KEY POINTS:
A World Cup report which says New Zealand rugby places too much importance on the tournament is itself a mighty 47 pages long.
The two authors should have taken 40 leaves out of their own book and themselves less seriously.
They are from diverse backgrounds by stereotype.
Don
Tricker was a star in softball, where players revel in deciding trophies at frantically short tournaments before enjoying straight-talking sessions in thebeer tent.
Mike Heron is a lawyer, a profession that can turn anything into a long stretch and where it takes years just getting to the bar.
Legal eagle beats rough diamond in the Independent Review of the 2007 Rugby World Cup Campaign, and none of us should be surprised. Sceptics predicted the report would be a New Zealand Rugby Union arse-covering exercise, but maybe the authors were too concerned about their reputations.
Thus, the hardline All Black World Cup campaign has been met with a soft response. Considering the debris it left and scale of the failure, the report has left the door open for self-praise by virtue of such faint damnation.
High-level sport is a rough-and-tumble arena requiring sharp decision making. The report is genuine and thorough, but its fair-play ethos leads to contradictions instead of rip-roaring conclusions.
On one hand, the report says the NZRU board followed "good governance" in endorsing the controversial conditioning programme which stripped Super 14 teams of leading All Blacks for two months. On the other, it criticises the board for allowing an "untested initiative with wide ranging impacts" without taking more time to consider it and without seeking outside advice.
The conditioning programme is also criticised for being "one size fits all" yet is said to have been based on a sound premise.
Look hard enough and there are enough bullets in the report to conclude that Heron and Tricker found the World Cup campaign to be riddled with holes, including in the boardroom.
Still, it is contradictory, verbose, full of escape routes and too fascinated with the mechanics of preparing a footy team at the expense of being ruthless about the results.
It reveals that Graham Henry and his fellow All Black coaches demanded the team attempt a drop goal late in the quarter-final loss to France in Cardiff. The players ignored the directive, although if rugby communication is to be judged by the Heron-Tricker report, the players may have thought it was only an option.
The report has humour, but only of the unintentional variety via a naive fascination with rugby training.
One section states: "The average gain in lean muscle mass during the conditioning programme was 1.5kg ... this is a significant result and was reflected in the number of players who attained personal best body composition scores during the RWC."
Quick, someone organise a tickertape parade for the body composition champs.
In the end though, you take what you want out of these reports and most of us have made up our minds anyway.
Whatever the ins and outs, taking a team as dominant as the All Blacks to the World Cup and missing the semifinals is such a clear-cut failure that Henry had to be replaced by the brilliant Robbie Deans. That is the law of the sports jungle - Henry did his best but it just wasn't good enough to survive when a man of Deans' pedigree was waiting to take over.
The report doesn't even offer an opinion on whether Henry should have been retained, which was the crux of the post-World Cup debate.
This tome says too little using too much, and is way too late.
It will allow the NZRU to claim that they have thoroughly investigated the World Cup disappointment, allowing them to escape taking full responsibility.
So, New Zealand rugby will trundle on with a frustrating lack of debate from within its all-encompassing walls.
A lesson here is that invigorating debate is not about token free speech but rather is a means of influencing events.
Just this week, the Chiefs coach Ian Foster could be seen on television toeing the "we'll just get on with the rugby and leave the decisions to those above us" line, as if the game is administered by a pack of Solomons.
The analysis and criticisms are continually left to the columnists, journalists, radio hosts and talkback callers in this country while a game that is funded entirely through the central office carries on as if it is a masonic lodge.
Wise men exist within the walls and we'd like to know what they think - for a start it would make rugby much more interesting.
It would have been far more meaningful if Crusaders boss Deans for instance, or maybe the various Super 14 chief executives, had questioned the World Cup policies more than a year ago.
