KEY POINTS:
It's becoming harder and harder to get the boot as a sports coach in this country. Impossibly so.
Here we are, almost at the year's end, and despite a series of disasters the only sack in sight is the one being carried by the portly Christmas present deliverer.
At this rate, someone will start a "Bring Back Paul Nevin" campaign.
Our sport has become the antithesis of reality shows. On TV, people get voted off, leaving a winner. In New Zealand sport, people get voted back in and we are left with losers.
The latest in this survivor series is Gary Kemble, whose major claim to fame as a coach is ... (fill in the blank if you can).
A trivia question: What is Gary Kemble's greatest achievement as a coach? Answer: His Houdini act in not getting sacked as Kiwi coach on Friday.
Kemble's coaching career is so obscure that not only do most people not know what he's won, which is hardly anything, they don't even know what he's lost.
That was, of course, until he ran amuck as the Kiwi coach against Australia and Great Britain in 2007, during which the only thing that grew was some Kiwi players' girths.
In decades of watching the Kiwis, nothing matches the soul-destroying, heartless efforts of those who wore the national jersey this year and the atmosphere of uninterest in test football that accompanied their failure. The Kiwis didn't just lose test matches, they lost identity.
The drab Kemble may bleat that top stars were unavailable, but his players were out of professional ranks and should still have been good enough to test Great Britain. Where, for a start, was the absolute desperation for the cause that a test match demands? The Kiwis relied on a couple of individuals, including particularly captain Roy Asotasi, and were not a team at all.
It's a rough business, kicking a man when he's down, but Kemble should have been kicked out. Pronto.
I aim this question in all seriousness at any Kemble supporter: where in Kemble's record lies even a speck that tells you he might be a winning football coach who draws the best out of players or enthuses the supporters? Much of representative league - namely test and State of Origin matches - involves short, sharp, high-pressure assignments demanding precise tactics and the ability to instantly push the right buttons.
Yet Kemble's career is of grey, mid-table meanderings and cushy, highly forgettable NZRL assignments.
The NZRL needed to quickly recognise their mistake. That's the problem, of course, because the NZRL - like its rugby counterpart - turned a simple coaching decision into a complex arse-covering exercise in which they refused to make the ultimate admission of errors.
New NZRL chairman Ray Haffenden, a well-intentioned character, reckoned they needed consistency. After a year of tragic losses, consistency - you would have thought - was the last thing they needed if consistent still means more of the same. What the Kiwis actually need is a ground zero, to steal a scoreline they managed against both the Aussies and Brits.
Kemble is a failure who kept his job thanks to everybody else's failings.
The true extent of this disastrous state for New Zealand league was revealed over the weekend, when Australia offered the hand of charity in an effort to prop up the international game.
The ARL chief executive Geoff Carr all but gift wrapped the Brisbane coach Wayne Bennett as a mentor for Kemble.
"If he can help make them competitive it'll just add to the spice of the tournament," said Carr, about next year's league World Cup.
Carr had the temerity to add that the World Cup would benefit from a resumption of the Bennett-Ricky Stuart rivalry, as if international league should rely on a spat between Aussie coaches.
What next: should we stand at the Auckland docks perhaps, waiting for vats of Wally Lewis holy water or tablets bringing us the teachings of Mark Geyer to arrive while waving goodbye to the good ship National Pride.
If we need any outside help we'll hunt it down ourselves, thanks very much, without any humiliating glad-handing from across the Tasman.
My belief is that the NZRL administrators couldn't resist sticking with a coach they can control or influence. Kemble is a company man.
Graeme Norton would be a better bet as a home-based Kiwi coach even though he has spent some of the latter years in the wilderness. Norton is far from a sure bet of course, but he's a much better one than Kemble. At least he had a part in the good times the Kiwis experienced under Brian McClennan, giving him a potential foot in the door with the glory boys who live in Australia.
Norton is a touch zany, with a boyish enthusiasm. He just might have drawn a few top drawer performances out of our transtasman superstars.
The awful truth though is that there are no obvious, dead-set answers to the Kiwis' woes.
The really wretched truth is that some of the players who have been allowed to pull on the Kiwi jersey of late don't give a stuff anyway. They would happily play for Libya in the World Cup if Colonel Gaddafi robes were all the rage in the Sydney nightclubs.
Coaching the Kiwis is a damn tough job and the NZRL should get real and ditch the residency rule, to at least bring potentially strong overseas candidates - hopefully of New Zealand origins - into the equation.
And if there is an immediate answer out there, it is not Gary Kemble. The Kiwis need a strong, dominant, even colourful character who will make the team his own.
The NZRL should have had another flutter instead of flogging a dead horse.
