KEY POINTS:
Seems like there are plenty of people daft enough to believe that the departure of David Nucifora will automatically lead to a brighter future at the Blues.
The likeable Australian will be the first to admit that he didn't achieve as much as he would have liked in
terms of results.
He'll be especially disappointed at the failure to capitalise on a promising start this year and the home losses to the Force and Brumbies will be hard to get over.
Those were the two games where the Blues were at their worst, where old failings came back to haunt them.
Under pressure they abandoned the collective approach, reverting to individual raids and high-risk tricks.
The current culture of analysis tends to start and end with the coach. The Blues were chaotic in those key losses. They played with no vision, no adherence to a consistent pattern so Nucifora was blamed for failing to come up with the right gameplan.
Yet in the first three rounds and in the loss to the Crusaders, the Blues were cohesive, organised and disciplined. They held their structure, relied on forward power to win the collisions and then used natural skills and athleticism to run freely in the final 20 minutes.
Nucifora's failing was not in the construction or design of the gameplan. It was his inability in that crucial middle run of games to get the players to stick to it. But how much culpability can be heaped on the coach? There are only so many times he can say the same things. If the messages are simple and clearly delivered all week, who is to blame if the players work off a different script during the game?
At some stage the players have to accept responsibility for their performances and there should be a few individuals concerned about their end of season performance review.
Questions have to be asked of the senior group of leaders. Did they do all they could to guide the team particularly in those critical periods when games started to slip away? Only they will know whether they did or whether they opted to look after their own performances.
Suspicion will be hard to shake that there were some key players who got caught up in offshore negotiations, allowed their focus to drift towards 2009 rather than live in the present.
And what might have also been overlooked is that not everyone in the Blues squad is a dormant superstar waiting to be turned active by the arrival of a Messiah coach.
Among the world-class talents of Tony Woodcock and Keven Mealamu, there are players who have garnered reputations that exceed their ability. Every year the Blues are rated title contenders on the grounds they have the players to do the business. But do they really? Who from the Blues starting XV in Christchurch would have ousted their opposite from the Crusaders' line-up?
Woodcock, yes. Anthony Tuitavake, yes, but only a maybe if Casey Laulala had been fit. Mealamu, probably.
The Blues seem to be producing great athletes, the Crusaders great rugby players.
And it's that crucial failing that should temper the growing belief that the arrival of Pat Lam as head coach is all that is needed to invoke a change in fortune.
Lam deserves his chance. He's delivered two provincial titles in four campaigns. He's a good communicator, understands what makes most of his players tick and works enormously hard behind the scenes.
But there are systemic failings that need to be addressed and they will take time to fix. Too many players in the present Blues squad are recidivist offenders.
They make the same mistakes week after week in a competition where personal growth is integral to advancement. In one campaign players like Tim Bateman and Sean Maitland have made impressive gains. Kieran Read in two campaigns has evolved from a promising provincial player to knocking on the All Blacks' door.
Compare that to the crop of Blues players who have been with the side since 2004. In the same way Robbie Deans can't take all the credit for the achievements in Christchurch, Nucifora can't be blamed exclusively for the stagnation in Auckland.
Nucifora's tenure at the Blues was neither spectacular nor disastrous. In time he might admit to selection errors in 2008 when he failed to get the right mix in the backline until the latter stages.
In time he might even admit that the off-field regimental approach wasn't quite right.
And in time it might be shown that the reason the Blues finished mid-table wasn't because the coaching team got it all wrong, but because too many players were neither good enough nor professional enough.
