KEY POINTS:
It all depends on your point of view.
In the Herald this week Peter Bills - that endangered journalistic species, a British/Irish rugby writer who doesn't collude in his readership's ignorance or pander to their grievances and insecurities - wrote that the All Blacks had deflated the cosy
little bubble of Irish rugby.
He portrayed Northern Hemisphere rugby as complacent, happily mired in mediocrity, "light years" behind New Zealand.
The All Blacks, he implied, would have as little trouble swatting aside Wales tomorrow and England next weekend as they had disposing of Ireland.
I don't know about you but watching the Ireland and Munster games, I was struck by the thought that in some respects Irish rugby is in better shape than ours.
One country has superb, atmospheric stadiums packed to the rafters with spectators whose passion is only matched by their sportsmanship; the other can't fill its undersized, half-built, soulless arenas even for major internationals.
In fact, the only time in recent years when our rugby grounds have borne any resemblance to Croke Park and Thomond Park was during the 2005 British and Irish Lions tour. Then, of course, most of the vibrancy and atmosphere was courtesy of the Barmy Army.
The sheer passion exhibited by the Munster fans and players alike is an increasingly rare commodity in New Zealand rugby. The All Blacks' limp exits from successive World Cups were, as much as anything, the result of their inability to match their opponents' desire and desperation in sudden-death situations.
These days passion seems to be restricted to David and Goliath encounters, such as the heroic Ranfurly Shield challenge mounted by Tasman this year. That, plus the decent crowds attracted by provincial unions such as Hawkes Bay and Manawatu, suggests the fire hasn't quite gone out in the heartland even if the embers are losing their glow in the major centres.
The problem, though, is that professional rugby is, to all intents and purposes, based in the major centres. The Super 14 franchise system is consolidating the reconfiguration of the rugby landscape driven by the great social and economic shifts that got under way in the 1970s.
It's both curious and alarming that ultra-professionalism, in the form of private ownership of clubs, seems to have had little impact on the fierce tribal loyalties in European rugby, yet New Zealanders' support for their teams, beginning with the All Blacks, becomes more qualified and insipid with each passing year, despite the adoption of a structural model designed to ensure the game remains in the right hands.
Thirty-odd years ago my predecessor in this space, Gordon McLauchlan, labelled Kiwis "the passionless people". Back then you could have argued that rugby had the power to bestir us from our stitched-up torpor. It would be harder to say that today.
The other sobering message from Ireland is that the great exodus is starting to bite.
The good news is that no other nation could lose so many players and still overcome the Wallabies and Springboks. The bad news is that watching the All Blacks' midweek team scrape home against a depleted Munster side, it was clear that some of those wearing the black jersey would've hardly rated a scribble in the selectors' notebooks a year or two ago.
New Zealand has the brightest talent and the best rugby nursery but losing up to a third of our elite players every year is unsustainable. If nothing changes we'll become a third world nation in rugby terms, exporting raw material to the rich countries and getting ripped off in the process.
There's a correlation between these unwelcome trends. A basic principle of professional sport is that support equals wealth equals success.
The recent test in Hong Kong was labelled a transparent money-making ploy by those unafraid to state the obvious. If the game here enjoyed the fervent public support we saw in Dublin and Limerick - and will see in Cardiff and London - there'd be less danger of the All Blacks becoming rugby's equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters, an exhibition team that plays pretty much everywhere except Harlem.
There's a view that all our problems - from the player drain to night games - boil down to the fact that we're simply being financially out-muscled by England and France. Ireland and Wales are similarly dwarfed but seem to be doing better, at least off the field, than we are. Have they got keener or is the real story here that we care a lot less than we used to?
