From Campese's Shop to the Kangoo to Queensland: Why I’m Doing This All Again
Marseilles Waterfrony, Near Nimes, Melbourne and the Renault
©Photos from Mark ashcroft and Shutterstock
There’s a Waratahs jersey in my wardrobe that has no business being there. I bought it in Sydney in November 2003, two days before England won the World Cup, from a small sports shop near The Rocks, sold to me, in person, by David Campese. I’d walked in meaning to buy a Wallabies shirt. Campese talked me into the Waratahs instead, mostly because they’d sold out of the green and gold. An Englishman, buying Australian provincial colours from an Australian legend, days before England beat Australia to the World Cup. I still have it. I still don’t quite know what to make of it.
I was in Sydney on business that year, staying at the Four Seasons, watching the tournament build from hotel bars rather than stadium seats. I had a ticket in hand for the final. I didn’t use it. Karen and Max were at home, and so were my friend Glyn and his family, his wife Gill and their children Tom and Katie and we’d already committed to watching the final together, all of us in one room, rather than me alone in a stadium eleven thousand miles from them. Knowing how that night ended, in extra time, with Wilkinson’s drop goal going over; I’ve occasionally wondered whether I made the wrong call. I don’t really think I did.
That near-miss in Sydney is the prequel. The story properly starts four years later, in Nîmes.
2007: the trip that started it properly
We flew into Perpignan late, late enough that the Hertz desk had shut for the night, which meant an unplanned first evening at the Novotel Perpignan instead of behind the wheel. The next morning we collected our hire car, a Renault Kangoo that would become the fourth member of the trip in all but name, and I handed over my driving licence to a girl at the desk who told me, entirely unprompted, that she was from Ormskirk. Of all the places to hear a West Lancashire accent, a car rental counter in the south of France wasn’t one I’d have guessed.
We based ourselves with Glyn, at his home deep in the countryside between Nîmes and Sommières, Max and I sharing one room, Glyn and his son Tom the other. One morning around five, I woke to muttering and splashing outside the window. It was Glyn, working through the small hours to dump bundles of chlorine into the pool and fight back a rising green haze before anyone was awake to see it. It didn’t entirely work. It remains one of my favourite unscheduled parts of the entire trip.
The reason for all of it was one match: England against Australia, the 2007 quarter-final at the Stade Vélodrome, a repeat of the 2003 final four years on. We got to Marseille early, tickets in hand, and immediately faced the least glamorous problem of any World Cup trip, where on earth do you park. Neither of us knew the city beyond its reputation, and our chief worry wasn’t really for the Kangoo’s safety so much as our own. We took what comfort we could in the theory that Marseille’s gangs were unlikely to have much interest in a Renault Kangoo. We found a bar on the waterfront instead, had coffee looking out over the harbour, and watched an enormous yacht drift past flying, for reasons none of us could explain, a huge Welsh flag. The walk to the stadium afterwards was long, well policed, and full of strangers who all seemed to be having the same day we were. England won 12–10 on the back of Wilkinson’s boot and a defence that simply refused to be moved. We liked Marseille so much we went back the next day, without tickets, purely for the atmosphere of the second quarter-final and found ourselves again among brilliant rugby supporters who didn’t need a horse in the race to make the day worthwhile.
Leeds, and the sides trips
New Zealand followed. Then Australia. And at a World Cup much closer to home, Leeds, in 2015; I finally met in person the man I’d been trading copy with for years: Chris Heal, editor of this very publication. Elland Road that year overdelivered on nearly every front, and it’s stayed with me for reasons that have as much to do with that handshake as anything that happened on the pitch.
2027: doing it properly, together
Which brings me to Australia again, twenty-four years after Campese sold me the wrong shirt and twenty years after the Kangoo. Karen and I are planning the trip properly this time, as a couple, not a car full of blokes and pastries. The current thinking has us arriving in Brisbane at the end of September for an England match, before heading north to Townsville and across to Newcastle to take in fixtures from across the wider tournament rather than only the sides we’re supposed to care about, and finishing in Melbourne, not for tickets, but for the pubs, because a World Cup is at least half lived in rooms full of people who’ve all made their own version of our Marseille afternoon.
Both Townsville and Newcastle are hosting World Cup rugby for the first time, which is part of the appeal. North Queensland Stadium has four pool matches on its books, including Georgia against Romania, Chile against Hong Kong China, Tonga against Zimbabwe, and
Spain against Canada. Newcastle Stadium, also making its World Cup debut, has Fiji against Spain, Uruguay against Portugal, Japan against Samoa, and Italy against Georgia. Which of those we’ll actually see is still being worked out and that’s rather the point. Half the pleasure of a World Cup on the road is letting the fixture list and the mood of the place decide for you, the way a bar with a Welsh flag on a passing yacht decided an afternoon for us once before.
So this is the first of what I intend to be a regular series for TalkingRugbyUnion, running between now and the final in Sydney in November 2027; the planning, the travelling, the pubs, the pool matches nobody else is covering, and whatever this trip’s version of a chlorine-scented five a.m. turns out to be.
Different decade, different hemisphere, same instinct. I’m just glad I don’t need Campese to talk me into anything this time.
Seniormash Reflections writing for TalkingRugbyUnion.co.uk
