We should all adopt Don Brash's recent assessment of the race-based situation reinforcing the paramount significance of citizenship over dodgy ethnicity considerations.

Maori ‘All Blacks' comprising mainly players of infinitesimal Maori bloodlines are a race-based nonsense in the same league as the reserved anachronistic Maori Parliamentary seats. It is about time some of the media's editorial staff stopped fantasising over, fictionalising and rabbiting on about all things Maori and took a healthy dose of reality by facing the facts.

A couple of quotes sum it up rather nicely. 'The worst enemy of humans is not brute facts but men/women with brains who will not face them.” (Eastman) and 'Facts are stubborn things and whatever our wishes, our inclinations or the dictates of our passions they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” (John Adams).

Returning to last Saturday's rugby game, the performance by the Maori team was lamentable and a huge disappointment to the 28,000 followers who turned out to see them live up to their pre-match hype.

Frankly, it ended up in the same reeking-of-overconfidence mess as was the case in 1956 when the Springboks handed out a 37-zip thrashing.

S Paterson, Arataki.