Smith is attempting to preserve Wakefield's unbroken 18-year stint in the top flight with victory but as master prepares to take on pupil, Smith paid his counterpart an equally glowing reference before the game.
There's also been some schadenfreude in the air, watching their former colonial master prepare to "partition" itself.
As Nadal arranged his bottles of water and juice down to the millimetre along his required alignment, like a chess-master preparing his brain, it looked likely before the first semi-final that his perfectly competent opponent would not have a prayer.
If you're lucky, you can get a seat next to the open kitchen, watching the grill masters preparing the meat the traditional Adana way: minced meat of lamb, under one year old, mixed with tail fat.
The official sherpas and their political masters preparing for the global climate change talks in Paris which start today, have their already complicated task beset further by concerns over security, following the appalling attacks in Paris on Friday 13th November.
The decision to use the digital masters may be contentious among collectors, who have been arguing for years that EMI should release a high-quality vinyl set made directly from the original analog masters prepared in the 1960s.
Phallic Victories narrowed the focus to three different pairings, as Virginia and Dr DePaul took a trip out of state, Ethan found his babysitting duties complicated by the reliably unreliable George, and Libby helped Masters prepare for his big day.
To produce the new CDs, EMI returned to the mono and stereo masters prepared for the group's vinyl releases in the 1960s, which the label says have remained in pristine condition.
The LPs will be pressed on audiophile quality vinyl, using a version of the cleaned-up masters prepared for the 2009 CDs, with the exception of "Help!" and "Rubber Soul," which will use the remixed versions that George Martin, the group's producer, oversaw in 1986.
SU-8 masters prepared using the LED array were compared to masters made using an alternative cheap lithographic source, namely a gel crosslinker.
About one third (35.3%) were baccalaureate or masters prepared.
