Paul Lewis: Lay out welcome mat for the lions

When looking ahead to the year of sport in 2005, I hope we live up to the standard set by our transtasman cousins at the 2003 Rugby World Cup.

There is no sporting assignment bigger than the Lions rugby tour - an event which approximates the interest and atmosphere of tours of yesteryear, rather than today's comparatively quick-fire and characterless affairs. But the Lions tour worries me.

I worry that we - New Zealand and particularly Auckland - won't be the perfect hosts. Let me explain.

I was lucky enough to be in Australia for the 2003 Rugby World Cup, in Melbourne and Sydney, and I don't think anyone could've done it better. Even in Melbourne, where they are more likely to think about quantum physics than rugby, the city was galvanised.

It was all to do with the Australian response to their visitors. The Scots, Irish, Welsh and English supporters transformed the towns. They were everywhere - they sang, they chanted, they took the mickey out of passing Australians, they colonised sections of town and they were vastly entertaining. Except when the sun came out and all manner of pale legs and oval midriffs were exposed. It looked like a convention of giant plucked chickens.

It was good fun, good craic, as they say in Ireland, and dominated by good humour and friendly rivalry. The comparisons with soccer's exaggerated tribalism and hooliganism were as inevitable as they were stark.

No-one went mad, there were very few fights or other disturbances, there was some drunkenness but few of the distasteful public displays normally associated with over-sampling.

The Australians took their cue from the visiting Brits and were superb hosts. Australians can be among the most prickly and nationalistic of people - particularly when it comes to "Poms". But they somehow registered, on a national scale, the friendliness and good fun of the invading army of barmy Brits and responded in kind. The Australians as a host nation and as welcoming individuals, were quite simply outstanding.

I ended up in a Darling Harbour bar on my own after the All Blacks' execrable semi-final loss to Australia. The friends I was with were in mourning and had decided not to take refuge in late night pursuits. I ordered a beer, surveyed the crowd and bumped into a guy who spilled his drink. I offered to replace it, he grinned at me and said: "There's plenty more where that came from, mate" and dragged me into a huge circle of Australians and Brits, many of whom had just met each other and were exchanging good-natured insults and rounds of drinks.

I was reminded of a visit to Cardiff during an All Blacks test. After the game and a resounding victory, a Welsh friend took us to what he said was the only Welsh-speaking pub in Cardiff - and therefore a highly nationalistic environment. I struggled to the bar, ordered the first drinks and, as I put my hand in pocket to pay, a great hairy paw grabbed my arm and trapped my hand. "Where are you from?" a gravelly Welsh voice inquired. Here we go, I thought, preparing for the worst. He looked like a cross between Tom Jones after a five-day bender and the side of a mountain.

Once he'd established I was a Kiwi - or more particularly, was not English - he insisted on buying the round and he, then his friends and then the rest of the pub insisted on coming over to our table, hugely entertaining us and buying us drink upon drink. We ended up not buying a drink in a very long and hospitable night and singing songs in Welsh which we later discovered were anthems to the joy of burning down English holiday homes in Wales ... but that's another story.

And that's what I worry about, you see. I worry that we Kiwis will not be as good at being hosts. We can be a bit intense, sometimes, can't we? We take our rugby seriously and we can take our rivalries seriously too - especially where the Northern Hemisphere is concerned. We are sometimes bad losers. We can get a bit parochial, a bit, well, small.

New Zealand used to be regarded as an excellent rugby tour because of the friendliness of the people. I hope we haven't lost that.

Anyway, that's my New Year resolution. I want to be a good host to our visitors and treat them with the same good humour that they will bring here. I hope you do too.