Well, all week I have had this feeling in the pit of my stomach, all week listening to those talking about Australia the following week; about those bloody jerseys, but all week I have had that bad feeling inside of me.

So why did we lose?

Are the French better? Are we chokers? Was it the rotation? Was it the reconditioning?

I’d say no to all of those; once again the French came back against NZ, once again NZ failed to execute the basics right, and once again NZ were on the wrong end of the score board come full time.

Sure the ref was the biggest muppet this side of the biggest Muppet city in Muppetland; hands in the ruck constant off-sides, yellow card for doing something legal and then not issuing for the same infringement later, and we won’t even go down the whole issue of ‘that pass’.

I’d rather steer clear of criticizing him, because the AB’s ARE good enough to make an incompetent ref less influential.

We should look at the French, a stat I saw flash up as I was exiting stage left at 80 mins was they made 140 odd tackles to the AB’s 50 odd!!

That is staggering; for every tackle an AB made, a French man made 3, that is pretty much 10 tackles per man compared to 3 tackles per man for the AB’s; in my most humble opinion, this is where the game was won (or in our case...)

The French defence smothered the AB’s, gave them no room, legal or illegal, the French completely outplayed the AB’s at R & M time with more aggression and playing to the boundary the Ref had set for them.

What we need to do now, is take a step back, think about what happened here, before we lash out at those involved.

This was a one off match, sure the 4th 1 off match we have lost, but we have lost what, 5 matches in the past 4 years? This side will rank as one of the great AB sides, but in terms of RWC’s….The rugby gods have shit on us again, the 2nd loss of 2007 came at what would seem the worst possible time…or did it?

Had we beaten them in the dying minutes, would that have meant we’d have beaten a hugely confident England side? Would we then have beaten what is looking most likely a SA side in the final?

Or was this defeat just saving us 1 or 2 weeks of anxiety and then more heartache as we go down then?

NZ rugby will survive, and we will likely see them beat whoever goes on to be the 2007 Rugby World Champion in 2008, probably in 2009 and 2010 as well, but we still won’t hold that damned coveted trophy that is the ruination of our beloved game!

We need to realize these guys are just men like you or I (our few ladies excused) and are prone to being human like you or I, which also means they have feelings like you or I, so try not to be too harsh on them, I am sure they feel bad enough already.

As gutted as I feel, I know – as was plain to see – each and every member of that team was feeling it even worse!

I still feel ill now thinking about it, in fact I wish I could stop thinking about it, I doubt I will for a few days, I have seen some of the scathing comments from people in the Herald, people say some hurtful things when they are hurt themselves, don’t be too harsh, they deserve better than that.

Over and out