"It's great to have two points on the board," says Russell Coutts. "But if we had lost Race 2 I wouldn't have felt any different. I'm encouraged by our performance. This America's Cup race is all on."

Undefeated now in 11 races over three Cup matches, Charlie Barr's record surpassed, Coutts has every right to feel confident. If you had been inside the Alinghi compound after their 7sec win over NZL 82, you would have seen a relaxed, happy group. Jochen Schumann had a beer in hand, epitomising a group that is palpably at ease.

The contrast with a drawn Dean Barker could not have been starker. Which brings us back to the pre-match analysis. Frankly, the signals were confusing. Quite unlike the last three Cups where you knew the winner ahead of time.

America 3 over Il Moro was a question of score since Cayard was sailing superbly well and you never quite knew what the Bill Koch factor would do for America 3. In '95 and 2000, 5:0 was certainly always on, provided the weather or some other random factor was not introduced.

So convinced was Coutts that NZL 32 would demolish the stitched-together defender of Dennis Conner's crew on Young America's yacht, thereby setting up his run of wins back in '95, that all the Kiwi was worried about "was a collision and sinking the boat".

This time you had to weigh the mood in the two camps. Both were evidently upbeat, but for different reasons.

A finger on Team New Zealand's pulse told that that their mood took a real upswing nine months ago. When the hula was unveiled, you could see why. Already during the Louis Vuitton trials, Tom Schnackenberg had regarded the challenger fleet with his experienced eye and had seen the next generation of NZL 60 style boat in the OneWorld camp. Pitted against USA 67, the rest of the challenger fleet looked to be in much the same ballpark.

Team New Zealand, on the other hand, had gone down a very different path. They had discarded NZL 60 within weeks of the NZL 81 and 82 hitting the water. At the two unveilings, TNZ designer Clay Oliver was very happy to take the limelight. Did that offer one vital clue about how this Cup will turn out? - a much more pronounced reliance on the design team by the young sailing team...

Then on the eve of Race 1, Schnack uttered the words rarely heard before racing starts: "If we understand the design process as we think we understand it, we might have a slight edge." In other words, we think we're faster.

Throughout all of this, Alinghi was unfazed. Coutts and Butterworth have been positive for months. Rolf Vrolijk, Grant Simmer and Manolo Luiz de Elvira seemed pretty sure that the hula advantage was not what all of New Zealand believed it to be. The group felt their hulls were good enough, their rigs and sails certainly were, and crucially, the sailing team was good enough to make a real fight of it.

The snapshot of Race 2 suggests to me that SUI 64 has a slight edge upwind with NZL 82 enjoying the reverse downwind. With two competitive yachts, the 31st America's Cup will be raced for the hard way.

And in this instance, you'd back Coutts & Co. In Brad Butterworth and Murray Jones, Coutts enjoys boundless trust in two of the most skilful short and long range tacticians in the game. In trimmers Warwick Fleury and Simon Daubney, Coutts knows he has sailors who can turn a 25 ton, stall prone yacht, into an extension of his own will.

This group are the best America's Cup fighting unit of the past two decades, which has now been augmented and enhanced by the supreme Olympian of the past two decades, Jochen Schumann.

Little wonder Coutts says it's all on. He likes his chances for a third victory.
Tim Jeffery, 20 February 2003