The All Blacks! At Eden Park!

It is an historically difficult combination to overcome, as witness the fact that the Wallabies have not won there since 1986. As if you didn’t know, they’ll be taking their latest shot today at 3.05pm, Sydney real time.

Listen, I don’t say the Wallabies will win. Don’t. Don’t. DON’T.

And you can’t make me. My Kiss of Death has been put away for the duration.

But I do say, Gee, they’re a better chance than usual!

This is a team that went within a whisker of a series win against the British & Irish Lions and completely humiliated the Springboks at Ellis Park, putting 38 points on them in a single half to win there for the first in 60 years.

Wallabies coach Joe Schmidt looked relaxed at Friday’s captain’s run in Auckland.Credit: Getty Images

They were, true, a bit off their game against the Pumas in Sydney a fortnight ago, but this is a stronger team put on the field – with both Nick Frost back in the lineout, and Len Ikitau in the centres. Watch, too, the new halves combination: Tate McDermott starting at No.9 and hurling the ball to this season’s best performed fly-half, James O’Connor – who always seems to be smiling on the field, because he is just enjoying it all so much, savouring every second of his Second Coming.

We’ve got thunder in the forwards, lightning in the backs. We are the coming storm.

And we’re going up against an All Blacks side that was thumped by the Springboks a fortnight ago, losing by a record margin after the South Africans put 36 points on them in the second period.

Get it? The team the Wallabies beat by 38 points in the second half beat the All Blacks by 36 points in the same stanza! By that reckoning, our blokes might put 74 points on them in the last 40 minutes.

Second coming: James O’Connor in action in Cape Town.Credit: Getty Images

Yeah, nah.

If we do beat them, it is more likely to be by just one point, by the hairs of our chinny-chin-chins. But our blokes are a real chance.

Younger readers – and I have noticed your numbers growing alarmingly as the years go by – may not be completely au fait with the late Dickie Bird, and why the iconic umpire, who died this week aged 93, was no less than the most beloved figure in international cricket.

Great, and even generational players – Lillee, Lara, Botham, Warne – would come and go. But Harold “Dickie” Bird, who in his early years opened the batting with Sir Michael Parkinson for Yorkshire before becoming a Test umpire in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, was the charismatic, funny, honest, rock who stayed put at one end of the pitch even as the cricket world changed around him.

Cricket umpire Dickie Bird has died aged 92.Credit: Getty Images

Beloved by the players on and off the pitch, he was also the greatest cricketing raconteur, in no small part because he was so often on the spot when extraordinary things happened.

Here he is, for example, describing Shane Warne’s ball of the century: “I umpired his magic ball at Old Trafford. I was stood at........

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