KEY POINTS:
Is anyone in your household eating through a straw? I didn't think so.
I only ask because this week Britain's Independent newspaper claimed that when almost 82,000 watched Wasps beat Leicester in the premiership final at Twickenham, "the occasion was marked by the sound of jawbones shattering on
the pavements of Auckland and Christchurch".
Actually simple common sense tells us the vast majority of New Zealanders were blissfully unaware that the game even took place, let alone how many people attended. But if the size of the crowd had been drawn to our attention, we wouldn't have been overly surprised because we are capable of doing the maths on big stadia and large, dense populations.
The writer rather gave the game away in the next paragraph by quoting former All Black Justin Marshall to the effect that everything in the garden of European rugby is far lovelier than it is here. Another thing New Zealanders can grasp is that when Marshall opens his mouth deserts bloom and wastelands re-vegetate, such is the fertiliser content of his utterances.
We shouldn't confuse this journalistic licence with a forthright or provocative expression of opinion, as some did when Herald sports columnist Chris Rattue told us what he really thinks about Graham Henry and the New Zealand Rugby Union.
It was said of the great English columnist Auberon Waugh that he was one of the few journalists who knew what to do when offered freedom of expression, setting out what he thought "in a stream of consciousness which thousands of readers recognised as their unexpressed, indeed carefully repressed, instinctive reactions".
Going by the reader response, Rattue's column had precisely that liberating effect.
Among those liberated was NZRU chief executive Steve Tew who confessed that he and his board were unaware of the antipathy towards Henry when they reappointed him. This was a curious admission since at the time the NZRU PR machine went into overdrive to create the impression that the weight of public opinion was pro-Henry, while Henry himself indicated that he'd reached the decision to reapply on a warm wave of public support. Perhaps they were disoriented by their own spin.
The same sort of double-think generates the exasperated demands from Henry, the NZRU and their dwindling band of cheerleaders that we draw a line under the World Cup fiasco and "move on".
It shouldn't need to be pointed out that, regardless of the merits or otherwise in a strict rugby sense of Henry's second coming, it was his insistence on reapplying and the NZRU's decision to reappoint him and allow Australia to acquire Robbie Deans that has kept the pot simmering, to come to the boil whenever the All Blacks play the Wallabies for the foreseeable future.
The apparent intention of some New Zealanders to cheer for the Wallabies has prompted outrage but it is, after all, rugby not war, and people support teams for all sorts of whimsical reasons.
Nor is it unprecedented for New Zealanders to cheer for the opposition.
In Kings of Rugby, one of the classics of the game's sparse literature, the celebrated Herald rugby writer T. P. McLean reported an astonishing degree of local support for the 1959 British Lions. The crowds at Carisbrook and Eden Park frequently set up chants of "Red! Red!" and when Don "The Boot" Clarke missed a penalty which would have denied the visitors victory in the final test in Auckland "a deepening roar broke out around the ground.
The strain in the sounds was relief - relief for the Lions' sake".
Personally I can't imagine the circumstances that would drive me to withhold my support from the All Blacks. Having said that, a mischievous thought lurks in that dark recess of my mind which houses the suspicion that we take this stuff a bit too seriously: should the All Blacks lose the Bledisloe Cup in comprehensive fashion, there'll be an outbreak of witch-hunting, backstabbing and arse-covering on a scale not seen since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
For those of us who, in our various ways, are students of human behaviour it could be a once in a lifetime opportunity.
We may be in for a tumultuous time but I suspect that once our focus becomes fixed on the 2011 World Cup, the perception of a game in crisis will recede and we'll realise that what unites us vastly outweighs that which divides us. The real question is: what happens after that?
