England will have to go some today to match Wales’s performance against the haka last weekend — two minutes of rock-steady eyeballing until Richie McCaw led New Zealand’s eventual climbdown. It didn’t just set a benchmark for responding to the haka. It built an entirely new bench.

Graham Henry, the New Zealand coach, tried to cover for McCaw afterwards. “It took someone with common sense, the All Blacks captain, to get things going,” he said. Nice try, Henry, but let’s face it: your guy blinked.

All things considered, it’s probably as well that the All Blacks offered Wales the historical “Ka Mate” haka, not the much newer “Kapa O Pango” variation, which controversially concludes with a throat-slitting gesture. I should confess that, until this week, I thought “Kapa O Pango” was an Irish fly half, but, having read up on the history, I can confidently tell you that if the All Blacks start drawing their thumbs along their gullets this afternoon, we’re getting a 2005 remix, rather than the century-old “Ka Mate”.

The great Cardiff face-off of 2008 didn’t go down entirely well with the All Blacks. Ma’a Nonu, who weighs 16st 5lb including tattoos and is nicknamed “the Rock”, said: “I was a bit upset.” You could argue that it ill-becomes someone that big, who has just spent three minutes sticking his tongue out and slapping his pecs, to get all twitchy and thin-skinned just because a few Welshmen start staring at him.

But Nonu maintained that his principal concern was for the feelings of his country. “People back home will have been hurt by what they did,” Nonu said. “Standing there is asking for a fight.” Asking for a fight? After a war dance? What were those Wales players thinking of? One was reminded of the Peter Sellers line from Dr Strangelove: “You can’t fight in here. This is the war room.”

As today’s match neared, the controversy showed no sign of abating, with Brian Moore, the former England hooker, suggesting that “there should be a level playing field in psychological warfare” but without suggesting how that might work, and with Henry announcing his hope that “a copycat situation doesn’t occur. It’s time to move on and be more sensible.” Again, the tongues, the slapping, the hip-thrusting motions . . . Can we be certain that “sensible” really applies here?

It is, of course, tiresomely predictable to suggest, as Zinzan Brooke, the former New Zealand No 8, did, that England might arrange a Morris Dance by way of reply — as if flapping about with hankies and ribbons were the only cultural device in an Englishman’s locker on these occasions.

Someone should remind Brooke that England, too, has an historically proven warrior tradition, being, after all, the country that single-handedly invented punk rock and football hooliganism, to name only those.

England’s tribal rituals just don’t happen to express themselves in synchronised dancing, that’s all. What did Sir Arnold Bax, the composer, say? “Try everything once except incest and Morris Dancing.” It’s sound advice.

By thinking about this with a far more open mind than Brooke seems prepared to, we have devised two workable haka-response solutions, either of which would allow England to make a properly prideful stand today on their own turf, in the face of the haka’s intimidation, while also taking into account the apparent sensitivities in this area of Nonu, Henry and others.

First, there’s the children and animals option. It was Dennis Wise, at the FA Cup Final of 2000, who initiated the sentimental use of offspring on the big sporting occasions, and England can move the tradition into a whole new area by taking to the field this afternoon with their children, and perhaps, in addition, their children’s pets.

The All Blacks would then be sticking their tongues out and miming disembowelment in the direction of two-year-olds and their guinea pigs — an outcome that would, at the very least, surely, draw the haka’s sting.