Paul Thomas: Hansen won't be set in stone, but his language is a rare treat

Embattled All Blacks assistant coach Steve Hansen recently returned serve by pointing out that they don't build statues to critics.

He attributed this line to the legendary gridiron coach Vince Lombardi and the media took his word for it.

Lombardi might well have said it, but he didn't say it first: that distinction belongs to Finnish composer Jean Sibelius whose seven symphonies probably don't feature on Hansen's iPod. Nor would they feature on mine if I had one.

Sibelius has been vindicated by posterity. The Sibelius Monument, consisting of 600 stainless-steel tubes, is supposedly to Helsinki what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris.

He's also memorialised in New York, Toronto and the French capital.

By contrast one could wander the earth like Caine in Kung Fu without coming across monuments to those irked by the Finns' insistence on writing in a strictly tonal idiom.

Hansen, however, has some way to go. The critics were swift to point out that they don't build statues to losers, which is debatable: they do if they are ordered to.

Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-Il are recent examples of the urge to be immortalised in concrete, which is a conclusive symptom of megalomania.

If aliens were to conduct a survey of all the statues on earth, they'd probably conclude that what the human race admires and values above all else is insane ambition and indifference to suffering, particularly that of one's compatriots. It would have sufficed to point out that they don't build statues to rugby coaches.

Sibelius isn't the only high achiever to have hit back at critics with a dismissive one-liner. The spiky English singer-songwriter Graham Parker reckoned that "some people are in charge of pens that shouldn't be in charge of brooms".

Vice-president Spiro Agnew labelled the Nixon Administration's big-name critics "nattering nabobs of negativism", although their negative view of him proved resoundingly correct when he resigned in disgrace to avoid criminal charges.

Perhaps most memorably Irish playwright Brendan Behan wrote that critics "are like eunuchs in a harem: they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves".

There's an echo here of the retaliatory sneer delivered by more than one under-fire All Black down the years: "How many tests did you play?" Paradoxically there's a similar subtext to much of the criticism of forwards coach Hansen who, in his playing days, was neither a forward nor an All Black.

I hope the campaign to oust Hansen doesn't succeed, if for no other reason than he shows promise as a phrasemaker who occasionally provides relief from coach-speak, that mish-mash of utter banality and management jargon that transforms teams into groups and wins and losses into outcomes.

His summing up of the All Blacks' almost unwatchable performance against Italy - "Flush the dunny and move on" - was the authentic Kiwi male voice: earthy, laconic, vividly to the point.

Drawing on his experiences as a policeman, he observed that pressure wasn't being the coach of a misfiring All Black team - pressure "is when you have to knock on someone's door and say 'I'm sorry, your son just died'."

Yes, this is a reworking of Australian cricketing great Keith Miller's comment that pressure is "having a Messerschmitt up your arse", but none the worse for that.

Like Miller, a pilot during World War II, Hansen comes to the contest armed with life experiences that give him a sense of perspective not always evident in professional sport.

Some may ask what difference it makes whether he was a cop or a lighthouse keeper in a previous life, or indeed whether he actually had a previous life as opposed to having always made his living out of the game.

In Beyond a Boundary, often described as the finest cricket book ever written, the Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James answered those questions with a question of his own: "What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?"

A curious component of this palaver is the apparently widespread view that the New Zealand Rugby Union should step in and sack Hansen.

While this is usually couched in terms of bringing in new blood and fresh thinking, it would amount to the nine NZRU board members, only one of whom has a significant coaching background, deciding that they are better placed to evaluate Hansen's worth than Graham Henry is and forcing the latter to accept a right-hand man not of his choosing.

If that were to happen, one sincerely hopes that Henry would tell the NZRU, the critics and the talkback lynch mob to go to hell. If he did, I'd chip in for a statue to him.