Having cruelly blackwashed the combined British Isles Lions tourists just four months ago, New Zealand’s athletic young rugby sadists are back in the old country intent on inflicting further pain with a Grand Slam against the four ‘home’ nations on successive weekends, beginning today in a defiantly hyped-up Cardiff. It is a centenary show: on almost the same Taff patch in December 1905 Wales famously, disputedly, inflicted the solitary defeat on the fabled first All Black ‘Originals’ — a 3–0 whisker of a victory which has lodged enduringly in Welsh legend because in the following 100 years, club and country, New Zealand and Welsh XVs have played each other 73 times — and the Welsh have won on a paltry seven occasions.
As it did a century ago, New Zealand’s Maori war dance, the haka, will sound overture to the tumult.
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