The All Blacks went down, all hail Basic Cable! [updated]

Yeah, you heard right. The vaunted All Blacks took a nose­dive against the hosts, the French. And I saw it all on the most basic cable pack­age we can get.

Due to my, um, inabil­ity to find a job, we have cut back on a few things we don’t really need. Our mega cable pack­age was one of them. (It wasn’t that mega, it was the min­i­mum required to get HD chan­nels, though they are now gone, too.) I am left with the net­works (we get two sets here, one from each of the two cities nearby), weather, CNN, a bunch of local access chan­nels, ESPN (and ESPN2, my col­lege bas­ket­ball watch­ing is safe!) and then some­thing called Versus.

Ver­sus is, as best I can tell with­out going to their web site (why ruin the fun) an all-day Mid­west­ern men’s chan­nel. If you kill it for sport, there’s a show on Ver­sus about it. But there seems to be another cat­e­gory too: if it is even remotely clas­si­fied as a manly sport, and nobody else car­ries it, you can find it on Versus.

Thus, I am catch­ing occa­sional games from the Rugby World Cup, going on now in France.

Today, I watched (TiVo-delayed and in extreme fast-forward) the host French play New Zealand (called the All Blacks for their uni­forms). This is a single-elimination round, and the All Blacks were sup­posed to roundly trounce the French. But they did not. The French held on for a win with some excel­lent play.

And this despite the (now embar­rass­ing) dis­play of New Zealand tribal bug eyes and grunt­ing chants the All Blacks play­ers deliv­ered when the two teams lined up before the game. At the time it seemed all cool, and freaky, and scary and for­eign… now it just seems silly.

Update: Some peo­ple might get the impres­sion that I am dis­re­spect­ing the tra­di­tion of the All Black’s Haka (a form of the tra­di­tional Maori dance). Quite the oppo­site. I love the All Blacks, but think that the French, in this game, stood up to them toe-to-toe dur­ing the per­for­mance, and then proved it dur­ing the game. As noted in the Wikipedia, “Most recently, France famously wore the blue/white/red of the French flag and walked up to within a meter of the Haka per­for­mance, form­ing a line of patri­otic oppo­si­tion to the per­for­mance. They went on to defeat the All-Blacks 20–18.” While all the YouTube videos of this actual per­for­mance have been removed at the request of the Rugby World Cup, here is one of a match between New Zealand and France from 2006, in French, with French subtitles.

I am, of course, root­ing for Argentina to win it all. They are still in it, and Ver­sus is plan­ning on giv­ing me one of the semi­fi­nal matches (teams TBA) and the final, sev­eral hours delayed, of course. I hope it is the Argentina v. RSA game.