KEY POINTS:
Comments comparing the All Black's changing room after their World Cup loss with World War I trenches, were taken out of context, Anton Oliver has said.
The All Black hooker wrote to the Listener in response to a column by Bill Ralston sub-headed "Compare Cardiff with Passchendaele? Oh, take a big cup of shut up, Anton!"
In the letter - published in the magazine's November 3 edition - Oliver said comparing sport with war was absurd and deeply disrespectful and he had made "no such literal comparison".
"[Ralston] chose to isolate one sentence of a metaphor and failed to give the context," he said.
After the All Blacks' loss to France, Oliver was interviewed by former 1999 World Cup team-mate Andrew Mehrtens on TV3.
He told Mehrtens: "I have just finished reading Massacre at Passchendaele and also All Quiet on the Western Front, and in both of those books they describe no man's land quite clearly and vividly," Oliver said.
"And that is what it felt like in the players' changing room and in their hearts and minds. It feels desolate, decay, the putrid smell of, I don't know, death.
"That is a bit dramatic but you kind of know what I mean.
"It is just nothing, and no man's land is a place where nothing exists and that is what's happening, that is what it feels like."
In his article, Ralston highlighted Oliver's "It feels desolate, decay, the putrid smell of, I don't know, death" comment.
He wrote: "Oh, take a big cup of shut up, Anton! Passchendaele was this tiny country's worst military disaster. In a single day, thousands of Kiwi soldiers were killed or maimed. You simply lost a footie match and a $100,000 bonus."
Oliver (of St Bathans, Otago) told the Listener he had simply been trying to convey the atmosphere in the changing room during his interview with Mehrtens.
"Collectively, we truly believed we could win, that we were going to win, that the rotation policy, the conditioning window and the on-field tactics would see us victorious," he wrote.
"After 80 minutes, it turns out we were wrong. In our shed, silence reverberated, broken only by the wails of a few who couldn& 39;t internalise in solitude any longer. I was trying to help people understand what it was like, what it felt like."
Addressing Ralston personally, he added "But then, Bill, how could you possibly know indeed, how will you ever know?"
- NZHERALD STAFF
