When the All Blacks were ceremoniously dumped from Billy Boy's competition we all cooed 'Hallelujah!'

Sanctimoniously patronising, nobody liked them, nobody wanted them to win and on Saturday 6 October our pillows just seemed that little bit snugger as we drifted off to sleep with fond thoughts of the cabbages that would be hurled at Graham Henry upon his arrival at Auckland airport.

We did them a disservice and on even semi-mature reflection our (and mine, in particular) behaviour begets one thing.

Leaving aside our prejudices, for the sake of this competition, the All Blacks should have won the Webb Ellis pot. The best side in the competition went out in the quarter-finals. The team that played the best brand of rugby exited two weeks early. The team that dared to use their handling skills were denied. The team that chose to play running rugby got penalised for doing so. The squad with the greatest amount of superstars got shunted out the side door.

My God, were we premature with our spite. If we had known what would happen to France we would have retrospectively re-called Damien Traille's forward pass to Freddy Mercury and re-assessed Wayne Barnes' handling of that game.

Why? Because yet again this Olympian festival has been a crock. A competition that rewards mediocrity. Rugby of the lowest common denominator proliferated. Teams who demonstrated the least amount of aptitude, courage, skill, flair and positivity were rewarded the most.

We looked for the anomalous and got the anodyne.

Quite a few coaches fell on their swords, quite a few swords fell on the coaches and not all of them had a fouryear contract with their union involved in a costly capital project currently under construction. None of the top coaches in the competition had the balls to think outside the box or instruct their players not to play a game of mind-numbing ordinariness, field position at all costs and willing minds at the tackle scene. The product was terrible . . . the seven weeks (a long seven weeks) might leave the punters thinking that laced between the truly awful that there was merit in some of the matches played.

First off, never confuse quality with excitement. Sure, there were a number of uneasy finishes, but these were down to either incompetence or lack of clear direction in either how to close out a game or go and chase it.

None of us will ever be accused of overt patriotism in this World Cup. The huge numbers that turned up for the French and Argentine tests never received a dividend commensurate with the financial effort and support effort that was ploughed in. However, patriotism has dulled the sense of perspective required to judge how their team is doing. "Winning ugly" seems to be the chant from across the pond. Mind you, if Ireland were in the final after playing bar room brawl rugby, would I be complaining?

No, I wouldn't, nor would I give a damn about what the other 19 nations thought, but the fact that they would have gotten to the final playing such a turgid brand of football would stick in the craw.

This article was written before last night's events . . . either way, if England have not won they will have come damn close to winning. If the rugby world stands back and observes how far you can go by playing in a cynical and bankrupt style then the game is in trouble.

I now would give anything to rewind the clock, put New Zealand back in the loop and let them play quality rugby and take home the pot.

Maybe the IRB will have watched gawp-mouthed at the entertainment quotient and the quality of play in front of them and given it a moment of contemplative thought. If they did, a chill would descend on the administrative ranks of the game looking for a spine to run up. Just like its 1999 and 2003 predecessors, this tournament stinks. The mandarins must be aware of this, it can't have escaped their notice. Yet, no clear direction or remedy. They were kinda' hopin' that France 2007 would deliver the required level of entertainment. Everyone thought that once France beat New Zealand that the competition was saved, but the result only served to send it further into the mire.

Coaches . . . gutless eejits that they are . . . look around and see the laws as they are presented and they gear their sides to play accordingly. The first rule is don't make any mistakes, in particular don't make any mistakes in your half and the easiest way of doing that is to kick it. Now some tactical kickers can sum up where and when to kick the ball but most seem to play to team instructions, so intuition and natural initiative are taken away from a kicker's responsibility. This World Cup will forever be known as the 70metre Aimless Punt Down The Field Competition.

You see, the coaches want you to kick the ball into enemy territory but he doesn't want you to kick to touch as he wants to make sure that you don't concede the put-in. If you have the put-in on the lineout, you control the game. So the game has descended into a farce where players are picked on how long they can kick the ball, eg. Damien Traille. The idea being if you kick it 70 metres and the defensive kicker kicks it back 50 metres and possibly puts it in to touch you had garnered 20 metres of field position and, more importantly, you have the throw.

Sometimes it takes six or seven kicks and two or so minutes to achieve this mindnumbing feat of strategic brilliance.

It is no coincidence that there have been more crowd-waves in this tournament than in any other that I can remember. There is no incentive not to kick or to discontinue endless ping-pong and so sides will continue to do it. Teams aren't going to take a risk to run because the chances of a turnover are extremely high. I have not seen as many turn-overs in serious matches in a long time. The consequences are obvious but it is what is happening at the breakdown decreed by the IRB which makes it almost impossible to beat defences.

This tournament has been dominated by destroyers, Thierry Dusautoir, Schalk Burger, Lewis Moody, Lucas Ostiglia and Richie McCaw. Not only do these players tackle with devastating effect but their real worth to their own team is what they do or, more precisely, don't do after the tackle.

The IRB, with their 'Get Tough' policy on raking or rucking with the feet, which was applied rigidly by the referees, meant that you could not go in and ruck somebody who hadn't rolled away. These guys came in with impunity, did whatever they could get away with, and the player's natural form of justice . . . a good shoeing for the infringer . . . never got administered. It killed the tackle zone. The referees never policed it the way they should have to compensate and thus the tackle zone became a lottery. Why would you bother tempting fate, if you were caught trying to counter-attack and have the ball killed or turned over? The IRB are like a supermarket trolley with a mind of their own, supercilious to the needs of the greater good i. e. the rugby public.

So they didn't want anyone to get stood on or have their jersey shredded.

And right they were. They can issue directives on refereeing policy so why did they not tell the referees to police the maul properly. The maul has effectively been taken out of the game of union.

Players now can come in from the side and join from offside positions. Even players who amazingly end up at the back of an opposing team's maul can just hang around scragging for five seconds or so and then trot back before they are admonished by the ref. They can tackle players in the front of the maul, grab a leg and lift them out of it entirely.

There was a huge amount of illegality but nothing is done by the people delegated to protect the intricacies of the game.

Sides cannot maul properly and are negated by four or five players illegally while their back-row wait out in midfield for big hits on opposing centres.

Why give the ball back . . . there's no incentive . . . just box kick the pill and we'll have a game of ping-pong.

Problem recognition is the key. If they don't see the problem then nothing can be done. The game has almost become impossible to play. Almost every coach you see in the television shots during games is flanked by a rugby league defensive coach whispering in his ear. It is almost Orwellian how similar the game has become with rugby league. A few more snips and you wouldn't notice the difference.

Your game is a crock, Syd.