• The haka was embarrassing . . .
Bejaysus. Now the Irish are doing the haka.
Well, not exactly the Irish. There was a Samoan, a Tongan, a Maori and a weedy white guy with a moustache belting out the war dance at Limerick's lovely Thomond Park on Wednesday morning.
Oh, and they were members of the home team. That's Munster. An Irish rugby team. Doing the haka, not a jig.
I don't know where to start. Just when you think there couldn't possibly be an embarrassing haka to match the one performed by the petulant All Blacks inside their dressing room in Cardiff three years ago, along come Rua Tipoki and company.
It was awful, bile-inducingly awful, to see members of a second-string Irish rugby team performing the haka in front of the second-string All Blacks.
The haka is already overdone and there is no place for it to be performed by players on the books of an overseas club.
It also sets a precedent. Teams around the world are stacked with expatriate New Zealanders. Feel free to haka away, gentlemen.
• . . . but Munster was great
Putting aside the haka debacle, Wednesday's game was a cracker. Even the most hardened All Black fan had to be excited at how close Munster got to repeating its famous win of 1978.
When this tour is over, it is likely the game we will remember most vividly is the Munster match.
That tells me two things.
Midweek games should be a regular feature of tours. And with 35 players in the squad, there is no reason the All Blacks cannot play in the middle of every test week.
Secondly, and rather worryingly, some of those players were very lucky to be wearing black jerseys.
New Zealand rugby rightly trumpets its great depth but you can see the exodus of players to wealthy overseas clubs is starting to take its toll.
• Taking North Otago to the world
Following my piece on North Otago players performing the haka on their recent tour of Japan - still a horrifying thought - I received this email from the union's chief executive, Colin Jackson, a man with a dry humour:
"We had a fantastic tour and the promotion for North Otago as a region and for rugby will be huge.
"Haka was also received with enthusiasm!!!"
• Playing with a straight bat
My father-in-law, Rob Simpson, celebrated his 50th birthday last Sunday and I was fortunate enough, at a gathering in his honour, to spend a couple of hours in conversation with the one and only Khalid "Billy" Ibadulla.
We covered the merits of Jesse Ryder over (appropriately) sausages and ham steak, and moved on to the captaincy of Ricky Ponting over pavlova.
But we spent most time debating the concept of an all-time World XI, something that has consumed far too many hours in the ODT sports department. Hobbs or Hammond? Marshall or Garner? Slater or Hobbs? (I tend to lose that one.)
Pleasingly, Mr Ibadulla agreed with me on a major issue: Shane Warne must be ranked ahead of Muttiah Muralitharan. A colleague favours Murali because Warne never had to bowl to the awesome Australian batsmen. But Mr Ibadulla points out the Australians don't have great records on the subcontinent. Warne would have cleaned up had he bowled to his own batsmen in Indian or Pakistan conditions.
• Home away from home
I've got mixed feelings about the Highlanders playing a "home" game in Palmerston North next year.
It is understandable from a financial point of view. The Manawatu union will promote the game well and, because it is a one-off, the game will probably attract twice as many paying customers as a corresponding game at apathy-ridden Carisbrook.
But maybe this isn't the time to be making finance the bottom line.
Maybe it's more important to win back the support of a rugby public turned off by poor results and performances.
The Highlanders can't do that by choosing to play away from home.
• Putting New Zealand cricket in perspective
You might have missed that Wellington captain Matthew Bell set a record this week.
Bell scored his 18th first-class century for Wellington, the most scored by any player for one province in New Zealand. The record was previously held by Otago's own Bert Sutcliffe (17).
We really don't score runs in this country.
Picking three English counties at random, you find Ernest Tyldesley scored 90 centuries for Lancashire, Graham Gooch smashed 94 for Essex and the great Jack Hobbs hit 144 tons for Surrey in his whopping first-class tally of 197.
These figures aren't meant as criticism of Bell. He's clearly the best opening batsman we've got and he should be in Australia.
• Aggressive? More like passive
"We'll play some aggressive cricket." - Otago cricket coach Mike Hesson quoted before the opening State Championship game against Northern Districts.
216 - Balls taken by Neil Broom to score 50 runs.
2.11 - Otago's run rate through 100 overs in its first innings.
