KEY POINTS:
Three times in the past few weeks I've heard or read Peter Bills, a British rugby writer for the Herald, recall a conversation he had with Graham Henry in Monaco last summer.
He says the occasion was a sponsor's dinner at which, sometime past midnight when they were
discussing the coming World Cup, the All Black coach said to him, "If we have to win it by tight, forward-based rugby, I would rather not win it."
Bills mentioned this on a radio call-in programme a day or two after the loss and the next caller could barely suppress his fury. If that was Henry's attitude, he said, he ought to have had the decency to hand over to someone more in tune with his country's priorities.
The call would have been the first of many. I switched off, my admiration of Henry higher by a hundredfold.
If he has since denied or clarified Bill's recollection I've not noticed. I dare say he would not have put it quite that way in the cold light of day; he'd say he'd been confident they could win without reducing the game to a contest of kicking for territory and tackling for advantage.
We were all confident. If then Henry had told us he'd rather not win it ugly we'd have been unconcerned. We were going to win well.
Now? The mob is braying for the blood of the brave. The dour rule again.
The loss could be less New Zealand's - we can win the dour game - than rugby's. The World Cup has left the game in trouble. It would be in less trouble if the Cup had descended to a dirge after the All Blacks departure, giving the game's rulers a resolve to change its laws, but it didn't.
The France-England semifinal and the final were not so bad. They were absorbing, as any close contest for a coveted trophy can be, and good fierce rugby - of a kind.
But not the kind that could keep television audiences watching every weekend.
The Super 14 is the sort of game a professional sport must be. Sadly its franchise coaches will have drawn the obvious conclusion from the past three weeks in France. Each match was won by the side most able to force the other to play with the ball.
This game matters more here than anywhere, even South Africa where soccer has a far greater following. Rugby is our foremost economic brand, our most popular national identity, an achievement in racial integration so effortless it goes unremarked.
Four years hence we will have hosted the World Cup. If the intentions of Martin Snedden's organising committee are realised it will have been an immensely warm, engaging experience for the whole country and players and supporters from visiting countries.
Visiting teams will have been hosted in provincial towns, feted by them, helped perhaps by a month or so of association with the province's rugby and supported by the locality when the team plays its pool matches.
Sports Minister Trevor Mallard has set up a $5 million agency to help promote those possibilities to councils, schools and community groups.
It is just a pity the number of teams could be reduced from the 20 teams that France hosted to 16 in 2011. That is supposed to reduce the number of one-sided matches in pool play.
But who really cares about those? Not the losers who are as glad to get a game in the big league as we were when the All Whites played Brazil. New Zealand is one place where matches between the minnows might attract keen local interest if a town has taken each of the teams to its heart.
A mere 16 teams would force a change of format for the tournament if it is to produce a decent number of games. One obvious way to create more games would be to replace the knock-out rounds with another round robin, or two, for the qualifiers from the pools.
Quite possibly a finals series would be held to find the winner. One or two commentators abroad are quick to suspect New Zealand wants to replace a one-off final with a series to suit its own chances of winning. They know Henry's team would have beaten any opposition more often than not, as the French coach was good enough to say.
That is one reason not to abandon the running game yet. But there is a better one. If we can host the next World Cup as well as we hope, we might not care quite so much if the All Blacks don't win it. Which perversely would probably help them win it.
But even if they didn't we might agree in the afterglow of hosting that it was better to play a brave game.
