Last night's Melbourne Rebels vs. Wellington Hurricanes Super 15 match was one of the most amazing games of Rugby I've ever been to in my life. The Rebels had been absolutely hammered by Queensland last week, 53-3, and last night when they were down 17-0 to the Hurricanes after only 17 minutes, having been absolutely abysmal in defence, it looked like it was going to be more of the same. But then . . . they started to get some ball. They started to get territory. They started to get a bit of continuity. Their forwards started to assert themselves. They scored a try. And another. And another - and amazingly, at half-time, their English flyhalf Danny Cipriani kicked a penatly goal from near the halfway line to make tie the score up, 20-20.
The half-time break didn't slow them down at all, and they scored three more tries in the second half, never looking back and never taking their foot off the throttle until they had the game well and truly, and unbelievably, won. The Hurricanes scored the last try of the match for a consolation but the final score was 42-25 and nobody could quite believe what had just happened.
Oh, and also? Five years ago when the Super 12 competition expanded to become the Super 14, the Australian Rugby Union showed abject cowardice in rewarding the fourth Australian team to Perth instead of Melbourne, because they were scared of taking on the Australian Football League in Melbourne, its native ground. Since the Super 15 season started a month and a half ago the Rebels have attracted consistenly good crowds - 25,000 for the first game, and then a more representative 15,000 at each subsequent home game. These crowds show what anyone who's lived in Melbourne for any length of time knows: there are thousands of people in this city from places in Australia and overseas where Rugby is the dominant game, and those people want to watch Rugby. They couldn't give a stuff about Australian Football. This weekend is the first weekend of the new Australian Football League season, which is major event, in fact one of the major events, in the Melbourne calendar, there was an AFL game being played at the same time as the Rugby, and at a stadium right next door - and what was the crowd figure at the Rugby? 17,000 - the second-highest of the season.
Magic.