KEY POINTS:
First take the best team in the world. Recondition the stock, by taking out 22 lumps of beef and leaving them aside. Then rotate the dish, ensuring the various elements do not combine.
Then take them to Corsica where they lightly simmer. Move briskly through the next stages
- slaughtering minnows and adding them to the mix. Add a large dollop of Scotsmen but care is needed here because this ingredient looks confusingly like all the others.
The next stage is most important - carefully under-prepare the ingredients before introducing them to 50,000 screaming Frenchmen and 15 very determined ones.
You must ensure the prime NZ beef is only lightly done. You must not overcook - as the choking response will be lost if the ingredients are permitted to merge together smoothly. Sieve out some of the best elements and leave them aside for the next dish. You can be certain this will work.
Finally, stir in a teaspoon of panic to stimulate the choking effect. Sprinkle with essence of concrete touch judge and add a sprig of Barnes-wort - a little-known weed which attained global status. If taken to excess, can produce erratic behaviour and impaired vision; even hallucinations. Often blamed if this dish is prepared poorly.
Serve with four million stunned mullets and don't accept responsibility at any stage.
If all diners actually swallow this, go get your job back.
You see, the NZRU has outclassed Harry Houdini on this one. When Houdini was at the height of his powers as an escapologist, he devised the extraordinary technique of dislocating his shoulders to help him escape from straitjackets and chains and the like, often being suspended upside down in water, with the public watching to see if he'd drown before he could escape.
The NZRU board has dislocated pretty much its whole body in the re-appointment of Graham Henry. But, while Houdini effected his great escapes in public, there is a terrible suspicion that the board's escape from the disaster that was the 2007 Rugby World Cup campaign took place behind the curtain of politics.
The irony is that, along with this feebly transparent attempt to save everyone's face, the board has given Henry an even tougher task. Before his job was comparatively easy - win the World Cup. Now, because of his own re-appointment, there is a further dimension: to restore the credibility of New Zealand rugby.
As John Hart, himself an All Black coach dumped after losing at a World Cup, has been eloquently saying in a two-part series in the Herald on Sunday that ends this week, the grand old game of rugby is under siege in this country from financial problems, rotation & reconditioning, loss of interest by sponsors, fans and other stakeholders and by a sense of arrogance and dislocation permeating the game and some of our leading players.
Hart also said that Henry's election would be divisive, in that the large slice of rugbydom opposed to Henry's re-appointment will be on his case. And so they will.
It remains to be seen whether Henry can help restore the credibility lost at the World Cup and with the now well-punctured strategies of rotation and reconditioning.
As for the credibility of the board, well, good luck with that one. Whatever the truth of it, the entire perception of this election is that it has been 'managed'. There's nothing new about an election being sewn up before a vote is cast - the ancient Romans perfected that one.
But this is a vote that has the smell of self-preservation about it; the same board that handed Henry his flaming torch has given it back to him even after he burned himself - and us - on the caboose. To have taken it off him would have highlighted their own culpability. It was as if the importance of their own rear ends was more important than the good of the game.
Even now, the hesitant, low-volume acknowledgements about mistakes made at the World Cup seem insincere; seemingly made by people who know they have to say the words but don't really believe them; who find in the re-appointment a way to draw a convenient shroud over all that has gone before.
And how does Henry win us back when the World Cup is four years away; when we all suspect the next act of political Houdini-ism will be to pass the torch to Steve Hansen two years hence - a man who has not even stood for election?
It's back to the old Tri Nations and Bledisloe Cup treadmill and, from what Henry is already saying, back to rotation... Yawn, yawn, and thrice yawn.
