KEY POINTS:
The chickens came home to roost in the land of the cockerel as Perpignan's superstar signing turned into the sick million-dollar man after precisely six hours of football for his French paymasters.
Daniel Carter's foreign lesion, a torn Achilles tendon, has cut short his European hiatus and the
French club will be mightily disappointed.
But their gloom will be nothing compared with the clouds that descend on New Zealand rugby if the game's perfect poster boy doesn't recover his form and fitness as this country sets after the holy grail that the rest of the world calls the 2011 World Cup.
The question must now be asked whether Carter's Achilles injury will be the downward turning point in a career that has managed to glitter despite not snaring World Cup gold.
Bad enough as the current situation is with Carter likely to miss the rest of this season, the unthinkable is that a foolhardy stint to give his bank balance a boost will cast an even longer shadow over his career.
It has been a disaster waiting to happen. This whole mad venture is one of a fate that should never have been tempted. The NZRU's fumbling hands are all over the failed fetlock, their fingerprints all over the crime scene.
Not that they will tell it that way of course.
No matter how bad the NZRU crashes, they've always got a press statement ready for a hasty trip to the accident scene.
The ambulance man at the bottom of the latest cliff is the All Black manager Darren Shand, who proclaimed that Perpignan had been very open about the state of Carter's health and his rehabilitation would be closely monitored. All Black doctor Deb Robinson and physiotherapist Peter Gallagher had been in touch. Well goodness gracious me.
It's hard to imagine what else Perpignan could be apart from open, what with Carter in plaster and probably due for a date with a surgeon's knife. The NZRU's outward confidence in Perpignan is naive at best and spin at worst. As for keeping in touch, how touching. The day that the NZRU knows everything that is going on at a French rugby club, and feels able to make a medical diagnosis half a world away, is the day that you and I will be able to get a check-up from the GP over the phone.
These days All Blacks can hardly hop on a bus without a fleet of support staff in tow. Yet this same overstaffed outfit is happy to proclaim they could monitor Carter's health without getting a stethoscope within 20,000km of the bloke.
Carter's Achilles injury surfaced early last month when it was described as a mild inflammation. Three weeks later he was back kicking Perpignan to victory and his season into touch.
The grandiose NZRU thrills to the sound of its own voice as they trumpet their beloved All Blacks' exalted place in the sporting world.
Would Manchester United, you have to ask, play so fast and loose with Ronaldo or Wayne Rooney? Would Sir Alex let his brilliant charges spend the summer playing for someone else, happy to check up on the potentially disastrous ailments over the phone?
Chalk this up as one more NZRU disaster in experimentation.
Carter's so-called sabbatical was morally and even perhaps legally indefensible because he was given an earning opportunity that is denied to 140-odd other professional rugby players in this country.
The NZRU not only created a loophole for their prized poster boy, one which strains the bonds that help the All Blacks even in the professional age, but it always put his fitness and spark at risk.
Playing year-round rugby invites tiredness, which in turn invites injury. Even if he had returned without obvious sign of injury, playing without the usual break could still have had a long-term effect on his career.
And Carter was going to face extra pressure to play under duress and despite any injuries, because Perpignan were paying so much for his services and had no long-term consequences to consider.
So Carter flexed his muscles - well, the NZRU should have flexed theirs back.
Instead, brilliant innovation was the sad cry as Carter was given a temporary release by chief executive Steve Tew and his NZRU board while a compliant audience lapped the nonsense up.
The ticking time bomb has exploded. Carter has been left limping, just like the administration that opened the European door for their favourite son.
The expensive and poorly conceived World Cup campaign, the denigration of the Super 14 which preceded it, the self-serving report that followed the tournament, the self-interested reappointment of Graham Henry at the expense of the brilliant Robbie Deans, the national championship shambles including the Tasman/Northland fiasco, and now the nobbling of the All Black linchpin.
All of these have been self-inflicted wounds. Yet this ailing beast keeps staggering on.
- Frazier v Ali. Navratilova v Evert. Borg v McEnroe. Nicklaus v Palmer. Great sporting rivalries don't get better than those. The developing rivalry between Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer wrote another marvellous chapter at the Australian Open.
How long will this wonderful contest endure, though? There's no doubt that Nadal is still soaring towards his prime, and his ability on clay brings a rare versatility to his supremacy. The question now is can Federer find a tougher physical edge to match Nadal's game.
- The shocking lbw decision against Brendon McCullum in the first Chappell-Hadlee cricket one-dayer at Perth is a vote for the introduction of mandatory video backup for umpires.
Video or no video, an international umpire should not have got a decision like that wrong, because McCullum got an enormous inside edge on to his pads.
The television commentators were spot on with their views on video umpiring - if it is going to be introduced it should be controlled by the umpires themselves, and not through the use of challenges by players.
- Who will win? It's the age-old sporting question, and I've heard it asked a lot lately. The difference this time, though, is that the subject is New Zealand boxing. The June clash between David Tua and Shane Cameron has the x-factor. It's got people talking.
So who will win? Time to put the neck out - and I've got no hesitation in saying Tua.
Tua has a strong neck and chin and better fighters than Cameron have been unable to knock him down. Even if Tua isn't in his best shape, he should still get enough of that left hook on to Cameron to damage the Mountain Warrior's fragile skin and put an end to the fight. A Tua TKO. That's this boxing layman's tip.
