We lost 24-10. Fairly boring game to be honest and the atmosphere (if you can use that word) was absolutely dead. Give me a football game any day.
The start was pretty cool though was it was the 'Centenary Test' (ie, 100 years since they first played each othere) so the festivities etc were pretty good. The crowd was as expected really. NZ is the only country I've seen live (and I've been to international sporting events in other countries) or on TV who boo and shout obscenities through opposition national anthems. We'd bought our food before finding our seats and the girlfriend said "I'm putting my food on the ground cos its disrespectful to eat during a national anthem." So in response to the treatment of our anthem I ate my burger through the NZ one. Not that anyone saw or gave a sh*t but it made me feel good.
As for the game, England were absolutely abysmal for an hour. Think the only time we had the ball over the half way line was in the first minute because they kicked off, and a Kiwi player broke his arm making a tackle. Not that we saw it as a group of about 10 people turned up to climb their way through our row to their seats. Only knew it had happened because a guy behind us had headphones in with the commentary and said "sounds like he's broken his arm." We were 10 metres out from Englands try line about 8 rows from the front so were pretty close to all the first half action.
Amazing we went into half time only 12-0 down with only 2 tries in it. Spotted ourselves on the screen at half time too. Quickly became 18-0 in the 2nd half and I thought it would end up about 30-0. Then suddenly we got up their end and scored a try. Then straight from the restart got a breakaway and scored a length of the field effort. The try scorer shanked his simple conversion which would have put us just a converted try back and made it interesting. Then we seemed to have scored again only for the video ref to disallow it for a pretty soft push. Then they went straight up the other end and scored another 2 to finish it off.
Australia should thrash us by much more next week.
One thing I don't really understand is why NZ were allowed to play with 1 extra player. Reuben Wiki (NZ legend recently retired) was the 'waterboy' or whatever they call the guy who runs on with the drinks, but he was on the field almost the entire game. Every time they had the ball he was on the pitch 5m behind the team directing the play and effectively captaining the team. He went off the pitch when we had the ball, presumably because it would illegal if he somehow got in the way of the actual play. But I just don't understand why he was allowed to be on the pitch captaining the team when they had the ball.
