Dialogue: Persistent crisis in nation at play

You don't need to be out of the country very long to discover what really matters. On the far side of the planet there was just one thing I was itching to know. Eventually I ran into an Australian.

"You haven't heard?" he said. "It was a terrific match." He glowed at the recall of the All Blacks' opening onslaught, the Wallabies' rally, the ebb and flow of fortunes, the tension. When finally he mentioned the result, I was happy too.

Would a New Zealander have been as warmed, I wondered, by a sparkling game that tipped the other way? This week provided an answer.

Last Saturday's rematch with Australia was, if anything, even better than the first (now that I've seen a recording). The defences were stronger, the attacks more planned, the tries less fortuitous. Again the match was decided in the last minute, when we blew it.

Children play games as a kind of rehearsal for life, learning in a relatively harmless way how to organise themselves, exploit their strengths, repair their weaknesses, cooperate and compete under rules. Nations play games that can be just as instructive for the national character.

We have not been exactly buzzing with pleasure this week. Commentators have consoled us with the idea that the test last Saturday was at least a minute too long, that by accident or design an otherwise splendid referee dealt us a cruel card at the end. There is a sudden consensus that rugby needs a siren or something to call time. This is not like us.

Anyone who has watched rugby for a while is well accustomed to the tantalising ways of referees' time. It is one of the games' little charms that you never quite know when it will end. There is less danger that a team in the lead will dick about for the last few minutes.

They have to play hard to the whistle and All Black teams have been particularly good at it. Over the years they have broken the hearts of many a Welshman who imagined with fulltime on the clock that Wales had a match in the bag. Now we are making the same excuse. It is not like us.

We are normally cruelly honest with ourselves, often to excess and never more so than after the World Cup last year. Maybe that needless self-flagellation has left us too delicate yet to face another disappointment.

Especially when it concerns the new captain. A nation desperate for leadership has raised Todd Blackadder to the status of a national icon. Even serious journals are writing in awe of his niceness, modesty and conspicuous decency.

Jim Anderton is said to have remarked not so long ago that New Zealanders looked up to the likes of Todd Blackadder rather than Russell Coutts. What does that say about us? Coutts is the best in the world at what he does. Blackadder is a very ordinary rugby player, too slow really for international competition nowadays.

He is in the team solely because the players like him and will do their utmost for him. Leadership of that sort has to be out front. That unforgiving final minute on Saturday found the captain off the pace. When he needed to be marshalling the team to close it out, he was pleading for fulltime. In confusion they lost two lineouts and backpedalled 70m.

But we're not ready to notice. Blame the referee's watch instead.

It's quite a contrast to last year. When you look back on it, why did we get into such a paroxysm over the loss of a single match that mattered.

"Face it. We weren't good enough," wailed a typical commentary at the time. We had, a few months before, won the Tri-Nations series (again) - a much tougher league than the World Cup. Earlier in the season Canterbury won the Super 12, as Auckland or Canterbury have done in all five years the series has been running.

The World Cup is a tournament. The particular appeal of tournaments is that the best do not necessarily win. It is always possible that Tiger Woods will have a bad round. Pete Sampras can have an off-day in the first week of a grand slam. A third division club on a good day might put Manchester United out of the FA Cup.

A second-rate rugby team can put even the All Blacks off their game (once) with a bit of fire and thuggery.

It makes things interesting but when it comes to ranking players and teams, nobody uses a single tournament. Yet we call the Australians world champions and continue to read that this year's mission is to haul our rugby out of some sort of crisis. There never was one, except in our self-confidence. Our resources remain deeper and richer than those of any other rugby-playing place.

It is a mark of serious national insecurity that defeat in a World Cup semifinal should have so shaken our confidence in the one thing we do better than anybody in the world.

We didn't need to despair last year and we don't need excuses for momentary failures now. It's not like us.