My oh my, the Liberals didn’t have to poo-poo the worm as a left-wing plot — why does everything always come back to conspiracies for the conservatives? — or stack the online polls.  Chaps, your bloke had his clock cleaned, but it doesn’t matter — the debate will be forgotten about by the end of the week.

Except it will matter if you keep believing your own spin about Kevin Rudd. Abbott the pugilist was expected to easily outperform the stolid Rudd, floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee, unencumbered with his own policy, needing only to land blows on the verbose bureaucrat.

Only problem was, Abbott the pugilist showed up to the boxing ring to find that instead his opponent was holding a love-in, talking about families and kids and late-night trips to the Emergency Department and asking Abbott to join him in doing the right thing by Australians.

Abbott’s boxing attire suddenly looked decidedly out of place.

Rudd may not be able to throw an uppercut like Abbott but he outsmarted him. He outsmarted him from the minute Abbott foolishly mentioned election debates last Thursday and Rudd decided that he’d give him exactly what he asked for, but a whole lot sooner than he planned.

It helped that Rudd brought his A-game with him, the one that has mostly been in the locker since even before election night, the one where he talks in sentences everyone can understand and seeds words into them that make him sound like he’s an organic part of mainstream Australian values. Even when Rudd went negative and slipped the knife into Abbott over health funding, it seemed like he was doing it more in the spirit of encouraging Abbott to the path of righteousness than out of partisan malice.

But the only real problem for the Opposition was Abbott’s curious inability to hammer on the weak points of Rudd’s plan. It took a journalist to ask about the possible closure of regional hospitals, which prompted Rudd to unveil a sort of backstop plan to ensure they wouldn’t close.  “Mr Rudd has just changed his policy,” Abbott responded.  Unfortunately, Mr Rudd had also just taken away a key Opposition tactic in trying to rouse opposition to the plan in regional electorates.

But on other issues, like quite how local hospital networks will operate, who’ll be on their boards and manage them, who will be responsible for poor decisions, how they’ll respond to demographic changes — a whole host of issues that remain mysteries even to those keenly following the debate, Abbott was mostly silent. If you’re going to be negative, you should at least be effectively negative, homing in on real weak points. Instead Abbott reflexively retreated to insulation and school projects.

I wonder if Abbott has a problem not just with numbers but with policy detail. Maybe it’s because he followed the forensic Turnbull, who would have had the Rudd plan up on blocks so he could pull it apart from beneath, issue by issue. Then again, Peter Dutton is the responsible shadow minister and, well, if you’re relying on Dutton as your details man you might be waiting awhile.

Moreover, to be fair, Rudd wasn’t exactly details-heavy either. Possibly he feared that if he even briefly released Bad Kevin, the verbose bureaucrat who can’t get through a sentence without letting rip an acronym, inventing an incomprehensible new phrase and mentioning half a dozen statistics, he would take over and not let up until he’d murdered the English language right there on the Press Club podium. Then again, I keep having to remind myself that this isn’t really about health reform, so much as a political narrative about hospital funding.

As long as Abbott learns from yesterday, he won’t suffer any damage and might even benefit from it. If he stops underestimating Rudd and realises being entirely negative was a luxury Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull had but which he no longer does, he’ll be a smarter opponent in three or four months’ time when the serious stuff starts.