The New Zealand Rugby Team's Haka

I saw the Haka performed at the Churchill Cup in New Zealand, led by team captain Farah Palmer, who lead her team to a 2006 World Cup victory in September. One of the coolest dances in women's sports. This video is from the side, but gives you the general idea. Here is a story about the New Zealand women's rugby team, written for the now-defunct women's rugby magazine, Match Report:

All That and a Bag of Chips:
New Zealand Rugby Team Captain Farah Palmer
by Kaki Flynn for Match Report, a women's rugby magazine

On a Black Fern message board, under a string of chat about the New Zealand team captain Farah Palmer, a chatter writes, "She is soooo funny, and sooo nice, and she jokes around a lot. Is she really that good of a player?"

Actually, someone could have replied, she is not just sooo funny, and sooo nice, she is also sooo smart, sooo talented, and soooo into looking at the world outside of rugby.

Being the team captain of the Black Ferns, the most dominant team in the world right now, is just a small piece of who she is.

Type the name Farah Palmer in Google, and up pops a list of her accolades that range from winning a body building competion to her rugby wins. And her biography from Massey University, where she uses her PhD to teach in the Sport Management program, and works with the adidas Institute of Rugby.

Read a description of her position as the Director of Te Au Rangahau, an organization dedicated to Maori business development. Her win in a body building competition, from when she decided to give the sport a go, and climbed to the top. Her volunteer work with kids. Her New Zealand University Sportsperson of the Year Award.

Included in that list is a story from the 2002 World Cup, where she says that she is thinking about retiring. Not yet, it seems, as she was in the center of the field at the Churchill Cup, leading her team in the haka.

She shows no signs of slowing down. Right before leaving for the Churchill Cup, her team had a fitness test, and Palmer finished first, ahead of her younger teammates.

I talked to her at the Sin Bin Party, the after party held at the Druid, a local bar, where players and coaches from Canada, New Zealand and England unwound from three weeks of play.

She was sporting a giant cut down the top of her forehead from the matches the weekend before. All of this energy, accomplishment and power comes wrapped in a hooker frame, with a gentle voice, clear brown eyes and a sense of calm that puts you immediately at ease.

The New Zealand women had a lot to celebrate, having just beat England 38-0. The players, thrilled not just by the win but the point spread, would turn to each other and yell, "What was the score today?," and then yell in return, "38-nill! 38-nill!"

New Zealand had beaten England before, at the World Cup in 2002, but this was a newer team, and every rugger knows that a lot can happen to a team in two years. That meant that a lot of the confidence the team had going into the game was coming from stats on a piece of paper, not tested head-to-head combat with current players.

New Zealand's head coach, Jed Rowlands, startled the team in his speech to them the morning before the final match of the Churchill Cup, where they were about to face England, the defending champions.

You know, you might be coming from behind, he told the team. You might be losing at half time, and they might come back into the game, and be winning by 20 points, so I want you guys to be able to come back from that.

As it turned out, Rowlands should have been standing in Englands locker room before the game giving that motivational speech.

Palmer, hooker and team captain since 1997, led her team before the match in the haka, an aggressive dance the New Zealand team does before international matches.

The haka is a challenge to the opposition, where we line up, and then come forward and move back in unison. The next part of the dance symbolizes grabbing your opponent by the neck, and strangling the life out of them, said Palmer.

Fans can see the haka performed before the game, and even perform the dance themselves during the game, in the stands, if they are so moved by the play.

There weren't any hakas being performed that night at the Druid, however, because it is considered bad form to do the dance in a pub after drinking, even though the team gets people begging them to perform.

On this particular day, the haka worked its magic, because England played, in their own words, like they had the life strangled out of them.

For New Zealand, the game was a dream. A lot of the moves went perfectly, and exactly as we practiced. It was Champaign rugby for us, said Palmer.

For England, the game was a nightmare a giant bottle of Mad Dog 20/20. I hated every minute of it, said Sue Day, Englands fullback. For Englands team captain, Maxine Edwards, this was a painful loss in a rugby career that has spanned almost 20 years, and includes over 39 caps.

We would like to change everything about the game, said Edwards. We would like to start the whole day again, with everything we have learned.

The first half, we didnt go out and we didn't take the game to them, which is one thing we thought we had learned from the World Cup. We didn't want to sit on our heels, and wait for them to play their game, and then defend, but to actually play the game that we wanted to play, and to take the ball into their area, and to come out with a try, said Palmer.

I think there was a certain amount of watching, instead of going in and doing, said Geoff Richards, Englands head coach. New Zealand is a pretty streetwise team. They know how to slow the ball down, and they know how to kick.

Back in the locker room at half time, England talked about what they needed to do. Set the scrum earlier. Win the set pieces. Throw the ball straighter in the lineouts. Pass the ball backwards, but drive forward dynamically.

Go into the locker room for 10 minutes. Come back out. Change everything.

That didn't happen in the second half, and New Zealand continued to rack up the score. Four of New Zealands players are teammates for Canterbury, and the connection and familiarity between those players was obvious on the pitch.

Three of those Cantebury players scored tries, with fullback Stacey Lene bringing in two tries, including a penalty try awarded when Englands Karen Andrew pulled her down as Lene was kicking the ball into the try zone.

A Cantebury trio pulled the last try of the game together, with wing Stephanie Mortimer and prop Casey Robertson linking with Aucklands Hannah Myers to push Melissa Roscoe over the line.

Stacey and Stephanie are both just jiggy players, said Palmer. Our wingers can make something out of nothing. You have to love wingers who can do that.

I thought that last try was great, because it involved the whole team, and was a score from the bench, said assistant coach Kiwi Searancke, who started coaching the women last year. Roscoe was a last-minute replacement in the second half.

Searancke, the forwards coach, is exactly how you would imagine a forwards coach for the top team in the world would be. Imagine a coach the size of the Chicago Bears Refrigerator with a New Zealand accent and an infectious laugh, and you have Searancke.

During the interview, at least five people came up to him, wanting to talk about rugby and strategy for the forwards. He and Canadas head coach, David Mays, who played in England for 18 years, traded some good-natured needling about the rivalry between the two countries.

The New Zealand team is famous for their defense, driving opponents even England back 10 to 20 meters down the pitch while maintaining perfect symmetry.

The tight five have to win it for you, and the rest happens, said Searancke, who also attributes the success of the team to honing individual skills. For example, our fullback, Claire Richardson, has amazing power; she can throw the ball the width of the rugby field.

We have been working on our defense. I didnt think they could really find any holes in our defense. A couple of times they got wide, but we had enough cover, said Palmer. We were absolutely stoked about how we played.

The haka and the other dances that include unity before, during, and after the game pull the team together as well. In the huddle, the team does a hand-clapping cheer that pulls the team together because the clapping must be done in time, pulling the team into focus and into the present.

Earlier in the afternoon, after the games were over, the New Zealand women performed a dance called a Waiata-a-ringa (song with hands) for the fans in the stadium, and then for all of the womens teams.

The song tells the story of the New Zealand Black Ferns, including explaining the name the fern is the monarch of the fern family and the teams history.

The team forms a mountain shape with their arms and hands, to symbolize success in sports. The rest of the song talks about themes such as, united we stand, united we fall. "We have our difficulties," said Palmer, "But at those moments, when we are performing, it pulls us all together, and gets us focused. "

Soccer Heaven: Mia vs. Brandi

by Kaki Flynn for usolympicteam.com
“Who’s Brandi Chastain?” I asked the person sitting next to me.

I was in soccer heaven -- Chapel Hill, N.C. -- working at a soccer company to pay for journalism school. I had just gotten off the phone with Chad Chastain, who had more notoriety at the time than his sister in our soccer world, because he could score us good discounts on soccer gear from Nike, while his sister Brandi was someone we knew only as “the sister Chad won’t stop talking about.”

Inevitably, Chad, the sales rep at Nike, would introduce himself as “Chad Chastain, Brandi Chastain’s brother. Do you know her? If you don’t, you will. She’s going to be as big as Mia.”
“Big as Mia,” even in 1992, was still a relative statement, and usually applied only to those living in close proximity to soccer heaven.

The women’s soccer team had won the World Cup, but the publicity for women’s soccer was only big enough to carry one name, Mia Hamm, and barely resonated outside of the soccer world.

>> Interview with Mia Hamm, Brandi Chastain

>> Brandi Chastain website