OPINION: Valuable lesson in greedy dog tale

Jared Smith

How many of you remember the story of the The Dog and its Reflection, which comes from the Aesop's Fables in Ancient Greece?

I'll make it a little easier - it's the one about the greedy dog with a bone who's crossing a bridge and looks in the water, sees another dog with an equally tasty-looking morsel, and proceeds to drop his own prize trying to get it.

The fable doesn't just cover off the moral warning to abandon the foolish desire to reach for more than you have.

It even more simply screams out the advice, "don't make bone-head decisions".

Given the Tasman rugby team proved in Nelson on Thursday night they have adept ability with their forwards' passing interplay and solid execution all around the park, maybe coach Leon MacDonald should just sit them down for a literary lesson?

There was no sane reason, other than perhaps allowing for the mental handicap known as arrogance, to throw caution to the wind well after the fulltime whistle with a 30-24 advantage by continuing to have a futile crack at a bonus point try against one of the best counter-attacking teams in the ITM Cup.

Especially not with the sharp manner in which today's officials stand poised with whistle to lips for any possible hint a player has lost his feet when going through the gate.

Taranaki, already justifiably annoyed about the dubious try awarded to Jimmy Cowan, had nothing to lose with 80m of ground to cover back across Trafalgar Park.

And then the former Wanganui boy - Waisake Naholo - getting just half a sniff, just half a gap, was all it took.

A ball which should have been sent sailing into the stands two minutes beforehand was instead planted 15m to the left of the goal posts, with Naholo slamming it down again during his jubilant celebration for good measure.

A few weeks ago I watched the Sky Sports post-game panel where 'Sumo' Stevenson asked the somewhat pertinent question, "are Canterbury killing this competition"?

The uncomfortable-looking guests then quickly moved to refute that belief by saying that rather than "killing it", the seemingly unbeatable Cantabrians were merely showing the way with the quality of their performances and the cultivated depth of their talent.

In fact, one of them spoke up, Tasman had showed they have cottoned on to their senior Crusaders franchise partner by emulating Canterbury's structure and development programmes with their own academy set up.

This was why the Nelson-Marlborough amalgamation has enjoyed reasonable success recently against the Red 'n Blacks, he said.

Evidently, despite an 11-game winning streak going back to last September, they still have a lot to learn.

There is no earthly way any Canterbury team would have risked the four competition points they had already banked in the search for one more with a dangerous opponent still within striking distance.

That 30m ruck ball would have been surrounded, protected, and then booted backwards into oblivion.

Champion teams find a way to win, they don't go searching for new ways to lose.