One week till D-Day!

As the teams start to arrive in New Zealand for the Rugby World Cup kicking off on the 9th I am starting to think about my own trip down to the land of the long white cloud and the surprises that it has in store for me and J.

With Ireland's performances in the warm-up games a bit below power to say the least you would probably forgive me in saying that on Saturday evening my thoughts started leaning towards how I was going to come back from the World Cup and face my mates questioning and mocking me about why for the second successive tournament Ireland were knocked out at the group stages. This is not unrealistic when you consider that we have the Tri-Nations champions Australia in our group along with an Italy team that run us very close in the 6 Nations and if we get beat by these two teams then we would find it very difficult to progress out of the pool!

With all this in mind I spent Saturday night in the company of good friends with very little talk of the game which had taken place earlier that day and this I think was a good thing. I woke on Sunday a bit bleary-eyed and proceed to read the match reports and watch the interviews from Saturdays game and, to me anyway, it seemed that just like the rest of us the media, the management and the team itself were a bit taken aback by what had happened. Is this the same group of players who in March completely out classed the same team, England, in the same stadium? The answer quite simply is yes, and that is why we were all so shocked.

As the day progressed I started to get a few texts from J asking if I had received the parcel he had sent to me with my World Cup goodies in it, I hadn't at this stage so my excitement began to go up a bit thinking about the "kit" that was about to arrive along with e-tickets, full tour schedule etc. To be honest, I was starting to feel, in my head at least, a bit like one the 30 guys selected to play for Ireland in the World Cup it self.

Monday morning arrived and I nipped downstairs to the concierge to see if they were there to pick up my stuff and to my delight they were! I rushed back up to my apartment and ripped into the box to revel the goodies inside. There was a t-shirt, a polo shirt, a fleece, waterproof coat and a beanie hat, all with the official Rugby World Cup branding on them inside a neat little kit bag. All the kit was matching and seeing it all laid out on my sofa I could help but think that I was part of a team!

The team I am part of has a massive part to play, just like the Ireland back-room staff look after the players every needs helping them focus solely on the game at hand. I am part of the Ireland travelling support, people from all over the country (and in my case London) coming together to make the trip to the other side of the world to cheer on our team. When Ireland step out on to the pitches in New Plymouth, Auckland, Rotorua and Dunedin it will be our job to make sure that each of those stadiums becomes an Ireland home game! We are there to represent out country as people as well and even though we have come off the back of a few bad results we can just take a look at the positivity shown by the players as something to lift us!

A lot has happened to me in the past week and in another weeks time I will have reached D-Day and along with a few others will be heading to Heathrow airport were I will meet my travelling companions each of us making the trip for their own reasons but all with the one goal in mind, to make sure our boys in green get the best damn support that any travelling Ireland team have had anywhere!

COME ON IREALND!

My Rugby World Cup

With the start of the Rugby World Cup just over a month away my excitement is building. Last week I received my final match day ticket for the Ireland vs. Italy match in Dunedin and that was the key to my kid like excitement going through the roof.

In 2005 my friends and I decided that we were going to go the Lions Tour of South Africa in 2009, make it our once in a life time trip, no holds barred, great rugby, great country and great times. Unfortunately the trip never came to fruition and we all sat at home watching every last minute of every game on TV. But when the final whistle of the last Test match blew I knew that I had one last chance of a trip of a life time; the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand! This would be even bigger than the Lions tour; this was the ultimate rugby tournament taking place in a country where rugby is just the way of life. I could not think of anywhere else I should go for my dream rugby trip.

And so the planning began, dragging in my mate Jonny we set about planning how, when and where we would be going, how we would be getting about and how long we would be staying. From the start I wanted to take the full two months of September and October off, getting to New Zealand in plenty of time for the opening ceremony and then taking the time after the tournament was over to visit other parts of the South Pacific. Slowly but surely thou this idea came to an end, as I could not afford to take the time off work and the price for my once in a life time trip was rocketing.

Our plans changed and we decided that we would just attend the Ireland pool matches which would give us around a month in New Zealand. We applied for and got the tickets and it was then time to start looking into our travel. The last few months of 2010 were spent trying to get a prices for flights to New Zealand and getting quotes for camper-vans and car hire companies, looking into youth hostels, hotel's and camp sites. With Jonny back home in Ireland and myself based in London it was hard to try and work things out and therefore it was decided that when I was home over the Christmas holidays the two of us would sit down together and once and for all get things sorted or at least know which direction either one of us had to go to get the trip sorted. When I arrived home my Dad had been doing a bit of research of his own and had looked into a sports travel companies offering deals to the RWC for each of the home nations, this was something that we had thought about but had considered too expensive after a sitting down with a few beers and a few glasses of wine everything seemed to point in the direction of going with the sports travel company. Everything was there for us, flights to and from New Zealand, internal transfers, accommodation etc. All we had to do was the pay the money.

It was settled, as long as the company allowed us to use are own tickets we had already purchased we would go with them and sure enough, little under a month later our names were down and it was all steam ahead for the Rugby World Cup 2011 in New Zealand.

Over the next couple months I am going to try and blog as much as I can about the buildup too and of course the trip itself. I hope that you all will be able to enjoy this trip with me.