Award winning Herald on Sunday columnist Dylan Cleaver comments on Graham Henry's reappointment.
KEY POINTS:
Make no mistake: the reappointment of Graham Henry was a political decision.
How else do you explain away the fact that every vanquished All Blacks World Cup coach has lost his job except the one who lost earliest and in the most embarrassing fashion.
When you look at it in a wider context there is even greater reason to dump Henry. He made the World Cup his stated obsession and everything New Zealanders hold dear about their rugby was compromised in order to achieve that goal.
Undeserving players were made All Blacks, sometimes just once or twice before being discarded; the concept of a 1st XV, which from school level up is the essence of rugby, was destroyed; and the interests of second-tier (Super 14) and third-tier (NPC) rugby were trampled on in the search for The Holy Grail.
But the irony is those failings probably saved Henry his job.
Every idea he presented to the board, whether it be fundamentally sound or straight out of looney tunes, was rubber stamped before you could say "Hail to Henry the All Powerful".
How could the board then turn around and say "we made a horrible mistake". The answer, as we have found out today, is they couldn't. Mea culpa is a concept completely alien to the New Zealand Rugby Union. Up to today it's been alien to Graham Henry as well.
However Henry appears to have passed his first test with flying colours. There was none of the "we wouldn't change anything" truculence that stained his post-World Cup performance.
When asked whether he would repeat the controversial reconditioning programme Henry did not baulk.
"There will be a lot of discussion around that. In hindsight it was probably a mistake. I will rephrase that - it was a mistake. We need to sit down and rethink it."
Henry is a good coach and if you judge his body of work as a whole rather than just a failed campaign, then the case for his re-appointment is compelling. Robbie Deans is a good coach too. No matter which way the board went the All Blacks weren't going to lose.
But what sticks in the craw is the feeling that this was never really a contest: the board was only ever going to go one way.
