Bledisloe Cup fixtures are supposed to be grim affairs. But there was All Blacks winger Ben Smith laughing hysterically.
The Wallabies had gone through their customary second half routine of imploding, highlighted by their unruly replacement hooker Tolu Latu being sent to the sinbin for a moronic act. Seventy seconds later, voila the All Blacks, with the advantage of an extra man, scored at the other end when Smith grabbed a wayward Israel Folau pass and took off to find the line, helped by a questionable block of Kurtley Beale by New Zealand teammate Aaron Smith.
As Ben Smith ran back to his position knowing the Bledisloe Cup whitewash was now complete, he couldn't stop grinning. Then when talking to a member of the All Blacks support staff it turned into a long and loud almost side-splitting laugh. Why? Who knows, but it wouldn't surprise if it had something to do with the stupidity of his opponents.
Even if the Wallabies did produce one of their better performances of the season, which is not hard considering most 2018 efforts have been diabolical, the Japan Test emphasised once again that they fall well short of the world's best in skill level and on-field intelligence.
They remain a really dumb, ill-disciplined team.
Yet again Latu was shown to be a complete mug. After the All Blacks pack charged through their opponents to win a scrum penalty in the 66th minute, a back-pedalling Latu ridiculously slapped his opponent Codie Taylor across the side of the face. Taylor wasn't impressed with that, understandable as his team had just shown up the Australian front-row, pursued Latu and pushed him. Latu couldn't help himself and retaliated by again hitting Taylor in the face with an open hand.
Latu was not provoked. He started and ended it. Referees don't take kindly to players getting hit in the face, and so Latu disappeared for ten minutes.
All Blacks coach Steve Hansen got it right. "You're not allowed to strike someone in the face, so it was a pretty dumb thing wasn't it," Hansen said. "When you do dumb things, you get dumb reactions."
But what made this dumber than dumb is that this wayward he-man show came after Latu did something similar in the Wallabies' previous Test against Argentina. In the final minutes of the Salta international, all Australia had to do was to retain their composure in case of a Puma comeback. Someone forgot to tell Latu. Instead he decided to belt an opponent in the head with his forearm. He deserved a red card, not a yellow, but nonetheless the Wallabies that time got away with playing with 14 men.
Latu is a liability. The Wallabies must start looking elsewhere for a second hooker. But as Wallabies coach Michael Cheika has shown time and again, he blindly puts his faith in flawed products.
The signs that there is something inherently wrong with Cheika's Wallabies appeared well before kick-off. When announcing his line-up, Cheika had to rev up the lock he had called upon to replace the injured Adam Coleman. Cheika said that Rob Simmons had "a lot to prove here."
Simmons was about to play his 91st Test. It doesn't say much about the selection skills of Cheika and past Wallabies coaches who keep picking the lock if he still had a lot to prove in his ninth international season.
At least the often underwhelming Simmons, who boasts a personal 12 percent success rate against the All Blacks, was more visible this time around. The stern words clearly registered. Nonetheless, Cheika's squad has too many 'only just' Test players, who go missing when the pressure intensifies. The backup to a bunch of splutterers is also flimsy.
And that was shown by them being unable to take advantage of numerous excellent attacking opportunities in Yokohama, as well as failing badly in defending opposing set-piece moves, while under pressure they invariably lose their elementary skills.
With it comes another demoralising 3-0 Bledisloe Cup drubbing, where they were outscored 115-45, letting in 17 All Blacks tries and scoring just five. Again Cheika's success rate falls below 50 percent, and now his post 2015 World Cup win ratio sits at a mere 41 percent.
Then again Rugby Australia by its recent endorsement of Cheika and his entourage are clearly not distracted by these glaring figures. Quite a few of their board members were sighted in the Yokohama main grandstand watching the Wallabies demise. In spite of their glum looks, their motto clearly remains: "Near enough is good enough."
Sadly in the real world, the Australian rugby masses continue to walk away from a once glorious but now mediocre national team.