Dylan Cleaver: Win or lose, Henry's legacy is worthy

There's a certain irony in watching, from a distance, the Graham Henry revolution.

You don't have to dig too deep into the archives to find the last All Black coach who was sacked because of his intransigence and insistence on doing things his way or no way at all.

So, as Henry, with lieutenants left and right, cuts his Napoleonic swathe through the rugby landscape, it bears thinking what his legacy will be if his brutal campaign ends in the same manner as his predecessor's.

Mitchell, now exiled in Perth, left a delible mark on the All Blacks, on and off the field, that was quickly erased. While he was in charge the All Blacks returned to their unsmiling ways, refused to do anything but the bare minimum, and sometimes less, in terms of media and sponsorship commitments, and generally gave off a whiff of arrogance that was only acceptable when they won (and, let's not forget, they won pretty much everything except the one that mattered).

On the field they ran and ran and ran. But that was all. When Australia stopped them running they had nothing to fall back on.

So Henry and Co came in and put a friendly, if somewhat smirking, face back on Brand All Blacks. He re-instituted traditional skill sets like rucking and calculated kicking. So far it's been a marvellous success. Like Mitchell before him, Henry has won the majority of tests while in charge.

But Henry's greatest achievement has been the template he has left for All Black campaigns. Should his offensive in France end in familiar misfortune, his blueprint, or blackprint, shouldn't be deleted like Mitch's was.

While many player advocates and coaches have bemoaned the amount of rugby played, rugby bosses - particularly in the Northern Hemisphere - have 'oohed and ahhhed' sympathetically before jamming another couple of fixtures into the calendar.

Henry recognised the plight, loosely titled 'player welfare', was real and did something about it whether the public, past All Blacks or, you suspect, his bosses liked it or not.

Humans, he says, no matter how finely tuned, aren't equipped to play at optimum level three tests in a row.

Such is the physicality of modern rugby - it's supposedly harder and it's definitely faster - players were in real danger of suffering long-term damage unless moves were made to restrict their appearances.

Now, you can guarantee Henry's motives for recognising and doing something about this were selfish. He wants to win the World Cup and if winning means Richie McCaw spends his retirement nursing two hopelessly arthritic knees on the porch of a Canterbury lifestyle block, then there's little doubt Henry would take the win. Henry the Benevolent is harder to swallow than Henry the Redeemer.

But he has been astute enough to recognise that healthy players have more chance of winning World Cups and has thus attempted to mould seemingly three quarters of the country's pro players into All Blacks.

It's upset plenty of people, and that is understandable. It's not the 'All Black way' when you see players like Sosene Anesi, just as one example, wearing the silver fern after a couple of good games for Waikato.

But it's the 'Henry way' and for every Anesi there's been a Jason Eaton to balance the books.

Henry's depth building has been light years ahead of his international coaching colleagues. But here's the rub. It won't guarantee success.

The All Blacks have a funny habit of losing tests they are not expected to. Twenty years of hurt tells you it could just as easily happen in France next year. History also tells you that such a loss would most likely cost Henry his job. But it shouldn't cost him his legacy.

* Baseball fans are quickly learning that statistics can bite.

The repugnant Barry Bonds is poised to pass Babe Ruth's 714 home runs on the way to what Sports Illustrated has called his "joyless pursuit" of Hank Aaron's 755 homers.

Bonds, who is embroiled in the Balco drugs scandal, almost certainly played his most productive seasons while being, knowingly or not, administered with steroids.

The stats are tainted. And baseball with impure stats isn't baseball at all. There are even calls for his name to be accompanied in the record books with an asterisk. Good job, and while we're at it let's clean up another sport obsessed with statistics - cricket.

Cricket was stained, not by steroids, but by match-fixing.

Surely it is time for the cheats - Hanse Cronje and Salim Malik among them - to have an asterisk next to their names in the annals of cricket bible Wisden.