been up, pretty much for three days.
Tonga, you made it worth it.
And come to think of it, I’m giving Wally and Rob a run for their money. I’ve heard rumours they have actually had a rest or two.
Sleeping’s cheating.
