KEY POINTS:
I suspect it is my brief to tease you. To remind you that World Cups away from your shores are not exactly your thing.
Great bears of the forest that you are, how is it that you fear no one, yet always find a thorn to stand on? I suspect that is the sort of thing expected of me.
Heaven forbid. For skittishness before the big event you need look no further than Wales.
To lose by 60 points to England in the first warm-up game of the August series was like looking forward to a giant platter of "fruits de mer" on a promenade of the Med and finding yourself instead supping on a bucket of cold sick.
To England, of all people. I ask you. It put us as high in the world rankings as the Liechenstein B XV. Okay, so we then beat Argentina. But that was touch and go against their C team.
And then we lost to France. To be honest, they were contemptuously good. I think three of them broke into a sweat on the hour. The rest of them polished their nails and swatted aside the occasional red shirt.
No, we don't do teasing in Wales. Instead, deep in our misery - and if there were a World Cup in breast-beating we would be such multiple champions they would simply give us the trophy to keep - we have swapped pondering on the fact that everybody can now beat us for a serious study of who might actually beat the best. It's the game of diverting depression.
So, who can beat you? Well, there's always France. Hell, it's their backyard and what you did to them there last November seems to have stung them into action. It's called peaking at the right time. Which brings us back to the All Blacks, and being too good too soon ... No, no, that's unnecessary.
And there's always Australia, who - as you know better than anyone - don't have the hang-up about the All Blacks, the institutional sense of wonder that can paralyse us up here.
And when it comes to stepping up for competition on the grand scale, the Aussies do seem to have patented the formula for leaving nerves behind.
Which may not be the case everywhere ... no, no, there we go again.
And you might have to beware of Ireland. We did chuckle when we found out it was a Kiwi who clouted Brian O'Driscoll in Ireland's warm-up brawl in Bayonne. It sort of reveals that behind a stony exterior, there might be a more vulnerable indiscipline, the sort of waywardness that might send a pocket of Kiwis out on a late-night drinking spree.
We value human frailty in Wales, but know that it can lead to strong people doing strange things under pressure. Who would have thought that in 2003 ... no, no, I was going to say something cruel.
At least it means you will have to be careful in the final, the semifinal and the quarter. Where you will be able to relax - as if - and enjoy yourselves against Portugal.
I mention The Wolves (Os Lobos) because I was forced to go and meet them only last week. Tough assignment. Venice, on a summer's day when the crowds had started to thin, the day before they played up the road in Mogliano-Veneto, and lost (13-15) to John Kirwan's Japan.
Nobody will be more serene at the World Cup than the Portuguese. They are like lightweight boxers who are looking forward to their shot at the title.
That is, against Romania. But who first have to go to the dentist (Scotland), the saw-bones who operates without anaesthetic (Italy), and go 12 rounds, bare-knuckle, with the biggest gypsy on the camp-site (you).
I don't know if they still light a flame in the churches of Lisbon for souls to be protected, but there aren't enough humpbacks left in the oceans to provide the blubber for candles that might keep Os Lobos out of harm's way.
They know it's going to hurt but have reached that state of mind where they are beyond pain. They feel connected to you. If you bored a hole from New Zealand through the core of the earth and out the other side, you would re-surface in Portugal. So, go easy you lot, or you will start to earn yourselves a reputation as a nation that has no compassion, that takes its rugby too seriously. No, no ...
* Eddie Butler is a former Wales and Lions international who now writes for the Observer
