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 tourna-