The way it ought to be!

All roads lead to Wanganui on Saturday.
Literally hundreds of Wairarapa-Bush rugby supporters will be making the journey to help their team celebrate the winning of the inaugural Heartland championship
At just after 4pm skipper Joe Harwood will shake hands with legendary All Black Colin Meads and lift the Meads Cup above his head, a signal that a hugely successful 2006 season has come to a memorable end.
And on the other side of the coin will be the Wanganui players slumped over in the dejection of defeat and their hordes of supporters returning glumly to their homes with their tails firmly between their legs.
Victory will not have come easily though.
Wanganui are a feisty outfit with size and mobility up front and outside backs who had run in a string of spectacular tries in earlier Heartland games.
The sort of team which given an inch will always take a mile.
Problem for them is this time they weren't up against a side about to make things easy for them.
That herculean defensive effort by Wairarapa-Bush over the closing 10 minutes of their semi-final with North Otago will have been a portent of things to come.
Wanganui's big men would have constantly looked to barge them way through and over their Wairarapa-Bush counterparts only to have just as constantly had their heads buried in the dirt by opponents with names like Iro, Henderson, Robinson and Spence.
Same with their flash backs.
No dancing feet, clever little swerves or dummies from them as they were unmercifully hammered by Couch and Simanu,
And anyway even the cleverest of backs can't do much without the ball, can they?
A Wairarapa-Bush scrum spearheaded by one of the unsung heroes in their line-up, a bloke called Higgison, along with less experienced but still very rugged customers in Harwood and Buckle, would have slowly but surely battered their opponents into submission.
Same in the lineout. Wanganui have some tall timber there and they would have been a nuisance but when push came to shove the cunning and athleticism of Robinson and Kedarabuka was always likely to give them the edge.
And we should never have worried either, should we, at the ability of our loosies to dominate ball at the breakdown, make life an absolute misery for the opposing inside backs and star in several rampaging bursts in broken play.
I mean no other loose trio had come even close to matching them
so why should we have been the least concerned about Wanganui's obviously over-rated loosies making a go of it.
We can admit to a slight doubt though about the option taking of our backs but there too the sharp improvement in the semi-final should have told us any problems in that area had been rectified.
Halfback McKenzie and first-five Rimene aren't exactly newcomers on the rep scene and temperament can be a huge asset in an important occasion like a grand final. Cool heads are required then and we had just the men for the job in that respect, didn't we?
And if us Wairarapa-Bush supporters are still getting used to outside backs with names like Togia, Seumanutata and Lafaele the fact they had starred in the cauldron of Wellington club rugby should have told us that when tries were there to be scored, well, they would score them.
We should have known too that the biggest obstacle to success would be the bloody referee.
How often in previous Heartland games had we been on the receiving end of hefty penalty counts when we, in fact, had played like little angels and the opposition had broken every law in the book
So many times you started to wonder if we hadn't paid up the gold watches and other expensive jewellery which apparently entices referees to colour their decisions?if you know what I mean.
But fortunately for the ref we didn't need to slam him on this occasion.More a case of patting him on the head, telling him you hope his eyesight improves after treatment and buying him a beer
And then let the celebrations begin?????