KEY POINTS:
It's mid-1940. The spectre of war stalks Europe. The appeasement of Adolf Hitler, which British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain claimed would deliver "peace in our time," has been exposed as the diplomatic equivalent of fool's gold.
Blinded by snobbery, wishful thinking and naivete, Chamberlain's Government has dragged its feet on rearmament and is in the process of bungling negotiations over an anti-Nazi alliance with the Soviet Union.
Backbencher Leo Amery addresses the House of Commons. Instead of assailing the wretched leaders of his own party by quoting Oliver Cromwell _ "Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!" _ he says the following: "Whatever your views on appeasement, we've got to put all that behind us and move on. I know some people think Winston Churchill should be in charge, but it's high time they got over it and rallied around Neville."
Clearly, one can go only so far with this analogy but the calls to move on from the All Blacks' World Cup pratfall and the murky decision to reappoint Graham Henry seem self-serving. Why shouldn't we dwell on them? Someone has to, given that the New Zealand Rugby Union is no more rigorous when it comes to self-examination than most large organisations.
The coaching soap opera _ the hype surrounding tonight's instalment recalls the `Who shot J. R. Ewing?' episode in Dallas _ is only a symptom of a wider malaise: the growing disenchantment of many New Zealanders with the game they grew up with and expected to remain devoted to for life.
There's a generational dimension to it, an instinctive recoil from aspects of professionalism which older folk find garish and contrived. But professionalism was inevitable and the professional game is arguably a more accurate reflection of society than the amateur game used to be.
More significant is the sense that the elite game is becoming ever more arrogant, insular, narcissistic and inclined to treat the public as dimwits or pests.
After the World Cup the NZRU board declared that it's more important to have a winning team year in, year out, than succeed at a quadrennial tournament, as if the two are mutually exclusive. So why did Henry justify his jarring innovations with the mantra that he had to do something different because conventional methods hadn't worked for 20 years, an explicit acknowledgement that everything was geared towards winning the World Cup?
The board also told us that the prospect of an unwanted Deans being snapped up by the Aussies wouldn't be a factor in their deliberations. Why not? What sensibly-run business wouldn't agonise over the implications of endorsing a management that had spectacularly failed to achieve a key strategic goal and thereby driving the obvious (and next generation) successor into the arms of a fierce competitor?
If there's one thing that triggers my unease with the elite game, it's the preciousness surrounding the haka. I've seen many a ragged and tipsy haka performed by Kiwis in various parts of the world but bystanders usually understood that what they were witnessing was a celebration of national identity, that shared sense of being New Zealanders.
What then are we to make of a group of players who decide that the haka as performed by generations of their distinguished predecessors isn't good enough for them, and take it upon themselves to devise a version for their exclusive use? How unworldly do you have to be to insist there's nothing wrong with making throat-slitting gestures at opponents before the commencement of a sporting fixture?
How self-important do you have to be to believe that your hosts have no right to determine the order of events before kick-off and how petulant to react to not getting your own way by doing the haka in the dressing-room, thereby disappointing the 80-odd thousand paying spectators who weren't party to the dispute?
We like to think that the All Blacks are to rugby what Brazil is to soccer: a team that combines style with substance, that remains faithful to a great tradition, that seeks to explore the possibilities of the game while their rivals' vision extends no further than the scoreboard.
This isn't a wholly biased or romanticised picture but it's an incomplete one, not least because pockets of the international rugby community find the All Blacks and the relentless mythologising which surrounds them increasingly hard to stomach. Those who run the game should be on high alert for signs that New Zealanders are coming around to this view.
When all is said and done though, once you've supported a team through thick and thin, you're never more than 90 minutes away from becoming a true believer again. Over to you, Mr Henry.
