KEY POINTS:
Are you ready to be heartbroken? asked Lloyd Cole on his 1984 debut album.
A pertinent question for people like him - he was a philosophy student at Glasgow University with an interest in post-war American fiction, French new wave cinema and golf - and for All Black supporters as a World Cup enters the sudden death phase.
Personally, I was ready because about a month before the tournament began I dreamt that the All Blacks lost to France in the quarter-finals by the narrowest of margins, squandering a scoring opportunity in the dying minutes. You may scoff - I would - but it's true.
Now I'm a card-carrying sceptic but, even if I believed in clairvoyance, I wouldn't regard this as supporting evidence. And just for the record, I rarely dream about rugby although next time I do, I'll certainly whip down to the TAB the next morning.
It was simply a case of my resting mind processing information and coming up with the worst-case scenario in the somewhat superstitious hope that disaster imagined is disaster averted.
The botched draw meant there was always a distinct possibility of the All Blacks having to play France in the quarter-finals. Given their national pride and the expectation generated by their triumphant hosting of the 1998 soccer World Cup, it was only to be expected that in that eventuality the French would move heaven and earth to avoid being ejected from their own party. Furthermore, the notion that the French are hopeless away from home is spurious, as anyone who was at Eden Park on Bastille Day, 1979, can vouch for.
If there's a silver lining, it's that successive World Cup implosions have induced a degree of fatalism. Yes, there are demands for heads to roll but the foul lynch mob atmosphere of 1999 and, to a lesser extent, 2003, hasn't been replicated.
If Graham Henry goes, he should do so with the rugby community's thanks for he has been a distinguished coach whose failure to win the biggest prize of all was not for want of trying. However, I'm a little perplexed by his insistence that his strategies were correct.
It's not that I want self-flagellation but it seems at odds with his mantra - and the justification for his radicalism - that he had to do things differently because the way we've gone about it for the last 20 years hasn't produced the goods.
Henry was employing the ruthless accounting of high stakes competitive endeavour, be it war, politics, business or sport, which works backwards from the result disregarding mitigating factors, good intentions and the vagaries of fortune. The right strategies are those that deliver the desired outcome; those that fail to do so are, by definition, wrong.
It's probably not surprising that he's reluctant to apply this implacable logic to his campaign since being an intellectual contortionist with a highly selective memory seems to be part and parcel of coaching at the top level these days. Perhaps, too, coaches and athletes can't engage in self-interrogation until the flame of ambition has dimmed.
But are these serial failures in vital one-off games really about coaching strategies? If there's a common factor, it would seem to be the All Blacks were - to use a particularly dire example of sporting jargon - "out-passioned".
I don't share the view that professionalism has leached the soul out of our game and today's All Blacks lack the commitment and will to win of their predecessors. Apart from anything else, this is a strand of that dishonest nostalgia which makes out everything in the garden was lovely in the days when players had to buy their boots and the NZRU HQ was a barber's shop on Lambton Quay. Besides, the World Cup isn't the first monkey on NZ rugby's back: for 60-odd years we obsessed over our inability to win a series in South Africa.
But I do wonder if it's possible for our players to have the desire needed to be the best team in the world year in, year out and to push themselves to another level every four years against opponents who can husband their physical and mental resources.
The French have lower expectations of their rugby team - Bernard Laporte wouldn't be in his eighth year as coach otherwise. Maybe their players were able to be men possessed last weekend because they were able to be mice in their preceding encounters with the All Blacks, some of which resulted in humiliations on a scale that would bring out the lynch mob here.
