The Big One

I now had two days to sort out my trip to Sydney and I spent hours on the net looking for reasonable accommodation and tickets, without much success. My mate Adam was already in Sydney and also another mate Haydn had arrived there, and they were both working on the case from the inside, but it was proving quite difficult.

When I had got back to Adelaide my foot was causing me a bit of grief, but a couple of days of care and rest seemed to improve the position and I set off feeling not too bad, with enormous excitement about both the game and also the chance to visit one of the  great cities of the southern hemisphere.

I got to Sydney and my first priority was somewhere to stay. I met Haydn and his wife Sally and started hunting. The odd places that were available were going fast and the prices were crazy, asking hundreds of dollars a night, until I found The Astoria. It looked a bit seedy in the daylight, but they were happy to do a deal for $50 a night. As I didn’t intend to spend much time there, and a quick check of the room revealed clean linen, I agreed to take it.

My plan was to let the match come and go, then move to a better hotel, which would hopefully be significantly cheaper after the weekend, where I could stay for a few more days and enable me to have a good look around the city.

You know that old saying, ‘If something seems too good to be true.....’ well It only took a few minutes of the first night to reveal why the hotel room rates were so good. By night, most of the other ‘guests’ seemed to be drug addicts or working girls and rooms were available by the hour!! My room faced onto a busy street and on inspection I realised that the bathroom window had a big hole in the glass into which the shower curtain had been stuffed, therefore it was loud and cold. I thought of the trauma of trying to find another room, dragging my stuff about with an increasingly troublesome foot and decided to use ear plugs, put a chair against the door and tough it out for two nights.

The hotel manager was sympathetic, but unapologetic, the next morning. He agreed to a move to the only other room he had, on the top floor at the rear, which was smaller but quieter, without even looking at it I agreed. My foot was worsening and a walk to the top floor did not appeal, instead I met with Haydn for breakfast and a little boat trip out of Darling Harbour into Circular Quay.

If you ask yourself to think of images conjured up by the name Australia, after kangaroos, beaches and sharks, Sydney harbour bridge and the opera house are probably going to come quickly to mind, so taking a water taxi that went under one and passed the other was a special experience.

                                                          

Sometimes when you get to see buildings or structures that you have only seen in books and on tv, they can be a little disappointing, not so here. The bridge is a mighty feat of engineering and bigger than I imagined and the opera house is exquisite, I so looked forward to getting up close and personal with them both in the next week.

And you've got to see it and the surrounding quay at night

 

 

 

                                                            

It was good to have a drinking buddy and me and Haydn had a great afternoon soaking up the pre-match build up

 

                                   

     

 

                                                                    

and apparently we also managed to get our mugs onto Welsh tv,  courtesy of a roving camera crew from Reuters.

My night in the new room was quieter, but probably ranked on a par with the Laos home stay in terms of how pleasant an experience it was.......but the linen was good.

Match day started brilliantly. Adam called to tell me that his uncle had a spare ticket if I was interested and 3 nano seconds later I arranged to meet him. My ticket at Melbourne had taught me that you don’t necessarily get what you pay for and, with the demand for this game so high, I would have taken anything, this ticket was Bronze and cost $95.

An article on the BBC website that morning really annoyed me. It was a story about the cost for a group of students attending the tour and made a point about ticket prices, in particular that Australians had had the chance to buy tickets from £60. Why were these not available to all? I hope the WRU read this and will introduce a tiered pricing structure for future Australian visitors.

My luck continued when Haydn and his lovely family invited me to join them for a pre match drink,

 

 and told me I was booked on a bus from a local pub to get to the ground. Relaxed, because I had my ticket in my pocket, we met, had a couple of liveners and then it was all on the bus, which was loaded with beer, and we sang our way out to the stadium, which seemed to be miles away.

The ground is part of the Olympic park built for the 2000  games and the whole facility is enormous and, still very impressive, but the walk to the stadium from the bus park, and then into the stadium and up to the 6^th tier

 and then up 84 steps to my seat was not at all comfortable.

I joined Mike, my ticket benefactor, several rows from the back of the stadium, (again), but this time just off the half way line.

It was a far superior seat to that which I had had at Melbourne. The atmosphere was electric, the tension and anticipation unbearable but the optimism was high. They were beatable.....

Thirty seconds after the kick off, they were very beatable. A knock on from the first attempted take seemed to deflate the whole team for a moment and at the same time fire the Lions with confidence.

Especially as it is now historical, I will not attempt to summarise the game, but it was as enjoyable a rugby performance as I can remember, and the second half was epic. The Lions roared ... and I was there !!

And this was the final whistle

 

 On the very happy bus back, we had a huge problem when we ran out of beer!!! The driver just stopped, blocking the inside lane on the main road back to the city, and two of the guys dashed into a liquor store and picked up 3 cases. The driver’s tip increased dramatically.

As the game had not kicked off until 8pm we didn’t get back to the pub until nearly 11.30 and therefore it was only a couple of hours before we decided to call it a night and I returned to bedlam.

The crazys had obviously saved themselves for Saturday and at 4am there were still junkies getting wasted in the fire escape stairwell outside my room. I pushed the plugs in deeper and slept, with a big smile on my face.

It was definitely time to move on, whatever the cost or inconvenience, but I had no idea at that moment about what was to come and how it would change my life!