KEY POINTS:
The mission: to pore over the latest Bledisloe Cup tape and decide whether Richie McCaw is a cheat or not.
In other words, do the McCaw maligners - including opposition coaches in this country - have a point when they say he gets a free ride from referees.
This was the assignment handed down by the boss a few days ago. Gee, thanks.
No person - not even a couch-slouch with a laptop - should be forced to watch that Eden Park game again. Have mercy. It was bad enough the first time.
What's more, there will never be a definitive answer to the McCaw question. So why try, yet again?
The boss' response: get the tape rolling.
And he has a point. You just know that this is a story which is sure to rear its head at the World Cup, if not before, especially if Springboks coach Jake White or an Aussie tabloid feel they are having a quiet week.
Ultimately, this is a ref's call. That's my out.
So let's cheat, and talk instead about cheating and the perception of it, rather than zeroing in on poor Richie.
Personally, I'm quite prepared, delighted even, to label that bludging, intercept-hunting South African wing Breyton Paulse as rugby's only out-and-out cheat. Paulse is so offside that he is a liability to his own team, yet he celebrates like a circus act when one of his hero-seeking burglaries comes off.
Everyone else gets a pass card however, because rugby is such a mishmash that the rules are begging to be broken. That's if you can understand them in the first place.
McCaw, Schalk Burger, George Smith, Phil Waugh and the rest have it tougher than most in continually dealing with the tackled-ball area. Demanding that footballers remain on their feet even when great hulks are crashing on top of them is about as logical as ringing up Campo and asking him to be quiet.
And when a sport has a rule stipulating that players must enter through an imaginary gate, then you can't blame the players for imagining that this entrance does not necessarily run at right angles to the sideline.
Quite frankly, you would defy anyone being able to decipher what goes on at the breakdown most of the time. Rugby is a jumble of bodies and confusion, and that's just in the commentary box. The rugby law book isn't a set of rules - it's an invitation to a street riot.
One clear observation about McCaw was possible from the Eden Park test however.
He liked to slide off the scrum illegally to disrupt Australia's possession at the back of a retreating pack. He tried it once and got away with it, but was nabbed by the referee a moment later.
Some might claim he was cheating at the scrums. Others would say that it's a player's job to test the referee and rules.
This is the essence of my argument. One man's cheat is another man's paragon depending on what side of the gate you are on.
When McCaw times his scrum disengagement brilliantly and is a defenceless hero being smashed to the ground while playing for the All Blacks, he is a superstar deserving of a parade up Queen St.
But when McCaw is sliding off scrums early and diving in at rucks while playing for Canterbury against Auckland, he is a rotten so and so who deserves to be put in stocks outside Britomart.
Sport is viewed through ever changing tints of glasses because it is an emotional experience, rather than an exact science. You can't justify all our reactions to sport, and you're not supposed to.
When Carl Hayman buried Matt Dunning into the ground at Eden Park, it was a colossus of the game dealing to a useless pudding who would have trouble holding up a bank with a rocket launcher. Yet Dunning is in danger of acquiring folk hero status in Australia, as a battler making good. I might be exaggerating his status a little, but you get the point.
When a couple of All Black props were dealt to by the South Africans 50 years ago, the visitors were vicious brutes fully deserving of the retribution dealt out to them by a white knight called Kevin Skinner.
Skinner was a hero here. South Africa reckoned he was a thug.
Put it another way. Colin Meads is the greatest player in the history of the game, although you still meet Australians who reckon he is an SOB who tried to tear Ken Catchpole in two. Meads is No 1 in New Zealand, but an Aussie paper said he was "reviled" when placing him eighth on a list of the most feared sportsman ever.
What about Sean Fitzpatrick? He was loved by All Black fans, but when in Auckland colours some of those same fans concurred with South Africans who regarded him as a cheat of Antichrist proportions.
There are exceptions to these twisting rules of parochialism. Some Englishmen revered Jonah Lomu more than Kiwis did, and there are New Zealanders who go out of their way to say nice things about John Eales even though he stabbed us through the heart so many times. Eales had a pleasant face and a nice-boy haircut, which helped.
Aussie Tim Horan was widely regarded as the game's best inside centre in this country, but if he had been a Pom we'd have called him an over-rated softie. Not that they would ever produce a back as good as Horan.
Back to cheating or gamesmanship or whatever you want to call it. It's a tricky topic and one where the assessments are heavily skewed by the starting point - which is invariably a bias.
Parochialism aside, there is an ethereal zone known as the spirit of the game which governs this subject but even then the guidelines are extremely obscure.
There are acts which are easy to categorise of course. Anyone who gets hold of the Tour de France's yellow jersey, for instance, is a career criminal conducting chemical warfare.
Other areas are less certain, contradictory even.
Cricket batsmen who shake their head towards the umpire then grab an ear lobe even though "snicko" is doing impressions of a seismograph in the Nevada desert are largely immune from persecution. Yet bowlers who get hair gel on the ball are the lead item on the 6 o'clock news.
Cheating is so subjective - apparently there are people out there who even like Paulse.
A final word on McCaw.
Hush you naysayers with ulterior motives - all right-minded and God-fearing folk who pay their taxes and seek out little old ladies to help across the road know in their heart that McCaw is a genius who lives on the right side of the law. Except if he is playing for Canterbury, of course, when he is a ratbag and a cheat.
