FOR once, the great, implacable, unstoppable All Blacks machine has made an error. Today, New Zealand must take on a half-decent rugby team.

How they managed to allow France on to the schedule of one of those patented All Blacks Soft Rugby Tours, I don’t know. It must have been because they realised that for the tour to have any credibility, they would have to play England or France. So, naturally, they took the softer option — no doubt regretting that they couldn’t play Scotland instead (or San Marino) — and went for France.

New Zealand began their tour with a match against Italy. Italy, still struggling to make the step from not bad to pretty good, got a routine hammering. The All Blacks then took on Wales. It would seem that they skimped their research on this one. True, Wales are a second-tier rugby nation, but they are emphatically an improving team and gave the All Blacks a bit of a fright.

France might do a little better than that. The fact that Argentina beat them last weekend will either make France unstoppable or make them cave in after ten minutes. You never know with France. Chances are it will be a tough match for the All Blacks.

But hey, chaps, never mind. The final match of the tour is against the Barbarians and that will make plenty of money without testing anyone’s stomach for the fight. The Barbarians team will be an ad-hoc gathering of every has-been and never-wozzer residing in the northern hemisphere. All the decent players will be taking part in the Heineken Cup that weekend. That is the way of it these days. When the All Blacks play, the real action tends to be elsewhere.

But there is bad news on the horizon. I am very sorry to have to tell the New Zealanders that next autumn they will have to play England at Twickenham. They had to do it. Otherwise people might — perish the thought — suspect that New Zealand had been avoiding that fixture.

Playing England at Twickenham has become, despite the post-World Cup slump, just about the hardest task in world rugby. Nevertheless, the Australians have taken it on five times in the past six years and so have the South Africans. In that time, New Zealand have played England at Twickenham once.

That is not counting the match in the 1999 World Cup, which they couldn’t really avoid. And to be fair and accurate and so forth, New Zealand won convincingly. None of the games that Australia and South Africa played at Twickenham was in the World Cup. Perhaps those countries believe that identifying a sporting challenge should be followed by the act of taking it on.

All right, then, let us accept the fact that New Zealand are at least going to play France today. So if France beat them, it is a national humiliation, right? Well, wrong actually. The players comprise a “development squad”. This is technically known as a team with a built-in excuse for losing.

The All Blacks’ line-up today has nine changes from the team that played in the final match of the Tri-Nations tournament. This is an experimental line-up that may or may not produce future stars. What it is not is a completely baked side for whom victory is everything.

All right, you can say that this ruthlessness and disrespectful policy towards international rugby matches is part of the All Blacks’ canniness. They make soft tours, they send out development teams, but when it comes to the biggest of the big occasions, they are ready and the others are not.

Lovely theory, shame about the practice. New Zealand won the first World Cup, in 1987 and, er, that’s it. At the last World Cup they lost in the semi-finals to Australia. The All Blacks were rated higher, the Australians wanted it more.

It increasingly seems that the All Blacks myth is just a mite short of substance these days. And all the policy and planning and organisation seem to be designed to protect the myth.

There is precious little that is exceptional about the present All Blacks, apart from the mystique. They have hung on to that with glorious tenacity, but surely it is time that someone noticed that there was a shortfall in actual performance. You can’t go swaggering about claiming to be the best rugby team in the history of the universe if you don’t (a) beat other leading rugby teams, or (b) even play them.

The New Zealanders created hard-nosed, intense rugby union and imposed on the sport a lofty professionalism in the days when woolliness was a revered philosophical concept. Once, every rugby player in the world was, at heart, an All Blacks wannabe.

Times have changed and everyone has moved on except New Zealand. They are mired in the glories of their past and instead of moving on they set up soft tours and pick squads that can lose without shame. The world has caught up with the All Blacks myth and realised that, although the kit remains the coolest in world sport, the clothes have no emperors.