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.

While the term "running rugby" focuses on the legs, it's only relevant if everyone is also catching the ball with their hands. Running rugby actually means passing and catching rugby.

Yet the occasion, the significance, the transtasman rivalry and closeness of the score, meant it was gripping.

What do you need for a memorable test match? Tension. Rivalry. A massive and packed stadium. In the absence of much icing, the cake can still be excellent.

A last-gasp winning goal helps.

Goalkicking can ruin rugby, but it can also make it. Rugby is littered with history-turning kicks: Brian McKechnie against Wales, Allan Hewson against the Boks, John Eales against the All Blacks, and now Carter - in his slightly controversial comeback - against Australia.

For what it's worth, I would rate both the All Blacks and the Wallabies as works in mid-progress.

The All Blacks should have won by more, but for their own attacking inadequacies. Graham Henry has the semblance of a good side, but by this point in the season they should be far more competent than they are.

There will be much celebration, and a test win is a test win, but this is still not a particularly good All Black combo. They may need a new voice among their coaches and selectors to sort out recurring problems.

The support work in particular is haphazard, but in terms of personnel they have a touch more potential than Australia, for now.

The All Blacks were also robbed of what most would regard as a legitimate Carter try by Jonathan Kaplan's marginal forward-pass call.

As an ardent critic of the Henry reappointment and regime, I gladly admit here that he deserves praise for keeping a struggling team in the Tri-Nations hunt and retaining the treasured Bledisloe Cup. You can't scoff at that, and sometimes, at this level, winning is indeed enough.

Henry has handled a lot of pressure and may still emerge victorious out the other side. His side has not dropped its bundle and may indeed be starting to pick it up.

It was a glorious day in Auckland on Saturday. And the feeling went on into the night.

I'm not sure if we really need cameras parked above the heads of the coaches in the coaching boxes, as they were in Sydney. But the camera did reveal the sort of pressure that coaches are under in international sport. It must be maddening to see your match plans turn to custard rather than fruition.

Poor refereeing calls also send coaches crazy with frustration. Wellington and their coach, Jamie Joseph, copped an absolute doozy on Saturday night. The NPC does not use video replays, which led to Chris Pollock's decision to deny Wellington No 10 Fa'atonu Fili a try. It can only be assumed that some referees have become so video dependent that they are no longer competent to operate without them. Fili cradled the ball like a politician looking after a vote as he scored. Auckland forward Dean Budd, in trying to prevent the try, dived and waved vaguely in the vicinity of what turned out to be a sporting crime.

I have supported and loved the Auckland rugby team all my life. But from the moment of Pollock's crazy decision, I hoped that Wellington would retain the Ranfurly Shield. No holder deserves to lose it on a call like that. It would have been embarrassing to win it under those circumstances.

Boys own or way too boysie? Prime Minister John Key was quick to get in on the Bledisloe Cup act, being snapped among the players holding the cup. He's sharp on the photo opportunities. Key was also pictured drinking out of the giant goblet - I would have thought this was the domain of the players alone.

There is something cringe-inducing (and way too political) about a middle-aged armchair rider acting like he's one of the troops who has emerged triumphant from the heat of battle.