Heather du Plessis-Allan: The Haka drama is back

Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive

The Haka drama is back today, isn't it?

Because Joe Marler has now backtracked completely on what he said and has apologised for it and specifically has apologised to New Zealand fans for, in his words, “my poorly articulated tweet earlier in the week, I meant no malice New Zealand”.

What have you done?

Are we honestly that sensitive about the haka that we can't handle it when a rugby prop - not known as the brains of the bunch -criticises the haka in a silly little social media post on X.

Can we really not handle this?

What did we do to him? What did we do? Did we bombard him on Twitter?

Because I feel like that's what happened here and that's why he deleted his Twitter account for a while, isn't it?

I think that we may have to get a little bit of a change going about how we perceive the All Blacks’ haka.

Yes, it is special to us and it quite clearly is very special to the All Blacks as well, but it's not special to everybody, is it?

I mean, the rest of the world just has to put up with it, don't they?

And so maybe, instead of being so aggro at them when they tell us that they don't really like it, especially the British and especially Steven Jones, we should understand that.

They don't have to like it. They don'thave to put up with this, but they do.

We should actually be grateful that the rugby world indulges us the way that they do.

They let us do the Haka for a start and then they let us have all these rules about how other teams have to respond to the haka, how close they can get stuff like that.They try to be respectful.

They face the challenge, they apologise profusely when a plane accidentally flies over the top at the wrong time, they don't have to do any of this stuff, and they definitely do not have to like the thing and we shouldn't be so sensitive about it.

So,let's be honest about this, right.

We do the Haka a lot nowadays because there are a lot of international tests nowadays and it is frankly very nice that the rest of the world lets us do it.

So maybe a little less sensitivity, a little bit more gratitude.

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