Comment: It's not all right here

What? Not an All White-wash on Thursday at the Halberg Awards?
Simply scandalous.
My preoccupation is with how the New Zealand footballers won every conceivable award, including the publicly voted "Most Memorable Sporting Moment of the Year", and yet not deemed good enough for the "Sportsman of the Year".
It surely was a tense night... so much so that former Commonwealth Games athletics champion Dick Tayler spat the dummy the next day and resigned from the 28-member judging panel.
For once another code - one that sissies in tight shorts played in the yesteryear - was challenging the national sport, rugby.
The atmosphere was so charged in the final leg that you could rub two chopsticks to ignite a flame. The rapturous clapping had subsided to a lukewarm affair as the gala night meandered towards the supreme award. Even the footballers, receiving the silverware, almost looked apologetic about stealing the thunder from the All Blacks, Kiwis and Silver Ferns contingents.
Someone please explain to me how a panel can venerate a team and their coach's input but bypass the captain.
Did All White skipper Ryan Nelsen bring shame to his country at the World Cup?
The answer is an emphatic no.
The only logical conclusion one can draw from the judging panel's decision to award the Sportsman of the Year award to ABs counterpart Richie McCaw is that Nelsen is in someway deficient either on/off the field.
Come on, not too many people in this country can boast playing for an English Premier League side, let alone leading them in a career spanning more than 200 games to date.
Perhaps Nelsen, in the throes of England's football season now, didn't help his case in opting to convey his muted celebration via a dodgy Skype connection.
I suppose, if anything, the vote for defender Winston Reid's dying-minute equaliser against Slovakia at the South Africa World Cup shows a general thread of where the public mindset is.
In fact, it was surprising how many rugby die-hards in Hawke's Bay paid tribute to the All Whites late in 2009 for winning the qualifier against Bahrain in Wellington to make the cup.
Nelsen, after all, had put aside his lucrative obligations to Blackburn Rovers to lead his country in a sport no one would have ever given them a chance of qualifying in, let alone winning. He played with a tummy bug against Paraguay.
Okay, it wasn't anywhere near the ball-breaking leadership from Wayne "Buck" Shelford in 1986 on the ABs' French tour but, ironically, that puts McCaw's case in perspective, too.
One could almost be forgiven for thinking McCaw's selection last night was a purely political gesture amid a collective sigh of relief that the elite awards hadn't totally snubbed the code.
"Here, you go son. Now go show the country you can win the Webb Ellis Trophy later this year and put an end to all this namby-pamby nonsense with football."
That an "irate, almost speechless" Tayler, the Canterbury Rugby Supporters' Club president, publicly denounced the All Whites but much later declared to TV he voted for the ABs speaks volumes.
The bottom line is more than 200 countries play the beautiful game around the world compared with 95 in rugby, 70 in netball and 57 in rugby league.
In rugby you can cut to the chase to say the ABs, Springboks, the Wallabies and England/France will make the semifinals.
In rugby league and netball it's Australia, New Zealand/England final.
In football, nations play gruelling qualifiers to the last 32 and, even then, it's near impossible to unequivocally pick the winners.
If winning is the criteria, then why aren't the consecutive four-time champion Black Ferns on the Halberg Award podium?
Double standards in rugby perhaps or simply a case of apples with nectarines?