Paul Lewis: Only 10 words for English media

This week, a journalist from the LA Times, writing about a new book called Are Men Really Necessary?, advanced the theory that she only needed 10 words to successfully communicate with men. Of course, they were all caveman-grunt, one-syllable words and were a bit of a laugh.

We blokes are indulgent with such fancies. We know it is a female way of striking back at supposed male superiority. We know - and I base this on 20 years of living in an otherwise all-female house - that we are indispensable when it comes to taking the rubbish out and setting the timer recording on the video recorder.

But we are far less indulgent of the English when it comes to playing them at rugby or reading their reviews of same. I fear there are way too many New Zealanders with a jaundiced view of the English, formed, unfortunately, through their rugby media.

Almost every time we play England, we are incensed anew by their errant media, who seem never to have heard of credit where it's due. Part of it has to do with shameless, froth-at-the-mouth, wind-up merchants like the acerbic super-patriot Stephen Jones (who is actually Welsh but you'd never know it).

Jones' style is to seize on a concept that the English love and the Kiwis hate. Hence: the All Black forwards still have "a soft underbelly" and Jerry Collins is still "one-dimensional".

Jones has the same debating style as zealots everywhere - he repeats the same thing over and over again until a sizeable percentage of the audience think it's fact and/or those with opposing viewpoints give up and drift off to do something more pleasant, like firing a stapler gun into their temples.

It's when they play the All Blacks that the English most lose sight of reason, for some reason. That's why otherwise much-respected writers like the Telegraph's Paul Ackford come up with the complete cobblers of his analysis of the All Black win last week. Read the beginning of Ackford's piece and there is encapsulated the piercing angst of England rugby over the last 50 years - so big, so strong, so few wins over the ABs.

There it was - the heroic defeat. The sport at which England leads the world. The Dunkirk spirit. New Zealand had won but England could hold their heads high. England outgunned NZ up front, said Ackford. The All Blacks had leapt high at the final whistle in relief (it couldn't have been triumph, could it, triumph at beating a worthy foe and a referee who seemed to have taken too many party pills?)

We all react less than indulgently. Yet there is no need. We adopt the pose of injured colonials but we too could use just 10 words to communicate with England re rugby: We. Are. Better. At. Playing. Rugby. And. Always. Have. Been.

Rugby is maybe the sole area of our existence where we can be like this to the Mother Country. And they don't like it. It explains the fuss in the English media about the haka. There's little or no concern from the Celtic nations, who understand only too well the importance of an independent culture.

If you sit in a press box at Twickenham and watch the combined ethos of the English press corps at work, it is eye-opening. So much angst, so much alignment with the national side, so little objective assessment. If they don't win the match, they can still indulge in fanciful analysis and the audience-pleasing needs of their circulation.

Ackford's piece was an aberration. He is a writer whose material I normally enjoy as it has a hard edge and a sense of reality about it. But we in New Zealand need to stop biting down so hard when we see articles like this and Jones' ongoing seizures.

We just need to pat them on their metaphorical heads and send them out in the garden to play, mentally running over our 10-word vocabulary. That's what mature societies do.

Seek out an objective English view of the match instead - there are plenty of them, like Tim Glover's piece in the Independent on Sunday. It captured the undeniable effort and physicality of the England forwards but also made the telling point that their backs wouldn't have scored a try even if referee Alan Lewis - he's got more cards than Hallmark - had sent off the whole All Black pack for blinking too much and if they'd distracted the All Blacks by setting Tony Blair on fire on halfway.

When I lived in Britain, I played in the same rugby team as Glover, or TG, as he is known. TG is undeniably Welsh, not some kind of English-accented ersatz Welshman like Jones. He also had a touching belief that he was the latest in a long line of Welsh fly-halves from the famous "factory".

I played in one match with TG where he insisted on deploying an irritating little dink kick aimed just behind the opposing backline. We all told him it was crap but he insisted on pulling it anyway - and dinked it gently into the arms of the opposition winger who promptly rocketed 70m for a try under the bar. All the way back to the goal-line, TG harangued us on the defensive failings of our back row.

So, even TG is no stranger to delusion then. But his match analysis stayed well within the acceptable limits of the definition of the word "analysis".

You see, after nearly four years of playing rugby in England, I can exclusively reveal that the English are a great lot - full of fun, they love their rugby and are not slow to deprecate themselves. It would be a shame if our view of them was forever coloured by media slanting.