Hands off! Things are fine as they are.

So Australia and South Africa have drawn a brace of rugby matches recently.

They’re entirely apt results, actually, given these are two poor sides with no idea how to kick on and win games.

But now, we’re told, that international rugby ought to be better than that. It’s not enough to have a stalemate anymore. No, we need to conjure up some artificial mechanism that will allow a winner to be declared.

Give me strength.

A draw has always been a worthwhile and fair result and if, sanity prevails, it will remain so.

The fact a few athletes feel a bit flat after being involved in a stalemate, such as last weekend’s 27-27 draw between the Wallabies and Springboks in Bloemfontein, is no reason to overhaul a system that has served so well for so long.

If we bring the argument back home, a 1-1 draw was a perfectly reasonable outcome to this year’s series between the All Blacks and British and Irish Lions. If one team were good enough to have won the threematch series they would have; but they weren’t.

It wasn’t as satisfying as a win for either team, or their supporters, but what’s the alternative?

Cricket, for example, has had blokes in lab coats come up with a thing called the Duckworth-lewis Method. It’s a system so absurd that teams batting second can score more runs than the team batting first and still be deemed the loser.

And how about golden point in rugby league, where referees lose the courage of their convictions and field goal attempts become the order of the day? What’s fair about losing in those circumstances?

How do people who didn’t like the result of the third test between the All Blacks and Lions - or two Rugby Championship meetings between Australia and South Africa this year - propose we break a tie in test rugby? What stroke of genius would promote a fairer outcome than a draw?

‘‘It’s a dull feeling, isn’t it?,’’ Wallabies back Kurtley Beale said after the Bloemfontein match.

‘‘There’s no proper result. I feel like it’s just a bit of a dead rubber.’’

The alternative is to turn the outcome over to a television executive or professional administrator, with no feel for what sport’s actually like.

If every rugby match ended in a nil-nil draw then maybe I’d have some sympathy with the idea of trying to manufacture a winner. But they don’t.

Similarly, in knockout situations, someone has to advance and things such as extra time are a necessity. But not in instances such as Beale was talking about.

No, it would be a sad indictment on society’s need for continual gratification if a draw ceased to stand as a legitimate result.

A draw has always been a worthwhile and fair result and if, sanity prevails, it will remain so.

Hamish Bidwell