KEY POINTS:
For A substantial chunk of Graham Henry's tenure, the All Blacks' rest and rotation policies have come under sustained scrutiny.
The coach uses player welfare as a tenet of his World Cup programme, claiming it boosts the squad's depth by protecting the health of his senior men and allowing the development of other players.
Those who challenge the strategy bundle up issues such as ruining the Super 14, dumping on the spectators, debasing the sanctity of All Black test caps and general confusion in Henry's cotton-wool crusade.
The reality may lie somewhere in the middle - and the problem is that no matter the outcome of the All Black World Cup campaign, we are not to know which argument is more correct.
The squad may be physically sharp but are they in tune mentally to the rigorous grind of regular rugby?
Pleas for player welfare make enormous sense but it is a matter of how that is addressed.
It was into these well-charted waters that Henry again steered the All Black battleship on the eve of their sixth World Cup campaign. He was a little feisty as he revisited his theories and he fixed his laser-eye blame on the media for stirring up trouble.
Most of his mates, he claimed, understood and agreed with his notions but, in the very next breath, he reckoned there were not enough rugby people who fully understood the physical toll of the modern game.
There was no epiphany for Henry but the increasing log of injured players enduring a huge workload did not sit easily with him.
"If we wanted to have any chance of winning Rugby World Cup we had to have some sort of policy that looked after the players and that is why they were introduced," he said.
"I think [acceptance] is more a media problem than a public problem to be quite frank. I am not being critical, I am just being honest. I think it is something the media have tried to get hold of and have continued to push that button, the rotation button and conditioning button because there is nothing else to talk about because we have kept on winning."
Henry then suggested, gravely, that this writer was probably ordered by his bosses to be reasonably negative.
When he asked for an answer he did laugh when told it was my natural inclination. The good ship Henry was not about to be slowed though.
"You can't be continually praising the team can you, you have got to find some weaknesses and throwaways are pretty easy to find with an international sporting team because you are under extreme pressure.
"But the team has been reasonably successful, even if I say so myself, and I guess the media have to find something to get their claws into and these are the two topics.
"We think they are the two things which are going to win the World Cup for us so we are at opposite ends of the pole quite frankly from some of the media.
"People who know the game, and some of them are close mates, understand completely, and are totally supportive - or that's what they say to me and I have no reason to think they are bullshitting me."
It was obvious players could not continue as they had. Some had not had a decent rest for five seasons and their base conditioning levels and bodies had deteriorated from the constant physical strain. Unlike other professional sports codes in New Zealand, rugby did not get a conditioning window.
Rugby had to do something to increase the longevity of its players and that theme was growing throughout the world. Henry hoped the All Black policies had accelerated that awareness. He was aghast at the numbers of injured players in the English and French premierships.
"The difficulty for a lot of people, who are rugby people, is they don't comprehend as well as they could perhaps that the game is extremely physical. There are huge collisions at huge pace and it takes some of them till Wednesday or Thursday after a test to start to feel normal again," said Henry.
When he played as a five-eighths in senior club rugby in the '70s, players did not have to deal with that sort of impact.
"And they did not have those sort of collisions in 1987 or 1995 - the game is extremely physical and unless you have a player welfare policy, the game you are going to play is going to deteriorate and the number of players you are going to have available is going to decrease, even with a welfare policy.
"So the conditioning window and rotation are welfare policies to have players ready to play at peak performance."
Accepted and understood. And, as someone who observed Henry's coaching and selection career with Auckland and the Blues, acknowledged as a major shift in his welfare thinking.
The concept does throw up a few curly ones though. Rotation seems to be fine for some but not so much for others such as Richie McCaw, Carl Hayman, Chris Jack, Daniel Carter and Mils Muliaina.
McCaw is the captain and probably hankers to lead the All Blacks but if anyone needed recovery and repair, it is surely the openside flanker.
And would Henry have pursued his selection switches and player rests if he had not been blessed with the calibre of players in New Zealand?
"I think that is a hugely negative statement, I don't think the glass is half empty it is all empty," he bridled.
"Rotation has developed the strength and depth. You can see that with the Junior All Blacks and we have had situations where we have beaten international sides in successive weeks with entirely different teams.
"I used to shit myself before some of those games that we were not going to do the business. I can only tell you the truth. We put our heads on the block by having the rotation policy, it put us under pressure with Wales in 2004 and Wales and Ireland on the Grand Slam tour. All right we got big wins but you don't feel that way going into the game.
"I think people get pretty blase about what we are doing. We could play safety first but we would achieve nothing in the finish, we would win the games but have nothing to show for it at the finish.
"All you would be doing is maintaining a legacy for New Zealand rugby, a winning legacy, but you are not developing anything for the future and what is the point of that?"
