Never under-estimate the capacity of the over-paid spinners in the Australian rugby union to rationalise losses by domestic teams by blaming the state of the code, the pedantry of referees, the opacity of the rules and on and on.

So focused are these deluded nongs on their futile attempts to challenge the popularity of the NRL by paying ridiculous prices for league stars and by mounting vacuous marketing campaigns, that they blame everyone but the coaches and the players.

Of course, the mediocrities in the media here lamely lap up this line that something is fundamentally wrong with union - the same people incidentally who were wetting themselves when the Waratahs were winning in 2005 and 2006.

Phil Derriman in the Sydney Morning Herald falls for the blame-the-rulebook smokescreen, but then buries the lead in the quote from Andrew Slack - Australian teams are losing simply because they have had all the creativity and intuition coached out of them for the past decade.

The supremacy of the Brumbies in Australian rugby - first under Rod Macqueen, then under Eddie Jones - has left a legacy of robotic play in which pre-ordained patterns and phase play take precedence over individual initiative. Australian teams more often play as if they are trying not to lose.

Aside from the injuries to Waugh and Vickerman, I think the biggest hole in Waratahs' this season was left by the return of Mat Rogers to league. Granted, he was defensively weak and prone to injury, but he had the ability to spark a backline and read the play in front of him that is sadly lacking from nearly all other midfield backs here, save Mortlock and Staniforth, when he gets a chance in the centres. Unpredictability was his strength.

But it beggars belief that the rugby writers here and the wannabe mungos drip feeding them could put up an argument that the answer to it all is to drop the flankers, depower the maul and the scrum and do everything in their power to make the game more like league.

So desparate are these greedy, unimaginative buffoons for crowds and TV ratings that they would destroy the game to save it. It is as if they believe that if they put 13 men out there and take away the contest for possession, the NRL fans will think it's league and turn up at games.

But let's be very clear about this. The noise in the Australian press about the crisis in rugby is really about the crisis in Australian rugby. I do not see the Blues or Crusaders failing to score tries. In those teams, I see rugby played at the very highest level of endeavour and creativity, and under the very same rules that the self-deluding Aussie journalists are deriding.

Rest assured, though, that as soon as the Australian teams start winning again (and the Brumbies looked very good against the Sharks this weekend), scribes on this side of the Tasman will quietly place union back on its favoured pedestal as the game they play in heaven.