Leanne Infante's World Cup Column: Halloween & Helicopters
In the fourth instalment of her World Cup column, Leanne Infante talks dog updates, Halloween and helipcopter rides.
I think it's probably starting to hit home how much I miss Tess now that Matt is here in New Zealand. For those who don’t know, Tess is our two-year-old Staffordshire bull terrier and the centre of attention back home! It's usually me, Matt and Tess going about our daily life in our house so to have just two of us here makes it so much more real.
I've been getting some amazing updates from the family that she's been staying with. They send me photos of Tess regularly and they've also started doing a ‘dogcast’ podcast, where they send me video updates of her! The first one was about 13 minutes long and it’s their two young girls, Bella and Evelyn running it all, chatting away at the camera and telling me all about what they’ve been up to.
When Matt arrived, he brought over a little poster painting from the girls. Tess’ paw print is painted in red with green paint around it so it looks like the England rose. They’ve added in good luck messages which were so cute. I’m missing her but I’m really enjoying the updates, and without wishing it all away, I am counting down the days till I see her again!
HALLOWEEN
For Halloween, Sarah McKenna and a couple of the other girls set up a scare maze in the hotel around our team room. They turned all the lights off in this long corridor that we had to go through before we got into the team room. All the doors were closed so it was pitch black apart from the fire exit signs, so that really added to the spookiness of it all.
Jess Breach was the host, adopting her best gremlin voice and getting victims to go through the maze, there were people jumping out on you, people hiding in suitcases, someone was hiding under a table and grabbing your legs as you’re trying to get through. Then once you made it to the team room there was a bit of a party vibe, we had the speaker going and there was face painting going on. The girls went all out and it was a really fun evening, once you’d made it through the corridor…
HONEYMOON HELICOPTER RIDE
Last week I didn’t really get up to much outside of the training because I was quite tired, whereas this week I’ve felt a lot more refreshed. A lot of our friends and family arrived for the quarter-final so I think everyone’s had a little extra energy boost to go and see their loved ones.
The time zones make a huge difference. Before they arrived, we either had to get up in the morning and speak to them before they go to bed or vice versa, so you’d speak to them at either end of the day with no contact in between. We’re used to being in camp for long periods of time at home with Six Nations, but there isn’t that barrier stopping us from being able to talk to each other. Having our close ones here has helped make it all feel a bit more normal, which is great for our focus leading into a big game.
We moved to the new hotel on Monday afternoon after the game. We checked out in the morning and couldn’t check in to this hotel until the afternoon, so everyone went out and did their own thing in Auckland.
Matt and I went on a helicopter ride around Auckland. It was a bit of a pre-honeymoon, early Christmas present and I know he's always wanted to do it, so I thought what better place to do it than on the other side of the world! We went out over the sea on a tour of all the islands in and around Auckland. We saw Waiheke island, which is one of the places that we’ve visited before and saw all of the vineyards from above. There are a couple of volcanic islands that we flew over and you can look right down into the craters. The pilot was naming all the islands as we flew over and I got some amazing pictures of the day. It was a great way to enjoy the recovery day before getting stuck into semi-final preparation!
EYES ON CANADA
We're really excited play Canada on Saturday, we're feeling confident going into the game after last weekend. We don’t quite know what the weather’s going to be like, but the way we played in those conditions has been great for our confidence, we know that we can play well whether it’s wet, dry or blowing a gale.
Canada are a great side. They’ve got some huge athletes and they’re going to take some breaking down but we're feeling confident. There’s obviously that added pressure that comes with it being a semi-final; there are no second chances but at the same time we’re all feeling really good going into it.
