KEY POINTS:
One of the good decisions coach Graham Henry made for the All Blacks was that, win or lose, they return from the rugby World Cup as a team. Unfortunately airline schedules and their unexpected elimination made that impossible. Nevertheless, they have done as well as can be expected
with 17 of the 30-man squad flying in today.
Although not what they originally wanted, it will be a welcome change from the tendency in recent years to scatter to the four winds at the final whistle of visits to Europe.
Another good characteristic of Henry's reign has been the team's attention to diplomacy. The players have presented a better public image than most, attending to off-field duties in good spirit. They have maintained that grace in defeat. No criticism of the referee's performance in their quarter-final has been heard publicly from the captain or coaching staff.
They deserve a warm welcome home today, not the welcome we expected to give them when they left or perhaps we expected we would be able to summon from Sunday morning's disappointment. But they will be enduring the disappointment more personally and deeply than any of us and deserve to know that their sportsmanship has made us proud.
It is not their role to condemn the refereeing of the quarter-final, but someone must. The All Blacks aim to dominate matches to a degree that dubious refereeing decisions make no difference to the result. It is a high aim, which is achieved more often than not. But New Zealanders who demand nothing less than their team's total dominance every time ask too much, especially in a knock-out tournament. The All Blacks' will to win was matched this time by France's determination to stay alive in their own World Cup.
The French deserve credit for their tenacity, which made the match an enthralling contest. It is this sort of contest in any sport that tests the quality of its rules and its referees. Even matches should not be at risk of being decided by doubtful rulings of their adjudicator.
The damage this can do to the appeal of the game can be seen in the lengths that rugby will go to to downplay the role the referee has played in a result. It takes a particularly bad display for an administrator to say, as New Zealand Rugby Union chairman Jock Hobbs did yesterday, "Some of the decisions the referee made had an enormous bearing on the outcome. In our view some of the decisions were very, very questionable."
Mr Hobbs' board will carry out a review of the World Cup effort, an exercise which might replace him as well as the coaching staff. But the country should pause before making the now ritual call for the coach's resignation after a World Cup failure.
Sacking the coach has not yet made the next one more successful. Perhaps it is time to take stock, ponder the possibility that a coach with an otherwise successful record, as previous All Black coaches had, will draw some very astute lessons from a World Cup failure and just might be worth a second chance. A coach of Henry's age might not want to serve another four years but he will ponder this loss long and hard and learn much that he could apply next time.
He might concede that pulling his players out of the first part of this season was a mistake in retrospect, particularly when his rotating selection policy had given him a squad of such depth in just about all positions. The International Rugby Board should do a review too, of its rules and refereeing standards. No sport can afford to let too many of its important contests be decided by the whistle.