STEVE HANSEN: Right boys, let's get started. Some details from the leader of the haka??? Um, where's Aaron Smuth?

VOICE: Ah, he's un the bathroom.

HANSEN: Someone get hum?

[Silence.]

HANSEN: OK, wait tull he's back.

[Ten minutes' silence.]

HANSEN: OK, we'll leave the haka to later, start without hum??? Sonny? Someone get Sonny off his phone?

VOICE: Ah, he's on wuth Khoder Nesser. Just organising a fight.

HANSEN: I've hed a gutful of thus. Tell Sonny he's banned.

[Five minutes pass.]

HANSEN: Right Sonny, hope you've learnt your lesson. Now boys. Let's address the specifuc danger men. We've got to shut down Etzebeth in the line-out, du Preez at the breakdown, obviously Kriel out wide???

VOICE: Steve?

HANSEN: ...Hougaard is the key to their quuck ball???

VOICE: Steve? That's the Sprungboks. We're playing Australia.

HANSEN: Shit! Sorry boys. The Wullabies, that's right. OK, let's get passionate boys, no room for complacency. Let's shove it right back down Eddie Jones' throat.

VOICE: Er, Steve????

TRANSMISSION AND MEETING ENDED 1410 HRS, PLAYERS WENT TO WATCH NRL ON TV. AARON SMUTH STILL UNSIGHTED.

Wishful thinking! The fact is, the remains of Australian rugby would be flattered if the All Blacks were paranoid about being bugged and STOKED if they were found to be talking about our team. Instead, the New Zealanders are not even bothering to change hotels since last year's bugging "scandal". And they don't care that those fiendish RBFM listening devices are available for free from JB Hi-Fi with any phone contract. The All Blacks have come to Sydney with one message and one mission: Stay awake, avoid complacency!

To misquote Gordon Bray's famous misquote: Could this be the final indignation?

Amid Australian rugby's crisis, which is fundamentally one of self-esteem, we are hosting the All Blacks. The situation is akin to suffering an acne breakout, a stye on the eye, laryngitis and halitosis the night before going to the school formal with Elle Macpherson. To find yourself coupled with her, at first you couldn't believe your luck. Now, you really can't believe your luck. And plenty of cruel people will turn up just to see what happens.

We have heard repeatedly that Saturday's match in Sydney is The Most Important Bledisloe Cup Match in a Generation. Given the circumstances, it can hardly be otherwise. But even worse, what if it is not? What if the Wallabies lose 42-0? That is only a widespread prediction, and a smaller margin than many forecasts. A 42-point loss might even be claimed as a moral victory. What if Australia fight pluckily and are in the game for long passages before losing 42-16? Or any other combination leading to variously honourable or dishonourable defeat?

We keep hearing, Trumperbolically, that it is the Most Important Bledisloe Cup Match in a Generation precisely because we're denying the truth, which is that it isn't. The loss of self-esteem is so total that nothing, not even a miracle Wallabies win, can be any more than a distraction from the underlying decline.

Some facts about the match are inevitable. Michael Hooper will play himself to a standstill, Kurtley Beale will do some good things, the Wallabies will fight to the last drop of sweat, and Michael Cheika will die a thousand deaths. But then it will be over and the world will keep turning, the sun will keep setting in the west, and Australian rugby will still be hating itself.

The perfect storm that has engulfed the code is such that the loss of the Western Force is no less appalling to those outside Western Australia than in it. And that's saying something. The country is, dismally, united.

There is unanimity that Australian players, from Folau to Foley, are playing worse now than two to five years ago. Skills across the game are in free-fall and loss of confidence has become a contagion. The Wallabies are a symptom of decline in Super Rugby and Super Rugby is a symptom of the grassroots, where the greatest resources are poured into young men who won't be playing rugby in five years, instead snapped up by other sports or real-world careers.

The Super Rugby debacle debate has felt like facing a checkmate in chess. You can move here or move there, but both moves result in defeat. You can argue about which way you choose to perish, but what everyone knows, and what makes them sick to the stomach to talk about, is how you got into this mess in the first place.

Where do you date it? A friend said during the week that it all went back to John Williamson's Waltzing Matilda, which started as a singer walking onto the field, beginning 'Once a jolly swagman???', and 100,000 people spontaneously joining in. Within a couple of years it was an orchestrated event complete with branded scarves and a tennis ball bouncing over the words on the big screen. Soul hijacked and hollowed out by corporatisation - a metaphor for the whole game.

But that's only one thing. There are too many other metaphors and too many other explanations to fit into all the pages of a Saturday newspaper, even if you expanded it to the size it was when Australia was winning World Cups.

That it falls to 23 young men on Saturday night to recover the self-esteem of an entire code is a demand as unfair as its accomplishment is unlikely. That the Wallabies are underdogs is a reversion to the historic norm, a status they enjoyed, and used to their occasional advantage, for decades before their stunning years of plenty from the early 1980s to the early 2000s.

Like the pirate Yellowbeard, they were never more dangerous than when they were dead. The current team, like those Australian rugby teams from the distant past, is seeking nothing more than to be treated with respect. It would be nice if, like those forebears, they could seem to be enjoying it.

So from this darkest despair, the only way is up. For the good of the sport, let's hope the Wallabies produce their best and/or the All Blacks their worst. We'll take either. And in a strange way, the news from the law courts is encouraging. It has been testified that the bugging of the All Blacks' hotel room a year ago might have been a fiction to begin with. Who would bother? What difference would it make? As they say over there: playing Australia, it just wasn't that bug a deal.

It's a nice hotel and they will be sleeping soundly. Now is the moment to strike.