Dylan Cleaver: The Mealamu debate - For

Keven Mealamu... views are mixed on his sin. Photo / Getty Images

Edinburgh is steeped in literary history. The Scottish capital gave the world Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, more recently Trainspotting and Harry Potter.

But the man who looms largest in present-day Edinburgh fiction is Detective Inspector John Rebus, the protagonist of Ian Rankin's best-selling crime novels.

Rebus is gruff, clothes crumple at the mere sight of him, he leaps before he looks and is not averse to 'unconventional' policing methods.

He shares some character traits, as a fellow journalist here noted, with Steve Hansen.

The former Christchurch policeman has been involved with his own hard-to-crack case this week: proving Keven Mealamu innocent of the charges laid and found against him by the IRB.

Hansen has been the front man for the flawed "Free Keven" campaign.

It is a stance that has seen the All Blacks criticised for arrogance, propagandising, hypocrisy and wrong-headedness.

At the risk of sounding like an acolyte, what the hell did you expect them to do?

Mealamu was cited for a headbutt against Lewis Moody. He told his teammates and coaches he didn't do it. If he had come off and said: "I think white-line fever might have caused me to do something silly out there", there would not have been any fuss. But he didn't. He believed the angle the replay was shot from was misleading.

The All Black camp, whether or not they felt privately he might have been clutching at straws, were duty bound to stand behind their man.

The Mealamu they have known for the better part of a decade is loyal, honest and a man of integrity. That counts for little through nonpartisan eyes, but it counts for a lot in theirs.

In the Telegraph, former England hooker Brian Moore wrote: "In law the prosecution is not allowed to present evidence of previous nefariousness by the accused solely for the purpose of tarnishing reputation, but the PR arena has no such precise distinctions; it is all about perception."

What he was saying was that Mealamu's clean record, a thread the All Blacks have highlighted ad nauseam, should be no more a defence than past misdeeds should be used to condemn.

Moore's probably right and, for what it's worth, on the evidence presented to the public it is fiendishly difficult to make a case for Mealamu.

Again that is missing the central point - the All Blacks have to try to make that case. It goes to the very heart of their ethos. Hate them for their thuggery if it suits, hate them for their clumsy attempts at PR, but don't hate them for standing by their mate.

Sometimes being in a team compels you to defend what others see as the indefensible.

We might find that hard to understand, Rebus wouldn't.