Goodhue’s

Bash, crash, smash went England, rolling over Italy like a tank division. So hallelujah for Jack Goodhue. The young man from the north is like a messenger from the gods. This is the way rugby can still be played. It can be about subtlety and simplicity. It can be about the ordinary and the beautiful. It can still be magnificent.

It is one reason why those of us who still love the game will be hoping that the All Blacks will triumph over England at the World Cup should it ever come to that. England are playing the ugly modern game of rugby, a game that has put too many young men in hospital. New Zealand can still play the beautiful game where space and thought and skill are treasured assets.

I am not naive. I know that New Zealand are not guiltless of that charge of brutality. The ‘tackle’ that Sevu Reece put in on Saturday, a tackle that could have put a young man in the morgue, was obscenely reckless and brutal.

Yet not even a penalty was given. That was the pattern all weekend. World Rugby must despair. The southern hemisphere officials are letting down the game. Do they not know that a young Samoan has already died this year.

But let’s get back to young Goodhue, because he is an evangelist for how the game should be played. For two thirds of the match against the hapless Chiefs, the two thirds when Goodhue was on the field, anything seemed possible for the coruscating Crusaders.

Scott Robertson, sitting in the coach’s box, called his 23-year-old centre ‘‘a class act’’.

True, and give Robertson some credit here. Not for the first time the Crusaders coach put his faith in the possible. Seta Tamanivalu had come south, a man who had already played in the midfield for the All Blacks. Robertson shifted Tamanivalu to the wing. In a rugby sense, Robertson wanted what the young, untried Goodhue could do for others, not what Tamanivalu could do for himself.

Assistant coach Ronan O’Gara said of Goodhue last year: ‘‘Jack is going to be a world star. He has the attitude, the determination and the frame. It’s his first season of test rugby but you wouldn’t know it: [he] has real rugby intellect and is a brilliant guy to coach.’’

That was all evident against the Chiefs. Goodhue gave the defensive line some real speed on the edge but also read the play so well when he was defending more narrowly. He is rumoured never to have missed a tackle in one of his final years at school. But it was Goodhue’s attacking game that had many of us rejoicing in the pews.

Yes, there was that flash moment when Goodhue got through the tackle and flipped the ball out of the back of the hand to