The Last Word: Hoping for a miracle

• One shot for glory
I honestly can't recall getting this excited about a football game not involving Liverpool since I played in goal for the Oamaru Under-11s 21 years ago.

It's a massive night for New Zealand football - for all of us - as the All Whites chase the dream of World Cup qualification against Bahrain.

You can keep your Tri-Nations and your twenty/20s and your grand finals.

Ninety minutes in Wellington tonight will define the New Zealand sporting year, and possibly next year as well.

We're a minnow in world football terms but, just like the Tall Blacks shocked the basketball world with their semifinal placing at the 2002 world championships in Indianapolis, so too can the All Whites make some waves in a global game.

If the miracle happens? Everything changes.

Test rugby goes from being merely routine to mind-numbingly boring.

Football - NEW ZEALAND football - becomes sexy again.

Ryan Nelsen, Shane Smeltz and Ivan Vicelich get their dues.

And the men of 1982 get to be remembered as the first, not the only, All Whites to reach the World Cup.

• NZRU wastes opportunity
What an exciting time it is to be a Southland rugby supporter.

Your beloved Stags won the Ranfurly Shield for the first time in 50 years and also reached the national semifinals, and your province is spewing out homegrown talent faster than the Tiwai smelter blows smoke.

Southland has also had a record 11 players named in the Highlanders.

All the exciting new Highlanders are Southland men.

The captain, All Black halfback Jimmy Cowan, is also a Southlander.

Not unreasonably, you dared to hope the Highlanders might launch the 2010 season in Invercargill, perhaps with the Ranfurly Shield in the background.

Capitalise on the feelgood factor and all that.

So where does the NZRU decide the Highlanders squad will be named?Auckland.

Words fail me. As they do when I consider the following questions:

1. There are three first fives in the All Black squad. Is it ideal that two of them are in the Chiefs?

2. How has Taniela Moa gone from being invited to All Black training camp to not being considered one of the top 10 halfbacks in the country?

3. Does Matt Berquist really offer much more than Glenn Dickson?

4. Same question but insert names "Bronson Murray" and "Ben Nolan".

5. Can the addition of Barry Matthews to the coaching staff allow us to use the phrase "North Otago mafia"?

6. What's the minimum number of wins we can EXPECT from the Highlanders next year: five, six or seven?

• Gatland is aura-ful
Of all the rubbish that chundered out of Warren Gatland's mouth in the days leading up the test between Wales and the All Blacks, one comment was particularly pointless.

As pretty much every northern hemisphere rugby coach, rugby player and rugby writer has done over the last decade, Gatland claimed playing the All Blacks was nothing special any more.

"They've lost their aura," he droned.

Well duh. The All Blacks now play 13-16 times a year. They're on TV constantly.

And, like everything on the planet, they're two clicks of a mouse button away on something called the internet that has made the world a small place.

Have the All Blacks lost their aura? Absolutely.

But name me one other team/place/person that has such a thing these days.

Wales still lost, by the way.

• Sandy Kerr mystery
Dedicated Otago University rugby historian Hugh Tohill has helped solve the mystery of Alex "Sandy" Kerr and his supposed education at Abbotsford School.

Kerr was, in fact, enrolled at Green Island School - twice, on October 23, 1876 and on January 7, 1881.

Tohill tells me Kerr left school on April 28, 1882, aged 11.

Abbotsford School can therefore claim its first All Black in the early hours of tomorrow morning when Ben Smith plays against Italy.

• The Arm of Roger
They wear pink and they have names like Anf, Samoa and Scoonzy.

They are the intriguingly named Arm of Roger, a Dunedin-based team in futsal, the indoor football-ish game that has taken off in recent years.

Arm of Roger captain Richard McDonald tells me his team wears pink because "it brings out the colour of our eyes.

Plus none of the other men's teams wear pink, so we don't need an alternate strip".

And the name? "It comes from a fake obscure folk band. A real band named Grandaddy made a fake band [Arm of Roger] to play rubbish music just for fun. We can relate to this."

The team has a Facebook page (225 fans) and the gift of the gab - one of the players boldly extended an invite to Peter Chin to present new pink tops to the team, and the mayor accepted.

• Honour for Seve
The great Seve Ballesteros earned another special honour this week, AFP reports.

Ballesteros accepted an honorary membership of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews.

The Spanish star won the British Open on the Old Course in 1984, when his fist-pumping celebration of a birdie putt on the final hole to claim his second Claret Jug made him famous across the world.

Ballesteros, who is recovering from brain surgery, won a third British Open in 1988 and became the first European to win the Masters in 1980, an achievement he repeated in 1983.

• Tri time
The folks down in the Catlins were delighted with the inaugural Tri (as in triathlon) Pounawea last weekend.

Nearly 160 multisporters took part, with a triathlon including a 500m swim in the Pounawea Estuary, a 24km lakeside cycle and a 6km run, and a duathlon consisting of a 3.5km run, 24km lakeside ride and 6km run.

Rob Creasy and Samantha Thompson, both of Christchurch, won the major races.

• Jumping up and down
The best female ski jumpers in the world have been back in court this week in a final bid for inclusion in the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Fourteen competitors were at the Court of Appeal in British Columbia claiming the Vancouver organising committee was discriminating against them by not staging women's ski jumping.

Their case was heard at the Supreme Court in July, when the presiding judge agreed the omission of women's ski jumping was discriminatory but it was the International Olympic Committee's fault and it was not subject to Canadian human rights law.

I'm not quite sure what Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards thinks of all this.

hayden.meikle@odt.co.nz