Chris Rattue: Credit where it's due - Henry has done well

Graham Henry deserves praise for keeping a struggling team in the Tri-Nations hunt and retaining the Bledisloe Cup. Photo / Getty Images

The Olympic flame was put out in Sydney nearly a decade ago, but the rugby one burned brightly, in a flickering way, in that city's gigantic sports stadium on Saturday night.

Having despaired at the Springboks' aerial ping-pong game last week, we should now give the brain a rest and the heart a chance by jumping off the bandwagon which has veered around the planet in search of rules to make rugby near perfect.

Rugby was always a sport of glaring imperfections, and you suspect it always will be. But rugby is not alone in that, as watchers of crucial games in World Cup soccer finals will know.

If rugby had been so wonderfully spectacular down the years, why was the 1973 clash between the Barbarians and All Blacks at Cardiff Arms Park trumpeted as the game to end all games?

The reason, of course, is that rugby can be very dour, a world of fits and starts. A couple of Welsh sidesteps, an end-to-end try, and hey presto, you had the greatest game in history back in the day.

At the highest level, trench warfare in the forwards, botched tries, refereeing atrocities and all the other ugly stuff are as much a part of the fascination and lore as the magical moments.

It would still be nice to get the obsessive kicking reduced, but it becomes self-defeating if you get too hung up on the tactics.

Saturday night's test was fantastic stuff. I watched it with an old mate, and it doesn't get better than that. We reminisced about getting up in the dead of night as kids to watch the All Blacks and Springboks duke it out in 1976; we argued about Graham Henry and Robbie Deans and agreed on other matters.

Later on, while watching English soccer champions Manchester United tear apart Wigan in the wee hours, I read an email from a friend, a middle-aged soccer star of the Liverpool persuasion who now lives in the shadow of Eden Park. His footie team had been given the runaround by a couple of younger opponents - I presume they were sprightly 40-year-olds with at least one good knee each - in Saturday's Whangaparaoa sun, and he urged me to remind anyone and everyone that we are incredibly lucky to live where we are.

I woke up a few hours later just excited to be alive.

For this punter, Saturday night's test match was gripping and contained almost everything a fine test match should. Maybe it was the mood I was in. There is sometimes an indefinable rationale to these things.

You could analyse Saturday night's match to death and still end up in a dead end. One of the post-match interviewers talked about it as a return to running rugby. Yes, there was a lot of running around, but with all the botched moves - and this is an ideal point to suggest that Luke McAlister's reintroduction has done nothing for the All Blacks' cohesion - it certainly wasn't running rugby in its pure form.