WHAT is a Rugby World Cup anyway?  A gathering of the 20 best rugby teams in the world?  Yes, I suppose.  But that is, dinkum, the least of it.  Those 20 teams will be responsible for about 600 players hitting Kiwi shores. ( OK, OK, in the professional era, you can add perhaps another 1200 coaches, assistant coaches, assistant-assistant coaches, statisticians, video analysts and sundry hangers-on, but anyway.) 

The real gathering, what the whole thing is about, is the quadrennial Carnival of the Cauliflower Ears.  This carnivals sees broadly ugly men and oft-beautiful women from across the globe - just under 100,000 of them - quietly leaving their places of residence to noisily gather in the country where the World Cup is held, so they can for once be truly among their own.  Hence why this World Cup will likely be even more joyous than most, as it is being held in a country where the preponderance of ugly men and beautiful women is well up into Guinness Book of Records territory.  But I digress …

An exponent of the Carnival of the Cauliflower Ears ... Keven Mealamu.  Credit:Getty Images

The wonderful thing about this carnival is that it has a culture all its own, unique in the world of sport and best exemplified by a scene I saw in Marseille during the last World Cup in 2007.  For on the weekend of the quarter-finals, after South Africa played Fiji and Australia played England, there by Marseille harbour were tens of thousands of rugby fans, carrying on into the wee hours - drinking, dancing, cavorting and hugging each other for no good reason - and all of it with no security!  At least 50,000 people there, with not a gendarme in sight, for there was no need - they were rugby people.  And right there, dear friends, we can discern certain rules of behaviour for the Caulis and Caulettes of the Carnival. 

Rugby people are only occasionally violent on the field, never off it.  No matter how passionate the fan, how close the game, what atrocities were committed in the course of it, once it is over there and the fans gather for the troisieme mi-temps, the third half, there is no propensity of rugby fans to burn down stadiums, they just burn the candle at both ends.  If their team loses they don't storm en masse into downtown and trash the joint, the worst they do is get trashed themselves.  They don't embrace violence, they embrace each other.