It’s one of those depressing quirks of sport that when your team is having a shitty season, you end up getting kicked even in the games where you play quite well. Otago is a grim, dreary place. Despite the best efforts of the locals to emphasise the scenic aspects of the region, Otago for most people is a grey, dreary Calvinist den of Spartan misery, famous for an average beer that shifts units not on the merits of its flavour but on a misty-eyed nostalgia for ageing white supremacists who long for the old days when men were men and the PC-brigade weren’t around to stop them calling their Maori farmhands dumb, black horis.

It dished up another one of those priceless nights which serve as a reminder why you’d rather tar and feather your own scrotum than live in the Deep South. One punter did his best to do the hard Southern Man thing, sporting shorts and a short-sleeved Otago jersey, but what the cameras didn’t show was his frost-bitten, gangrenous legs later being amputated shortly before he died from hypothermia.

We dominated territory and possession, but didn’t hold on to the ball at vital moments. It would be easy to blame this on the flankers for not getting to breakdowns quickly enough, so I will. However, there were also too many times that the ball-carrier went to ground too soon, leaving himself at the mercy of the Otago loosies who were thoroughly enjoying having no competition.

The match’s pivotal moment came when we drove off a line-out toward the Otago line. Having trundled up about 10 metres, the maul mysteriously collapsed 50 centimetres out – the referee could see nothing sinister in this – and we turned it over.

The tight five played well although Ben Afeaki was taught yet another lesson in his young career: he was outwitted by an opponent who was actually a shitter scrummager, but who kept infringing at the hit-up whilst continually avoiding the referee’s detection. He didn’t bother to bind in about 75% of the scrums: this led to Afeaki constantly collapsing or being screwed around. Not only did it fuck up our rhythm but it scored them a few free-kicks and penalties. Respect to the Otago guy for doing his job: Afeaki should log that away in his training manual alongside “Eat another hippopotamus”.

The backs lacked penetration, but apart from Pisi The Elder’s missed tackle they weren’t totally awful. Any chance that their young flyhalf would fancy beaches, boobs, and beer up here instead of bogans, pot-noodles, and buggery down there? He was handy.

One of the worst things about going to Dunedin is that the airport is approximately nine hundred and thirty six kilometers from town. This is because the hoary old goats who planned the city realized that no cunt in his right mind would want to stay there, but they might get discouraged by the prospect of the long drive out. They say that Dunedin is the Edinburgh of the South, but I’ve been to Edinburgh and it’s beautiful. Dunedin, on the other hand, is a f**king hole.