Rugby: Closest rivalry turns bitter

Relationships between the All Blacks and Wallabies camps have become increasingly strained over the past couple of years. Photo / Getty Images

Once the team the All Blacks disliked more than any other, England have long ceased to be "pricks to lose to," as Andrew Mehrtens so famously said.

The culture of arrogance fostered during the Will Carling era in the late 1980s and early 1990s has been eroded in recent years by the lack of success.

These days the English players, if anything, are hampered by the reverence and awe in which they hold the All Blacks.

Despite the idiotic comments by England's defence coach Mike Ford about Tri Nations not being "proper test match rugby", there is mutual respect among the players; the All Blacks are conscious of England's set piece and physical excellence; the English respectful of the high skill levels and pace with which the All Blacks play.

While relations are greatly improved, there is still an element of the All Blacks being made to feel like the colonial underclass whenever they play at Twickenham.

"I haven't lost at Twickenham and even when you win, when you sit through the after-match speeches, you often feel you have lost given some of the things that are said. You don't want to be on the losing side," says Mils Muliaina.

"There is a little bit of them seeing us as a small country from a long way away. But we are not easily intimidated."

The All Black players accept that the parts of the Twickenham experience which set teeth on edge are driven by the wider administration. The brandy-swilling, blazer-wearing official has proven a surprisingly resilient beast, even in the professional era. Rather than take offence, most of the All Blacks seem to be able to absorb these relics of the amateur code and almost marvel at their hideously out-of-touch views.

With England now gripped by a culture of humility, the team that the All Blacks have come to dislike losing to more than any other is probably the Wallabies.

The foundation of mutual respect between the players just isn't there and, in the last 12 months, an element of bitterness, almost nastiness, has brewed among the Australian team.

That undercurrent of disdain was seen in Hong Kong in the final seconds of the game. After James O'Connor dotted down for his crucial try, Quade Cooper took the opportunity to gloat in the most unbecoming way. He shoved Richie McCaw over, blasting a mouthful of invective in the process.

"Richie was on his hands and knees and he [Cooper] pushed him over and gave him a bit of an ear filling. I suppose you don't really appreciate things like that," says Muliaina. "I pushed him [Cooper] out of the way and gave him a bit which, looking back, I suppose I shouldn't have done."

The incident with Cooper will only further estrange the two sets of players - the drift beginning in 2008 when the All Blacks were incensed by Lote Tuqiri and Matt Dunning.

After the Wallabies won the first Bledisloe of the season in Sydney that year, both Tuqiri and Dunning goaded the All Blacks by saying the Australians would win all four.

Those comments became a big part of the All Black build-up in the Eden Park rematch a week later.

As it turned out, Tuqiri and Dunning couldn't have been more wrong, with the All Blacks winning the next 10 encounters. As the winning streak continued, relations deteriorated, which was in stark contrast with the South Africans.

The Boks, despite appearances to the contrary, are in fact the team with whom the All Blacks have most in common and the players are close.

"There definitely is [a close bond]," says Muliaina of the relationship between the All Black players and Springbok players.

"They are the easiest guys to get on with. They love mixing it up on the field but after the game we get on really well with them. We go into their changing rooms and they are the first to come into ours. There is that mutual respect."

The strong bonds forged with the Boks only exacerbated the distance that has grown between the Wallabies and All Blacks. "A couple of times we invited them [Wallabies] in but they had other things they had to go to," says Muliaina.

The rivalry now has an edge it hasn't had since Phil Kearns gave Sean Fitzpatrick the fingers in 1990. For the first few days in London, the All Blacks were clearly still reeling from defeat in Hong Kong.

The loss of their consecutive record obviously hurt. The lapses in their own performance hurt too.

But what was hardest to shake was the fact they had lost to a group of players they really aren't all that keen on.