KEY POINTS:
The All Blacks' intention to hold players back from their provinces in the Air New Zealand Cup was no surprise. Hearing they will play in-house training matches was.
I think this is a tacit admission the rotation and rehabilitation programme has fallen down. Practice matches, especially those within a squad, are often without meaning.
However, I think Graham Henry and co have decided things haven't quite gone to plan and they need more time to put their players together, to give them time in combinations and to play to their game plans - rather than letting them go back to provincial rugby.
They'd get game time there all right - it's just that it would be at provincial level and to someone else's game plan. That's not what the All Blacks need right now. They haven't had enough rugby at top level and, for me, that's the only way you can interpret this need for practice matches within the squad.
I am not saying the whole r&r business is a failure. We have to see how the World Cup pans out for that. But every day, that particular day of reckoning grows closer.
I don't think it has gone according to plan and these practice matches are an adjustment - and an acknowledgement of that.
I heard Wayne Smith say the All Blacks did something similar ahead of the end-of-year tour last season - and that they came out of the blocks with real intensity then. Fine, but the players didn't have anything like the r&r programme they've had this year.
My fear is we have created real player depth but we might not have given enough of that depth enough rugby up to now. Take lock as an example. This is a position where we were weak at international level and Graham Henry has built up the numbers of locks who are All Black quality and can play a leading role in test matches.
Fine, great job. But look again and tell me which lock has had enough rugby. Injury has played a big part but so has the whole r&r thing - and I think the All Blacks generally have ended up with too few players having played enough and without enough time to develop combinations.
That's what these in-house matches are all about.
I also found it quite hard to hear Graham Henry saying "they" (the All Blacks) had their mind on the World Cup against Australia.
Well, gee, I wonder who put that thought in their minds? And what happened to "we"?
If they had a game plan and did not play to it, it is the players' fault. But if they had a game plan, played to it and lost, it's the coaches' fault.
This season has been marked by a series of initiatives designed solely to get All Blacks right and in peak form for the World Cup.
Small wonder they are thinking only of the World Cup and not, as Sir Edmund Hillary said when asked how he got to the top of Everest: "By never looking up and by putting one foot in front of the other."
