KEY POINTS:
Something strange happened late in the match during Saturday night's Bledisloe Cup test in Hong Kong.
One bloke had the ball and a bunch of other blokes piled into him. Then they all fell over. Then, strangely, they - I believe the antiquated expression is - "competed for
the ball".
Older readers might recall a word from the distant past: "ruck". It's a hard guttural syllable from an age when single syllables carried menace and sprigs drew blood.
In Saturday's (sadly brief) re-enactment of those days gone by, All Black players piled in and blasted Wallabies off the ball. Irish referee Alan Lewis, as he had for most of the match, let the men in black get away with pretty much what they wanted.
But there was much that was strange about the weekend's cash-struck grab for Asian markets. The front-rowers and the referee both had different ideas about which set of rules the match was being played under: The Old Ones, the Super 14 ELVs, the Tri-Nations ELVs or the customary Irish-Whistler's-Whimsy variety. The later set of rules prevailed at scrum time and some variation on them is to be expected in the weeks ahead as Wayne Barnes and friends pop up to run the matches in the Grand Slam.
Wallaby playmaker Matt Giteau also forgot which set of rules were in effect, wellying the ball directly into Row Z after it had been passed to him inside his own 22. When players as clever as the Aussie stand-off are making fundamental errors about the rulebook, something odd is going on.
The surrealism was aided by Wallaby captain Stirling Mortlock's delivery of a double entendre for the ages in his post-match interview: "There were times where all 15 from both sides were sucking some big ones."
Maybe you should have been concentrating on the match, Stirling?
Disgracefully, given the effort and incongruity of flying both teams up there, it wasn't even a sellout.
But oddest of all was the location. The venue for Saturday's game - roughly equidistant between the heartlands of rugby in western Europe, Australasia and that mob perched on the southern tip of Africa - was strangely apt, because this is a sport in the midst of an odd transition.
Certainly for the Southern Hemisphere powers, we're in the transit lounge of a journey that will show us what, if anything, can be done to battle the power of the European currencies. Can we clutter our fixture list with enough oddities to bring in the cold, hard foreign currency needed to keep the Carters and McCaws of future generations based on these shores?
But there is, perhaps, an element of baby and bath water about all this. We want to keep the best and brightest here so the black jersey will retain its mana and lofty place in the global sporting stratosphere. Logically, in order to keep these characters here we need to pay bigger salaries, so we need to get more money for the big games. Hence, a heavily sponsored jaunt to Hong Kong, and next year's mooted visit to Denver. What price Dubai and Las Vegas?
(Memo to Steve Tew: Roger Federer once played Andre Agassi on the helipad of the Hotel Burj Al Arab. Mark out a wee footie pitch on the helipad, bang some posts on either end and we could take on the Boks up there with wealthy emirati watching from a fleet of circling luxury helicopters. With the money from that we could, er, safeguard heartland rugby in Manawatu. Or buy Manchester City Football Club.)
But amid the giddying vision of Colorado teens throwing aside their Nuggets caps and rushing to purchase All Black merchandise, we might want to slow down and consider if we actually need all that cash.
Since we started out on this path as a means of preserving the mana of the jersey we love we ought to consider how that mana will look when its smeared thin. These are the All Blacks, not the Harlem Globetrotters.
Here's a thought, maybe the NZRU should seek less money - let the star players go to Europe and select them as and when available. Yeah, it'll be a hassle and, yeah, half the time the best ones won't make the trip. But look at the alternative: Bledisloe Cup games played anywhere but here.
And if All Black coaches have less time with their young charges in the lead up to World Cups, they'll have less opportunity to mess up the coaching. Selectors would be so grateful to have players available in the international windows, they'd have no choice but to put the best ones on the field and forget all that rotation garbage.
Brazilian football players don't have their lives micro-managed by the Brazilian Football Association, but when they come together for a big tournament they're not too bad.
So let them go. Stop this mad dash for transtasman rugby to be played in transatlantic locales and let's preserve the dignity of the jersey we love.
Our players' talents are bounteous, their dedication supreme: They deserve to be rewarded financially. But why not let some crazed French comic book magnate or Lord Loaded of Rugby-upon-Tyne be the one paying the bill?
Besides, a season or two standing around in the rain at Leicester or Llanelli hoping to get a second touch of the ball before the final whistle might remind young Kiwi players of the sunny virtues of home. Unless, of course, they're from Southland, from where the English midlands look positively tropical.
