Dylan Cleaver: Tough year for rugby

Sitiveni Sivivatu's kicking has improved. Photo / Getty Images

It is not just the All Blacks' season in the dock at Marseille on Sunday morning, the game itself is facing an increasingly hostile jury.

With the professional rugby season now spanning 10 months, we can no longer use the Shakespearean cliche of this being the winter of our discontent, but perhaps we can turn to Dickens and refer to rugby stadia in 2009 having largely been bleak houses. (Bleak in the major centres at least. Rugby seems to have undergone a rebirth of sorts in the provinces, so the obvious thing to do is cut four of them off at the knees - but that is a whole other story.)

If you need a poster-child for rugby's ills, consider this: Sitiveni Sivivatu has received rave reviews in the past few weeks, not because of his scintillating running but because of the improvement in his kicking game and kick receipt.

Ah, the romance of modern rugby.

Sivivatu, who, has been one of the players of the tour, will take his place on the wing for the All Blacks on Sunday morning, acutely aware as the rest of his colleagues will be that a loss to France would provide a bitter bookend to an ordinary year.

It was Les Bleus who rocked into Dunedin and demonstrated that the All Blacks could not be judged in isolation; that the relatively poor showing of New Zealand's Super 14 franchises was in fact evidence of a national rugby malaise.

Grinding wins against France and Italy followed before South Africa took all sorts of liberties against the men in black, beating them three times in the Tri-Nations.

They did so with a ruthlessly efficient, brutally ugly gameplan that involved hoofing the ball into the air, chasing the ball like men possessed and assailing the poor victim who happened to be standing under it. Rugby? No, try forceback with violence.

The fact you can no longer pass it back into the 22 and kick out on the full has not led to a more dashing spectacle as was hoped by the creators of rugby's maligned experimental law variations. Instead, it has meant that rugby is played from 30m to 30m, where a good kicking game allied to commitment at the breakdown reigns.

There is something flawed with a sport when it is advantageous to not have the ball; when attacking creativity has gone the way of the four-point try; when the search for space has been replaced with the need to "win your collisions".

There is no easy solution. Whereas rival codes such as league and American football have a clear demarcation between attack and defence, rugby was designed to be a contest for possession in every phase of play. That's the beauty of the sport - its ugliness comes in the confusing legislation surrounding that contest for possession.

The rules at the breakdown are a shambles, indecipherable to the wider public and paid lip-service to by players and coaches.

The scrums, as evidenced in the "Milanese Farce", are little better.

So we move in an era where we have bulked up Supermen crashing into equally bulked up targets. Guile and cunning should be their kryptonite, but they see so little of that it barely matters.

The All Blacks have not been able to offer an antidote. The handling and footwork that, World Cup years aside, have marked them out as not only the best side in the world but the best to watch, have gone missing in action.

Those with black eyepatches will tell you how wonderful it is that they have not conceded a try in Britain, but how many people watch sport for the beauty of a well-formed defensive line. Coaches do, that's who.

Just three times have the All Blacks crossed the line against vastly inferior opposition and yet they have looked like the 1973 Barbarians compared to their Sanzar mates. South Africa's tour has lurched from one limp display to the next while "Aussie Bob" Deans and his Wallabies are close to a national joke.

Have the Northern Hemisphere teams closed the gap? No, the Southern Hemisphere have done it for them through a numbing lack of ambition.

Something fundamental needs to change, and change fast - Marseille would be as nice a place as any to start.

If not, it is not just the lustre - let's not call it "aura" - of the All Blacks that will be fading, but the sport itself.