Crikey, what a relief – the All Blacks are sticking with Graham Henry, meaning John O’Neill can resume his courtship of the Crusaders’ Robbie Deans to takeover as Wallabies coach.

For a minute there, just a minute, there seemed to be so much chatter about Alan Jones that you might have thought the long-retired coach and cash-for-comment king actually had a chance of again delivering half-time speeches in the Wallabies dressing room.

It has been a most curious campaign. An ungenerous soul might have thought there was some correlation between Jones’ nominating for the Wallabies job and his otherwise near invisibility during the election campaign. The rugby stuff was about the only air he received outside his own pontification show.

The Jones for Coach bandwagon, or perhaps wheelbarrow, has been an odd vehicle indeed, pushed along by rugby league commentators more than anyone else. Well, there was no rugby being played, so folks had to find something to fill a vacuum.

The public fate of Jones’ nomination should have been finalised last weekend though with the publication by Roy Masters of the “Jones Plan” — an amazingly simplistic view of professional rugby by someone who finished coaching in the amateur era two decades ago.

As the saying goes, to every deeply complex problem, there is a very simple answer – and it’ll be wrong.

The submission Jones put to the ARU selection panel had a number of truisms, a couple of good ideas that would work well for about one test before being countered — the 10-second lineout and some out-and-out howlers. For example, his sermon on the scrum:

These boys are not yet as strong as the people whose scrummaging they’re seeming to imitate … I always find, with respect, that if you spend too much time doing this in the gym, these fellows get a bit soft in the head. You’ve got to learn to wrestle and angle and react by physical contact. You’ve got to practise the scrum like a wrestling contest.

Ah yes, the wisdom of the school master: the jocks in the gym are thick. And Jones doesn’t think the existing prop crop should do a little physical contact, a bit of wrestle and angle and such? But wait, there’s more:

If we’ve got ball in hand, in the air and our players are in motion, then we have some of the most creative and destructive players in the world, backs and forwards … all that kid Barnes knew was to support the football. That’s all [John] Thornett’s team did in South Africa in 1963. They had no coach.

There you go, all you need is ball in hand and players in motion and no coach at all. When the coach from 83 hankers after game of 63, well, the game has moved on, leaving Jones and many rugby supporters behind.

Many of them understandably miss the old days, when defenses were much weaker and less organised, when there was no bench, when amateurs ran out of puff, allowing the odd zippy little back to run around them. Aimlessly shouting “getting it out to the wing” from the stands passed for informed commentary then. It doesn’t any more, but you’ll still hear it often enough.

Bring on Deans – if we can buy him. The Crusaders play rugby the way it is in heaven, the way it should be played. He’ll do more than shout “git ut out to the wung”.