As we say goodbye to 2021 and welcome in 2022, it's a good time to catch up on the very best of the Herald columnists we enjoyed reading over the last 12 months. From politics to sport, from business to entertainment and lifestyle, these are the voices and views ouraudience loved the most. Today it's the top five from Gregor Paul.
Springboks' cynical ploy - September 27
How the Springboks choose to play rugby really is their business. If they think it's a good idea to kick the ball away in the last minutes of a test when they need to score three points, that's their prerogative.
Just as it's their choice entirely if they think hoisting the ball into the heavens from inside their opponents' 22 is a reasonable, well-deduced attacking plan.
Plenty of critics disagree, arguing that test rugby is in the entertainment business and the Boks a scourge in this quest to put bums on seats.
Malcolm Marx of the Springboks after their loss to the All Blacks in September. Photo / Photosport
ABs' breakout player - July 11
There are always going to be athletes who carry a sense of untold possibilities, an allure based on their genetic blessings.
Ethan Blackadder is not one of those athletes. His genealogy is well known - his father, Todd, having played for the All Blacks, making it there on a ticket of an uncompromising mindset that saw him squeeze everything out of a body that didn't have the same bells and whistles as many of his peers.
The Blackadder apple has not fallen far from the tree as Ethan is well enough put together yet isn't going to beat Akira Ioane for speed or Shannon Frizell for explosive power.
He's made it to the test arena on an offering of quite fearless ball carrying and solid defensive work where the majority of his tackles are made with his shoulders.
The problem with having played the bad guy once before is that New Zealand Rugby appears destined to be forever cast in that role by their Sanzaar partners.
A global pandemic is raging, closing borders, forcing lockdowns and causing logistical chaos, but somehow this, and many other significant facts related to it, have been ignored to enable Australian rugby administrators to indulge in their new favourite game of trying to do what their players so painfully can't, and beat up on New Zealand.
Headlines have made it around the world in the last few days, portraying the rage Rugby Australia is feeling at supposedly hearing on social media about a unilateral, out of the blue decision by NZR to pull out of the third Bledisloe Cup test scheduled for Perth on August 28.
The problem was, however, that the Australian version of events was an epic failure to present the full story.
All Blacks perform the haka during the national anthem during the 2nd 2021 Bledisloe Cup Test rugby match between the All Blacks and Australia held at Eden Park. Photo / Getty Images.
Best defensive display in years - September 5
The Wallabies have had a rising sense they were getting close to the All Blacks this year – maybe just a pass or two and a bit of luck separating them from the All Blacks.
They were relieved of that notion in Perth by an All Blacks performance that illustrated these two teams are not as close as the Wallabies believed.
There were just too many ways in which the All Blacks were better than the Wallabies. From being more physical, more cohesive and more aware, to being so much more composed, strategically on point and clinical.
Akira Ioane was one of the notable All Blacks individual standouts. Photo / Photosport
ABs drastic turnaround - September 19
The rugby events of last year increasingly appear in need of being reclassified as an aberration.
A set of barely comprehensible circumstances caused havoc and produced results and performances that were wildly unpredictable and cast the All Blacks in an unflattering light where they were rarely able to provide a version of their true selves.
What we can see now, seven tests into the 2021 season, is that the All Blacks have emerged from their Covid-cocoon as something different and more impressive.
