It would have been sacrilegious if if wasn't such a lucid explanation of why Ocker shockers speak the way they do.

It was certainly music to the pages of that rather pompous London rag with an average readership of over 60, the Daily Telegraph. They were quoting a communication expert from Victoria University in Melbourne, a fellow by the name of Dean Frenkel who reckons the Australian alphabet cocktail was spiked by alcohol, of drunken slurring, by the heavy drinking, early penal colony settlers.

It was passed on to future generations by sober parents and inflicted on all classes of Australian society.

Frenkel reckons the average Australian speaks at just two thirds capacity with one third of their articulator muscles always sedentary, as if lying on a couch.

Think about the missing consonants, like t's when they slur impordant, or the i's with Austraya, or for that matter the vowels that are lazily transformed into other vowels, like a's to e's when they talk about stending around, or the i's when they refer to New South Wyles or the i's to oi's when they say good noight.

To add insult to injury to the Australian way of speaking, Winston Churchill once called it, the most brutal maltreatment which has ever been inflicted upon the mother tongue. Well he for one would know.

So while the up market Poms have been reading about the Aussie accent, others have been indulging in Richie McCaw bait, with newspaper columns being devoted to Richetty Grub and thugby's greatest champion with a defender saying he's a cheat but concluding that's his job - now that is sacrilegious.

But it's all in the name of sport, or more likely the Poms feeling aggrieved that they've got to turn their favourite rugger ground over to the colonies to battle it out for the ultimate prize. So it's open season on the antipodes.

Sitting in the stands will of course be Teflon John Key, Jonathan Coleman who's lucky enough to be sports minister and Trade Minister Tim Groser who was lucky enough to be in the neighbourhood. Andrew Little will also be there, probably in the cheaper seats and certainly in the more down market digs considering the taxpayer won't be picking up his hotel tab, unlike the rest of them.