Bowling the enemy with the national anthem

Doug Laing, staff reporter, Hawke's Bay Today.

It was "botched" and it was a "massacre".

Such words are not uncommon in the journalistic descriptive of major sports events, but this time the ball hadn't even been kicked-off.

That was yesterday's rugby league match between the Kiwis and England in the unlikely location of Denver, Colorado, chosen because it will host the Rugby League World Cup in 2025.

Just as well it's seven years away, because that means there's plenty of time for singer Crystal Collins to learn the words of the New Zealand national anthem, which she cringe-worthily botched and massacred beforehand.

No surprise that it was soon going viral, just as it would have gone back in 1999 had going-viral been available when Hinewehi Mohi, of our very own Ngati Kahungunu and St Joseph's Maori Girls College, sang the anthem in Maori at the Rugby World Cup in England.

It "shocked" us, it was reported at the time.

These two events have done more than just about anything else to expose to the world a national anthem which but for Mohi's indulgence could have been sunk as quite forgettable, and certainly not the motivational tool that anthems have generally become as a preface to international sportsfield combat.

Ordinarily, God Defend New Zealand sounds almost like a dirge compared with some of the other national anthems of the globe, as shown just the night before the Denver massacre.

When lined-up against La Marseillaise before the All Blacks played France in Dunedin our anthem just wasn't really in the contest.

La Marseillaise is among the great ones, the point highlighted by the fact that while most of us have no idea what the words mean we do know what a lot of them are, we can pronounce them, and we know the tune.

Army engineer Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle wrote it in 1792, during the French revolutionary wars, as a marching song, with lyrics that have been described as "bloodthirsty" and evoking images of cutting enemy throats.

For more reasons than just one, it's just as well we have the haka, and our rugby's usually better than the anthem.