48 hours: Lineouts just keep giving us the Blues

As the dust settled on another sporting weekend, one major question was left unanswered.

What should we do about the Blues lineout?

One impression of the Blues is this: there is actually the semblance of a rugby team trying to get out and if the field was a bit wider - say about 3km wide - everything would be fine.

A very wide field would eliminate lineouts, although you feel that the Bulls - who were allegedly playing rugby at Eden Park on Friday night - could still find a way of kicking the ball out when they weren't indulging in up-and-unders.

The Bulls may be the first team in history to try to combine two sports that were previously thought to be unrelated - soccer goalkeeper punting and volleyball. That's their business, however. Of far more concern to us is the Blues lineout.

If only rugby didn't have lineouts, the Blues could get on with the game.

It's most unfair, forcing the key sporting representatives of a city that prides itself on not getting excited to jump up and down all the time.

But the bottom line is this: unless they change the rules and start playing rugby on shapeless expanses like airfields or the Britomart transport centre, the Blues are going to have to live with lineouts.

So what to do with this objectionable object?

* Offer it for sale on Trade Me.

It would have to be a buyer-beware deal if the Blues wanted to keep their reputation as a vendor clean. You can sell just about any sort of whacky item on Trade Me. Famously, a chap sold a red paper clip by claiming it was once very important when it held together significant items. Someone who was a few clips short of a full packet paid $173, so there is hope for the sale of the Blues lineout. There are startling similarities between this description of a paper clip and this particular lineout. If the Blues got a reasonable price, it would help buy a new one.

* Make the Blues lineout line up for food at Eden Park.

The Blues lineout shows all the signs of having indulged in the full range of corporate hospitality and over quite some time. What it needs is to get back among the rank and file, to remember where it came from. Lining up for stadium food would give the lineout members hours and hours to get to know one another, which is a very good starting point when trying to construct - or reconstruct - a lineout. It would also get them used to opponents closing up the spaces.

* Take it to Table for Eight.

A wonderful way of forming partnerships for solitary citizens who have trouble closing the gaps with other citizens. For those who don't know how it works, strangers go out to dinner together in the hope of forming relationships, or even just friendships. Keven Mealamu and Ali Williams should be made to sit together, although you suspect it would take more than a blob of duck confit to get them bonding in a meaningful way.

* Make a reality TV show about the Blues lineout.

It must be said that Williams and Angus Macdonald looked far more comfortable on the television show Game of Two Halves last week than they ever have in the lineout this season. It was also a courageous effort, appearing in public so soon after the match against the Waratahs. Giving the Blues forwards more TV time might actually be the answer - a way of getting them used to performing in front of other people.

* Give it to David Benson-Pope to sort out.

* Send it to the next Commonwealth Games.

The Blues lineout would really feel at home in a New Zealand Games team although it would need a lot of work - a heck of a lot of work - to get the co-ordination necessary for a haka that met the qualification standard.

This Games idea is a long-term strategy and as we know, that's not the Blues' way. But making the Blues lineout feel warm and secure, even valuable, could produce wonders down the track.

* Issue a press release stating the Blues lineout is brilliant and will also be helping little old ladies cross the road this month.

Standard rugby PR - it's a bit of a surprise that this hasn't already occurred.

On to another rugby matter altogether ...

A few little birds have suggested that Graham Henry and his All Black cohorts don't give a toss about individual form in the first half or so of the Super 14.

But Henry and co must have been delighted with the vigour in the Crusaders-Hurricanes match in Wellington. The pace of the season finally picked up, you feel.

You take your life in your hands when, if you hail from Auckland, you offer up any sort of opinion on the Crusaders. It doesn't matter what you say, there will be at least one ardent Cantab out there who thinks you are doing his or her heroes down.

But here goes. Robbie Deans' Crusaders really are a magnificent outfit. In terms of established test heavyweights they don't have - with three obvious and major exceptions - a team of stars in the way the Blues had a decade ago. Yet they deliver week after week, almost whatever the circumstance, and can construct the most brilliant of tries.

Example A: The Andy Ellis try on Saturday which involved a calmly delayed pass under pressure from big Chris Jack. Jack's poise said so much about why the Crusaders succeed. Hats off to the Crusaders.

Honestly.