While playing Business House golf on a windy and chilly Thursday night, two of the players in our team posed the same question at different times during the evening.
The issue related to what happens at a kick-off which is used to start the game of rugby or begin the second half, and the restarts from scores.
My golf partners noted whenever the All Blacks kicked off during that ill-fated semifinal against England, one or two English players ran past the place where the ball was about to alight in the English half of the field.
That meant they were among the All Black players, rather than on their side of the ball.
When an All Black waiting to receive the ball leapt to tapped it back, hopefully to another support player, an Englishman got in the way and intercepted the ball.
How could they do this? It didn't look right. Aren't they offside?
Well, it certainly didn't look right but they weren't offside.
The reason? It was during what is called "general play" and in those situations offside lines don't apply.
Set phases of play – such as scrums, lineouts, rucks and mauls – do have prescribed offside lines designed to give the team in possession the opportunity to use the ball as they desire.
Offside play at these phases is unfair play, where the opposing team can gain an undeserved advantage over the other team.
There didn't used to be offside lines at tackles, but World Rugby has recently introduced them at this phase of the game too, along with a few other laws which make ruling on tackle infringements a bit of a minefield for players and referees.
But the English were smart enough to know the rules.
No offside lines at kick-offs meant they could stand anywhere on the field and hope the All Blacks either knocked or lost the ball backwards while contesting it.
Failure to regain possession at the kick-off was just one of the many things which contributed to the All Blacks losing on Saturday.
A former top Wanganui referee, Colin Pedley, used to tell me that if something didn't look right during the game then it probably wasn't right.
That is a pretty useful line of thought for a referee to follow most of the time, but not in this case.
A similar scenario can occur in general play when a player passes the ball to an opponent rather than to a team mate.
I played rugby in Central Otago with former All Black No 8 Don Clarke, and he was notorious for calling out to opposing ball carriers to pass the ball to him.
As he played rugby in the area for a very long time, he knew most opponents by name and fooled many of them with this cunning ploy.
One kick-off infringement which does not look right but seems to be regularly overlooked by referees and their assistants is players from the kicking team crossing the halfway line before the ball is actually kicked off.
Sometimes they are only just centimetres in front, but they can gain a big advantage from being offside.
Invariably, these offside players are first to arrive at the scene of the alighting ball and can cause mayhem for players catching it.
Just watch tomorrow night and see if you can spot some.
Hint – they are often the ones closest to the sideline and close to the sideline is usually the place where the kicker is directing the ball.
Unless of course the kicker is taking a short kick-off and planning on his players running past the ball in the hope of receiving a gift from above.