the rugby

I'm still not feeling well, so I'll hopefully post up more on this soon but I wanted to get a quick comment up on watching the All Blacks:

- Seeing the haka live was incredible.

- The weather couldn't have been better, and our seats were in the second row just in front of one of the goal lines - there were two trys (scores) which happened in our corner, less than 50 feet away.

- The atmosphere was one of the strangest I've ever been a part of. The crowd filing into the stadium before the game had a little buzz of excitement and anticipation you get before games people are interested in, but less than I would have expected.
It was even odder once the game started - for about the first 10 minutes, the stadium was dead quiet. There were about 35,000 people in the 37,000-seat stadium, but there was no rustling, no murmurs. There were cheers and applause at the right moments, like a change of possession or big hit, but then the silence would return. We could literally hear the players grunt from across the field. It felt more like a theater crowd. I couldn't quite figure it out, but after New Zealand went ahead by a couple scores the crowd definitely relaxed, and you started to hear more of a background noise, with people shouting encouragement or derision. I started talking with an older guy sitting next to me, who had obviously seen a lot of New Zealand rugby. His explanation was the crowd was nervous, worried at the start Australia might win.
It's a slightly different approach than most crowds in the States. In the year I've been in New Zealand, the All Blacks haven't lost a match, but the tone of coverage is always "well, yes, they won but...": the stars didn't play as well as expected, a segment of the game didn't look polished, a player is injured, the lineup still isn't settled. Something.

You get that in the States, too. But I think the approach in the States is "we expect our team to win, and if it doesn't, or look like it might lose at some point in the future, we're angry about it."
The approach here seems more like "we're happy our team is winning and we know it's one of the best in the world, but I just don't know if they can keep this up. There - see that? I told you we couldn't keep it up. I knew we couldn't really be that good this year."