KEY POINTS:
Largely clueless and bumbling England were robbed at Eden Park, not of a definite victory of course, but certainly of any remote chance they had.
Saturday's match was at times an exhilarating test, with the All Blacks showing explosive touches. Their fans should hope that a consistent, non-rotating
selection policy ensues, so this team establishes an identity beyond the over-bearing credo of their coaches.
No wonder that the director of elite rugby for England cut a forlorn figure in his Eden Park hutch. Rob Andrew had far more than three influential and incorrect rulings by referee Nigel Owens and his sidekicks to worry about after watching his team's hamfisted effort.
England swung low alright despite Topsy Ojo, who must remind people of the sweet running Martin "Chariots" Offiah. While England's real coach Martin Johnson was half a world away for the birth of his second child, Andrew has been roped in to oversee the birth of Johnson's coaching/managerial era. Andrew and Johnson are still roped together.
Johnson has said: "I may not be there in body but I'll still have plenty of input on team selection and the style of play. It's a little more difficult to run things from this side of the planet, but we're fortunate to have mobile phones as well as hotel phones these days."
And a slow-reacting England side looked trapped by convention and unable to produce the inspirational moments, although England usually play like this even when the head man is in the same hemisphere.
As Johnson suggested, this remote coaching lark would have been a difficult assignment in the days when global communication was reliant on telegrams.
Try up and under. Stop. Stop All Black midfield. Stop. Stop the game more. Stop. Step up. Stop. Stop Nonu stepping. Stop. Try up and under. Stop. Stop the rot. Stop.
Of course none of this would have been necessary, because those quaint days of telegrams coincided with an era when the coach actually travelled with his team.
Can you imagine the '71 Lions arriving here without Carwyn James, the '80s Wallabies turning up without Alan Jones, or the '96 All Blacks trundling off towards history in South Africa with John Hart preparing by setting up a call-savings plan?
It's all very well this father-on-board-for-the-baby-arrival business, but there are heavy responsibilities associated with coaching a national side, people are paying good money to watch, and as a result certain sacrifices need to be made.
Okay. Moving forward (don't you love that expression), so Johnson doesn't turn up, but still runs the show. So he's to blame then.
There were very good parts to England's game and their forwards, as always, were physical. If England can keep the game within zones that don't tax the overall speed of their pack, they threaten. The All Blacks did very well to cut them up the way they did. It was a strange test because if a few things had gone England's way, they could have pushed the All Blacks much harder. Yet the All Blacks could - should - have won by a heck of a lot more.
England couldn't produce moments of test-match class or even legal violence - such as Anthony Tuitavake's smashing early tackles - to lift them above the status of faintly noble losers.
The absence of their head coach was iconic for a side that lacked 80 minutes of belief and desperation.
However, if an England coach, or an England director of elite rugby, wanted a few excuses and picked over a game the way an under-pressure All Black coach did to save his job, he could make a few justifiable points.
Three All Black tries owed plenty to dodgy rulings.
England were unlucky to get an out-on-the-full kick-off ruling against them, when Sitiveni Sivivatu had one foot planted infield and the other in the air on receiving the ball. England should have had an attacking lineout after Sivivatu stepped into touch after catching the ball. Instead, an All Black halfway scrum and try ensued, and a critical 20-6 lead was established.
Ma'a Nonu threw a clear forward pass for another try, the ball leaving his hands a half-metre outside the England 22 while Mils Muliaina caught it a good metre inside the line. This is beyond the acceptable margin of latitude promoted by the "moving forward" motion experts. Wasn't a forward pass at the centre of the All Blacks World Cup quarter-final complaints or does this deal only work one way?
And Dan Carter should have been called for a knock on or forward pass on another All Black score when England failed to gain any advantage from his error.
Picky, you might say, given that the All Blacks fully deserved their win and were absolutely the best side. But these incidents represented a whopping 21 points in a game with a 17-point margin.
What is good for the goose is good for the gander, and this All Black regime is responsible for elevating the tactic of picking over incidents in lost football games, the blatant business of blurring a result by turning it into a series of microscopic incidents.
This test was a surreal version of the major battles between these sides down the years. But Johnson's absence at the helm of a rookie outfit epitomised the lack of bite.
A coach needs to look in his players' eyes, not the bleeding telephone book. Any English protest also lacks meaning without Johnson helping deliver it.
Their World Cup winning coach Clive "Sir Snide" Woodward would have used the sin binnings and dud rulings to rile up the troops and influence the match officials before the second test.
It would have been more than merely interesting to hear Johnson's immediate post-match reaction. But it's hard to raise a decent bark over the dog and bone.
HIGH
Tiger Woods' extraordinary charge on a still shaky knee in the US Open. It led to a nifty line from a commentator about Woods' version of limping home.
LOW
The Warriors getting dealt to by limited, muscular Cronulla. The Warriors are crashing back to earth after last year's overrated season.