England’s victory over the All Blacks was absolutely stunning. I don’t think they played better when they won the World Cup. The late great Carwyn James himself would have enthused over their performance.

Its significance is like an iceberg – four fifths is invisible. Let me try to illuminate. The All Blacks came to Twickenham chastened and deflated by the horror of their hooker’s lunatic assault on one of the Welsh locks the previous week, and by the worldwide condemnation of that assault.

I suggest that, because of that, they played by the rules and by the spirit of the rules for eighty minutes at Twickenham, with no suggestion of skullduggery, not even when their habitual superiority did not materialise. In fact it was the cleanest game anyone ever saw (one Englishman was sin-binned for ten minutes for an off-side infringement). It was the cleanest game imaginable, New Zealand did not deploy the dark arts when the going got tough, and got hammered, in a magnificent display of open rugby.

Could this be an almost divine revelation of how rugby could be, if New Zealand and South Africa could be weaned off the infantile conviction that they are entitled to cheat and to maim, if necessary, when the score requires a helping hand?

We could find out the answer to that question, if all my seven readers were to write to the IRB, demanding that television be deployed for instant on-field fourth-umpire intervention into cases of possible foul play. If that had been in action in Cardiff the previous week, the All Black hooker would have been red-carded and off the field long before the stricken Welsh lock had been stretchered off, and what a very different game 14 All Blacks would have had against 15 Welshmen. It would have been their proper reward for fielding a thug and not controlling him.

If the authorities went down that road, in no time at all we would be discovering who the best rugby players are, rather than who the best rugby+thuggery players are, which is probably the only information the game at its so-called “highest” level has to offer at present.

And we, the public, might find ourselves enjoying more and more games as enthralling as the Twickenham match last Saturday. Be persuaded, because I am not even an England fan. Write the letter.

Andrew Simpson

7.12.12