Why I won’t cheer for the All Whites
Arriba Peru. That’s right, I will be there, at Westpac Stadium, cheering for La Blanquirroja. I will be waving my inflatable llama in the air and bobbing up and down to the drumbeats of Alex Acuna. And I’m taking the whole family. And I hope they cheer along for Peru too.
Yes, I have failed the immigrant test, the famous measure of patriotism that Norman Tebbit came up with in ‘80s Britain to decry folk from Asia and the Caribbean who used to go to the Oval and Headingley and barrack for the West Indies, India and Pakistan. It just wasn’t British, said the Chingford Skinhead.
And maybe giving my favours to Peru just isn’t Kiwi, although in a way it is. You see I was planning to get behind the All Whites. I was hoping that Winston Reid, Tommy Smith, Michael Boxall and Themistokolis Tzimopolous would park the bus and frustrate the hell out of the Latins. I was hoping a crazy moment from Ryan Thomas, Marco Rojas and Chris Wood might somehow confuse the ball into going into the Peruvian net.
And then I would be in the midst of a country up on their feet. We would be going to Russia together. Mmm, yes, well, forget that last bit. We would all be going to the World Cup finals together. We would celebrate Tzimo’s hummus and rhyme it with Thomas and make up songs to sing long into the night and whirl our white shirts above our head.
And then Andy Martian, the man from another planet, the head of New Zealand Football, told us that he hoped the supporters made life hell for Peru. He wants us to be hooligans. He wants us to rattle their team bus and refuse to serve them coffee.
I won’t repeat everything that the Martian said, but here’s the gist; ‘‘It will be hostile, the hotel will be noisy and disruptive, all of those things we know happen in South America. So what we’ve got to think about is what can we do in New Zealand, as a country, to make sure this team know they’re coming into a battle.
‘‘It’s not about welcoming them into New Zealand for a great experience and a football extravaganza, this is about them coming into our home, and we’re going to make life as difficult for them as possible for them to perform.
‘‘This game is almost like a war, really. This is somebody coming to take away our prize, US$10 million (NZ$13.9m) changes the nature of the game of football in New Zealand over the next five years and Peru are coming to take that away from us, so what are we going to do to stop them? We’ll do everything we can on the field, but what can you do it off it?’’
Well, I’m not sure about that last ‘we’, Andy, because God help New Zealand if you’re on the pitch. But are you mad? Presumably if you’d be in charge of Allied troops in the Second World War you would have told them to behave like the Gestapo. But this isn’t war. And it matters a hell of a lot more to them than us. We can be kind, we can be welcoming, we can be Kiwi, just like we were at the Rugby World Cup and on the Lions tour.
Football is Peru’s game. And they have been through 30 years of agony. They call themselves the kings of the choke, the South American Chicago Cubs. All they have is