The future of Australian rugby looks black, and not black in a pretty All Black kind of way, more black in a Pit-of-Despair way.

The Wallabies may have managed to do what their AFL counterparts have been incapable of and stood up on the Ethiad turf but they didn’t stand up in the face of the Kiwi machine. Was our capitulation a brilliant long-term plan to lull the Kiwis into a false sense of security with an eye on the World Cup that they have been so brilliant at not winning? Nope we were just smashed. Richie McCaw is in terrifying best-player-in-the-world form; Giteau is missing both goals and touch equally – even from penalty kicks!

In searching for positives pundits are pointing to the fact that Wallabies threatened more in the second half even when they were down to 14 men but the contest was long decided by then. Coach Robbie Deans, in an awful post-game press conference which fitted in perfectly with the tenor of the Federation election campaign for saying nothing, claimed we “showed a lot of courage to essentially win the second half, apart from the last score, with 14 men”.  ‘Essentially’, which means ‘didn’t’, because, you know, the All Blacks scored the last try.

The All Blacks are now odds-on to defend the Beldisloe, which they have held since 2003. To put that into perspective the last time we Australians had our hands on the cup the war in Iraq hadn’t started, we all thought we were going to be wiped out by a SARS pandemic, and people knew who Russian pop idols Tatu were (remember them?)

Unless something drastic changes in a week – which apparently is a long time in politics but often not long enough in football – Robbie Dean’s homecoming in Christchurch next week is not likely to be a happy one.

Trivia from a trivial performance: We should all lock Drew Mitchell’s name into our brains as he takes over the trivia question mantle from David Codey (1987). Question: who was the last Australian player to be sent off in a test match?

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