Opinion

Some Kiwis have a genius for whining about our rugby. Some even do it for a living. Having just spent three weeks in hospital I don’t feel like joining in the carping chorus, but instead would like to suggest some reasons to be happy about the game, the All Blacks, and the World Cup, as the year draws to an end.

Let’s start with the fact it would be surprising if the wonder women of the Black Ferns’ sevens side didn’t win team of the year at the New Zealand rugby awards this Thursday. Technically, they play stunning rugby, but best of all there’s a patent joy in their game. That may be partly explained by the fact they’re breaking through glass ceiling after glass ceiling. You would also like to imagine that if some strutting French dipstick asked a Black Fern on stage if she twerked he might then be asked if he was finding it easy to breathe while being held by the neck a foot off the ground.

Seeing the feet of the ‘‘greed is good’’ Gordon Gekko of secondary school rugby, St Kentigern College, being held to the fire is a more grim pleasure. Schools in Auckland have been complaining about St Kents for at least five years, so good on them for showing all that angst wasn’t just cheap talk. It’d be laugh-out-loud time except for the possible effects on the poor kids from up and down the country who were recruited by St Kents — sorry, I mean who always dreamed of one day going to a school in Auckland to advance their academic studies.

Feel free to smile about the convolutions that commentators will go through trying to read between the lines about Joe Schmidt, and the break he’s going to take from coaching. I know it’s an alternative facts world, but everything I know and have heard about Schmidt suggests he may be saying something very startling: the truth.

Let’s switch to some pure ‘‘don’t worry, be

. . . best of all there’s a patent joy in their game.

happy’’ facts about the World Cup next year. If you think the choruses of ‘‘Hansen is wrecking the team’’, and ‘‘Read is past it’’ and ‘‘Hansen and his selectors are fools’’ have not only started early, but may also be dead right, I’ve saved you the trouble of looking back to when the same sort of bleating started before the best All Blacks team we’ve ever had at a World Cup won in 2015.

Among the targets were Dan Carter: ‘‘some hospital passes to team-mates bordering on dereliction of duty’’.

Yeah, that’s the same Dan Carter who was international rugby player of the year in 2015 after sublime play in the World Cup knockout games.

Richie McCaw was a majestic figure in 2015 as All Blacks captain. But in April ‘15 one of our writing friends said that in Super Rugby he was ‘‘poor by anyone’s standards’’ and there were calls to drop him as captain.

A line from Grizz Wyllie, while working on a book with him when he was the All Blacks coach in 1990, comes to mind. Talking about journalists, and our views on selections he said, ‘‘Well, it’s all right for you guys (he may have used a stronger word). Your bloody teams don’t have to play.’’

Keep that in mind if the outrage, upset, and fury that will be generated about the All Blacks at some keyboards between now and September of next year starts to worry you.

Finally, for mischievous pleasure, there’s the most astonishing moment from the autumn internationals. Stephen Jones and Sir Clive Woodward agreeing that Andy Farrell’s shoulder charge against the Wallabies was illegal. Let me say that again, Jones and Woodward agreed that Farrell, an Englishman, cheated. Farrell had also cheated the week before against South Africa. Who knows? The day may even come when a referee is brave enough to penalise him at Twickenham.