Juan for the road – Wednesday

We follow Juan Cote as he lives the Growden dream (no, not that one) and reports from deep within the Wallaby and Italian camps in Canberra.

Touched down in Canberra 20 mins ahead of schedule which  meant I could make the 9 am press conference at the Wallaby hotel. Called the media manager and sweet, I was in – about to make my Wallaby debut.

Shared a cab into town with a climate change expert – Canberra is such a high brow place. He talked about food security and the troubles facing South West Western Australia, the diminishing aquifers, Emissions Trading Schemes and hybrid cars.  I thought he was really smart until he started talking about brown coal pollution, be fucked, coal’s black!!!
Inside and the first thing I saw was Robbie Deans and Rocky having a chat in the foyer.  You could tell they had been there for a ‘wee-but’ as Rocky was about the nod off.  What was more concerning than Rocky’s apparent sleep apnea, was the fact he had a set of crutches next to him….WTF?  What a great buy he turned out to be.

Up to the media room and got word that Jim Williams would be doing the press conference.  Was given the ARU/Wallabies media kit – on a fucking USB, and not even a cool Wallabies USB, just a garden variety red one!! That means I’ll have to print the whole 168 pages of it myself, double sided of course to please my climate change mate.

Bit of a poor turnout for the press conference and I soon found out why.  From start to finish the whole thing lasted 3mins and 47 secs and sounded just like the one Jim did before the Baa-Baas game last week.  Actually, it didn’t sound too different to every other press conference I’ve ever heard Jim give.  No matter, I got to shake his hand and ask him a question so that definitely counts as a ‘cap’.

I then spent the rest of the day trying to keep warm and waiting for Lote to ring and do an interview Gagger had lined up on Twitter.  It was at about 4.30 pm when I decided that the ‘Lote Tuqiri’ Gagger had been ‘tweeting’ was in fact a 57 year old divorcee from Narrabri named Launa…we’d been had, unwitting victims of cyber-fraud.

Then the call, it was He.  I was summonsed to the Wallaby hotel for an interview – my second ‘cap’ in one day – onya Gagger!! Lote seemed a bit disinterested and edgy – “it’s not me, it’s the fact he’s pissed off at not getting picked” – I kept telling myself.  That kept me going until the point where he got the same look on his face as Rocky had just before nodding off earlier in the day…so it was me!

Oh well, as Mark Bartholomeusz said after his one test that lasted 2 min 30 seconds, “A caps a cap”