Paul Thomas: Our opinion is as good as an expert's

COMMENT

Napoleon reckoned England was a nation of shopkeepers.

He was half-right, but for military purposes it was the wrong half. The Duke of Wellington described his soldiers as "the mere scum of the earth." It was meant as a compliment and we all know who won the battle of Waterloo.

Pressed for a Napoleonic sound-bite, a visitor to New Zealand might suggest that we're a nation of selectors.

There must be at least a million people in this country who think they could do as good a job, if not better, of picking the All Blacks as Messrs Mitchell, Crowley and Shaw (with a little help from Deans).

The professionals are always trying to put us armchair amateurs in our place. We ball-watch so we miss a lot of the grunt-work, we're suckers for razzle-dazzle and we don't have access to the stats that provide a far more accurate measure of a player's effectiveness than our instant, subjective conclusions.

Well, never again should we allow ourselves to be blinded by science or bullied by the "what province did you play for?" brigade.

Last week, Peter Thorburn, an All Black selector under Laurie Mains and Wayne Smith, had misgivings about some of the selections. Pressed to be specific, he said Jerry Collins.

Well, Springbok winger Thinus Delport and his teammates probably wish Thorburn was still an All Black selector. Most New Zealanders are probably thankful he's not.

The point isn't that Collins' admirers are right and Thorburn is wrong, it's that someone regarded as one of our best rugby brains is firmly - even eccentrically - in the minority.

On this one, Thorburn has lined up with the Flat Earth Society - as he rather heroically labelled the talkback radio audience - with bees in their bonnets about Justin Marshall and Carlos Spencer.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. In 1992, Sean Fitzpatrick had to plead with the All Black selectors to get Zinzan Brooke into a 30-strong touring team. (Those selectors were Mains, Earle Kirton and, er, Thorburn. What is it about number 8s, Thorbs?)

And in 2001, John Mitchell said he and his panel were only interested in Spencer as a fullback, the unmistakable implication being that he wasn't an international first five-eighths' backside.

Sure enough, when Tony Brown pulled out of the end-of-year tour, they drafted in David Hill. Where's Hill now? Still in Waikato.

When selectors promote journeymen and sideline exceptional talents, it creates the suspicion of factors at play that wouldn't necessarily withstand close scrutiny. And when experts can be diametrically opposed over the merits of a given player, it invites the conclusion that, for all the talk about tackle counts, yardage and strength-to-weight ratios, they're capable of being as subjective as us.

So it's hardly surprising that a million-odd people out there reckon that if it's just a matter of opinion, theirs is as good as anyone's.

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