Claire Harvey: Please, let's not bring on the dancing girls

Now that New Zealand has won the right to host Rugby World Cup 2011, there is a very important question to keep us lying awake at night.

Are the organisers of the opening ceremony going to humiliate the nation?

Opening ceremonies for sporting tournaments are quite intriguing events, unlike anything else one might encounter in normal life. Enormously expensive and always planned in top secrecy, opening ceremonies bring together diverse entertainment genres including pantomime, tampon advertisement and Nuremberg Rally.

At best, they can be an exquisitely specialised form of gymnastic nationalism, where dancing children act out every conceivable patriotic cliche and Tourist Board marketing gimmick.

It's fun watching the crowds assembled for an opening ceremony - the audience members who smile and laugh and clap along with the music are the foreigners. The ones who groan, wince, blush bright red and try to hide behind a plastic cup of beer are the locals.

Please, please, let the 2011 World Cup opening ceremony contain no choirs of children, no children dancing with ribbons around a rugby-themed maypole, no children passing sacred flames to light the eternal cauldron of rugby, no 40,000-child haka, no children marching in a North Korean-style baton display.

Let's have an adults-only opening ceremony, and confine the children to their proper roles: selling $12 hot dogs at the concession stands for minimum wages or sitting with their families in the stands and sneaking sips from Dad's beer.

For the World Cup is a wonderful opportunity for New Zealand - perhaps not as big as the Olympics, but better in many ways. It will undoubtedly be well organised, and should bring us all the advantages of hosting a major international sporting event; fantastic public transport, clean streets, new public toilets, revamped motorways and lots of tourists, both now and in future.

The best part is there will be none of the quasi-religious sentimentality that goes with the Olympics; the International Olympic Committee's misty poetics about how "Olympism" is a "movement" which transcends business, entertainment and sport to unite the world in peace and love.

Speaking of unity and love, the unsuccessful Japanese bid committee is squalling that by giving the event to New Zealand, the fools of the International Rugby Board have recklessly squandered an opportunity to convert the entire world to rugby.

New Zealanders shouldn't feel guilty for a minute; the last World Cup failed to even convert Melbourne to rugby.

In the spirit of sharing the great game, the Australian Rugby Union thought it would be great to stage some 2003 World Cup games in Melbourne in the hope of showing Victorians that there is more than one way to kick a football. It didn't work. The All Blacks encamped in Melbourne for six weeks before and during the tournament and they were completely ignored by the locals.

In a phenomenon at once humorous and bemusing, the superstars of international rugby wandered the streets of Melbourne without attracting a second glance. The All Blacks dined at shopping mall food courts, went to the art gallery and shopped with joyous anonymity.

Winger Caleb Ralph, who is world-famous enough to have dated a member of the British Royal Family, got his legs waxed at a central city beauty salon, where the beautician asked him what he did for a living. She was impressed when he said, "I play football" - until she realised that he was not with one of the local Aussie Rules teams, whereupon her interest waned completely.

A sports journalist friend related the story of spotting Tana Umaga and Doug Howlett at the movies in inner-city Toorak. There they were, just quietly lining up to buy their tickets and snacks, apparently enjoying the sensation of blending in with a crowd.

In most other cities in the rugby-playing world, roaming All Blacks would be mobbed by schoolgirls or heckled by drunks as soon as they left the team hotel. In Melbourne, they didn't even get priority service in the popcorn queue.

Of course, part of the explanation is that World Cup 2003 began just a week after the Australian Football League Grand Final, an annual event that turns all of Melbourne, especially grannies and toddlers, into bloodthirsty barrackers in striped scarves.

As far as Victorians are concerned, a bunch of meaty fellows grinding shoulders with one another doesn't even belong in the same sporting category as the airborne acrobatics of Australian Rules.

Melbourne taxi drivers could be heard gently correcting World Cup tourists who said they were there for "the football" that they must be mistaken. "The Grand Final's already been and gone, love."

Admittedly, the Japanese may have found it easier to captivate their local audiences, considering that unlike Victorians, the average Japanese person is probably already aware that rugby is something more than a posh school in England.

But the Japanese can come and watch the World Cup here in Aotearoa, along with all the other international sports fans. The tourists will love every minute - especially the opening ceremony.