KEY POINTS:
Intransigence is a strange beast. All Black coach Graham Henry has pressed ahead with rotation and it wasn't even unexpected that he rotated so many players _ 12 _ between the test against the Wallabies and Scotland.
It was always going to happen. Player welfare has been such
a mantra of the Henry era it was always clear _ even in the bloody debris of the 2007 World Cup campaign _ that some form of rotation would continue.
Few people can argue against the logic _ five tests in five weeks is a tall order for any football player in any code.
The grand slam team of 1978 did so in four tests spread over five weeks _ though they had midweek matches too and still got through four tests with just four changes; two of them because of injury. In fact, if you count the midweek games and the final "test" against the Barbarians, the
30-man 1978 All Black squad played 13 matches in six weeks.
But, as the inestimable former All Black captain Buck Shelford said in these pages last week, it is possible to go "overboard" with player welfare.
Shelford said a great deal more that many rugby people will agree with _ that many modern rugby players were `soft' in attitude; that All Blacks of the modern era do not feel a loss as keenly as those of his day; that players are struggling with the demands
of the professional era, fuelling the flight to the inflated pay cheques of the northern hemisphere.
That's the problem with rotation _ like it or not, it devalues rugby. It devalues the grand slam. It devalues the All Blacks.
The game is struggling at the moment; struggling to find its identity in the professional era; to retain credibility.
One week, the Sanzar nations fire a warning shot across northern bows that they will not put up with weakened, meaningless European sides touring here in the June window. The very next week, Henry fields a weakened All Black team against Scotland. Consistency? Pot, kettle, black.
This was in the same week as two prominent British rugby writers, Stephen Jones and Peter Jackson, epitomised some of the problems the All Blacks face internationally.
Jones, a professional wind-up merchant, said a large number of these All Blacks would not make an English Premiership squad. Jackson, one of the most consistent news-breakers in British rugby writing, penned a piece in the Daily Mail which asked `will greed be the ruin of the All Blacks?' _ an opinion piece which sniffed at hawking the Bledisloe Cup to Hong Kong and parts further. It did so,
remarkably, without one word allowing that the money from the north had put the game in the south in peril and helped cause this phenomenon.
Jackson said: "Strip it bare and the first Bledisloe Cup match to be held outside the Antipodes is a case of contriving a Test match as a strictly business venture and cheapening its status as a consequence.
"... As for hawking the Bledisloe Cup round the world to the highest bidder, the danger is that they not so much overcook the golden goose as flog it to death."
Worse, even diehard rugby and All Black fans are finding their attention waning. It becomes harder and harder to summon the interest to see if the next new crop can foot it at the top level; watching a test that isn't a contest or, rather, only a contrived contest.
To be fair to Henry, he can justifiably point to the need to re-build and to forge new players in the fires of test match rugby _ a need caused by the same country or countries now raising questions about the quality of the All Blacks and the tests they play in.
But you don't get the feeling that's the sole motivation. This feels like a man trying to justify the misfires of 2007; someone trying to prove that the theory discredited at Cardiff in the World Cup quarter-final is valid, after all.
You hope that's wrong. Of course, Henry is motivated to win and he will gain a great deal of satisfaction in doing so with a multi-changing cast, many of them rookies; some of them perhaps not in the highest order of All Blacks.
But it's hard to shuck the feeling that he is doing it to demonstrate he was right in the first place.
He will likely rotate again for the Ireland test, bringing back many of the `A' roster. Then he will probably rotate again against Warren Gatland's Wales before playing the full A team against the English.
If that happens and all tests are won, the plaudits will be many. But they will be for the coaching team as much as the players. In an ever-changing vista of players, it is hard to say that this one or that one heavily influenced the Grand Slam. The real winner will be rotation and those doing the rotating.
In days gone by, Shelford's era if you like, All Blacks given the jersey often said that wasn't enough; they wanted not just to be All Blacks but great All Blacks.
It's hard to be great when you are being rotated in, out and around. Greatness comes from consistency of performance, being allowed to set records and new levels; not proving a theorem.
Surely All Black rugby and the New Zealand game are better served by consistently playing a top team and slotting in newcomers and resting top players in moderation; building up combinations.
It's better for the All Blacks, better for the opposition, better for the credibility of the game, better in terms of marketing offshore tests like Hong Kong and certainly better for the spectators.
It also means that they can never be accused, as they were at Cardiff, of overdoing things like rotation and under-delivering on combinations and performance.
And there's no risk of anyone thinking that it's one man's crusade.
