All Blacks stayed in "dog of a hotel" on eve of World Cup

Members of the All Blacks were forced to sleep on mattresses in the hallway due to the high heat and their hotel’s faulty air-conditioning on the eve of their Rugby World Cup opener against France, the Weekend Herald has revealed.

In a feature by Gregor Paul in the Weekend Herald, he reveals the All Blacks were put in a Novotel hotel in Paris which was so far below expectations no other team stayed there for the rest of the tournament. The team also had a fire alarm at 3am before the opening game, which they lost 27-13 to France.

They are the kind of unsettling conditions that international teams often used to face when on the away leg of a World Cup qualifier, but are unheard of for a tournament setting.

The All Blacks bounced back from the defeat to reach the final, while the hosts crashed out in the quarter-finals, losing to eventual champions South Africa.

Paul writes that on the eve of the opening game against the hosts, the All Blacks were put in a hotel that didn’t have working air-conditioning and with a questionable rating.

“The All Blacks arrived at Gare de Lyon uncomfortably hot, a situation that was to become significantly worse after they negotiated a 90-minute trip to their Novotel in the southwestern outer suburb of Creteil,” Paul writes in a feature on the side’s remarkable turnaround from their record defeat to South Africa at Twickenham to falling two kicks at goal short of lifting the World Cup.

“It turns out to be a dog of a hotel, proclaiming itself four-star accommodation but no one is sure whether it even deserves three.

“There are no function rooms for meetings, the air-conditioning doesn’t work and the kitchen is so filthy that the All Blacks’ chef, Wallace Mua, insists on scrubbing it for three hours before he is willing to cook in it.

“This is the second accommodation surprise that has been sprung, as at their base in Lyon, the swimming pool they were promised would be finished and functioning when they arrived was a concrete bunker, rubbish floating in the rusty rainwater that had collected.

“The lack of air-conditioning was a major problem given the temperature, and All Blacks nutritionist Cat Darry was worried that some players will be dehydrated by kick-off.

“A bad situation gets worse when a fire alarm goes off at 3am the night before the game.

“Half the players have already dragged their mattresses into the hallway where they think it might be cooler, but the only certainty anyone can have was that the French team were not enduring any of this and were sleeping soundly in their air-conditioned, soundproofed rooms across town.

“No other team stayed at that hotel after the All Blacks – World Rugby removed it from the Paris rotation, agreeing entirely that it was sub-standard.”

Paul writes that it wasn’t the only thing working against the All Blacks heading into the tournament opener.

“At the stadium on game night, the All Blacks in-house media team were denied access to the pitch-side by security, who said it was World Rugby rules – no one but rights-holding broadcasters were permitted.

“As the All Blacks staff were being told this, their French equivalents strolled past security and filmed whatever they liked, wherever they liked.”

Neither of the issues were made public by the All Blacks, in part because they didn’t want to it sound like sour grapes following the opening loss, their first in pool-play history.

Yesterday departing coach Ian Foster told Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking he was at peace with his time in the role.

“I think I am, but I’m still going over everything.

“We went into a World Cup that everyone thought, we all knew, was going to be probably one of the toughest ever and nearly nailed it.

“So, I’m at peace that we did everything we could, that we gave it everything we got, but still there’s always a massive disappointment we couldn’t get across the line.”

This article was first published on nzherald.co.nz and is republished here with permission