Paul Thomas: It may not be a beautiful game - but it's ours

When my mother wanted to highlight the dangers of self-absorption, she'd tell the story of the doting parents who watched their soldier son on parade and decided, "Everyone's out of step except our Johnny".

Every four years the soccer World Cup causes us to ponder our devotion to rugby. With South Africa and even Wales tilting towards the round-ball code, only here and in a few small South Pacific countries is rugby the unchallenged national game.

So who's out of step here: the rest of the world or us?

The insecurity is prompted by the scale, colour, passion and drama of the soccer World Cup which makes the rugby equivalent seem pallid and pretentious. How can rugby claim to stage a world event when swathes of the planet are unrepresented and the winner is inevitably one of the five countries that make up the game's unofficial first division?

There's so much hype surrounding the soccer World Cup that it's easy to lapse into this subservient posture. Soccer seems the only game in town, but the spotlight can expose as well as flatter and the blemishes on the "beautiful game" are there for dispassionate observers to see.

The World Cup is more predictable than the cheer squad would have you believe. Since 1970 only five countries have won it, the same number as dominate rugby. Every second tournament is held in Europe yet no non-European country has won there since 1958. Sure enough, all this year's semifinalists were European.

It's arguable that soccer's global reach actually undermines the tournament's competitiveness, since participation is based on a qualification process which is more about ensuring a geographical spread than the strongest possible line-up.

A third of the top 32 teams in the world - according to Fifa's rankings - failed to qualify for Germany 2006 yet Angola (57) and Togo (61) were there in the capacity of group stage cannon fodder.

Incidentally, Fifa ranks 205 countries but to put this in perspective New Zealand comes in at 118. Just how beautiful a game would the Turks and Caicos Islands and American Samoa - 204 plays 205 - put on?

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder but there's no denying that soccer is a simple game, devoid of the all-in scrambles for possession that take up so many pages in the Laws of Rugby Union.

So why is the officiating so poor? It's difficult to watch Germany 2006 without concluding that perhaps rugby referees don't do such a bad job after all.

The phenomenal revenues generated by soccer's international popularity are blurring the line between sport and show business and creating a snout-in-the-trough culture reminiscent of Hollywood and Wall Street at their most venal.

Over the past five years England's Football Association has paid the enigmatic Swede Sven Goran Eriksson $72 million to coach its national team. The return on this staggering outlay has been disloyalty, a couple of low-rent sex scandals and a squad of multi-millionaire players who succumb with girly feebleness whenever they're obliged to take part in the penalty shoot-outs that have such a bearing on major tournaments.

But even that mountain of money isn't enough: as England prepared for their quarter-final, Eriksson's agent was doing the rounds of publishers hawking a tell-all autobiography with an asking price of $4.5 million.

We shouldn't be too precious about players diving in the penalty area since trying to gain an advantage by conning the referee - or cheating, as it was known to previous generations - is hardly confined to soccer.

In cricket, a game that was once a byword for sporting etiquette ("it's not cricket"), batsmen brazenly stand their ground fully aware that they hit the ball and fieldsmen launch appeals as rehearsed as an All Black haka fully aware that the batsman didn't get anywhere near it.

But surely there's no spectacle in sport as unedifying (or, for that matter, as unmanly) as that of players who've hardly had a finger laid on them thrashing around as if they're being savaged by invisible pit-bulls in the hope of getting an opponent sent off.

Rugby players are subjected to very real and mostly legal violence but where possible they pretend (out of self-respect, an unwillingness to give their opponent the satisfaction and, yes, machismo) that they didn't feel a thing. Stoicism is ingrained in the New Zealand game but there are indications that European players, constantly exposed to soccer's cynical theatrics, no longer feel bound by rugby's rough code of honour.

Tonight at Jade Stadium the All Blacks continue their long march towards next year's Rugby World Cup, an event which will rivet the nation and snuff out any lingering infatuation with soccer, a game which serves to remind us that beauty is skin-deep.

US President Franklin D. Roosevelt said of the Nicaraguan tyrant Anastasio Somoza, "He may be a son of a bitch but he's our son of a bitch." Rugby may be a violent, anarchic, absurdly complicated mess that holds little interest for much of the rest of world - but it's our mess.