Rugby World Cup 2015: Song and dance over the haka just lets Dawson cash in with more lame humour

View From The Sofa: Hakarena YouTube

You mock the haka at your peril. Because such is the quality of the marketing propaganda – oops, sorry, tradition – surrounding the New Zealand rugby team’s pre-match ritual, to denigrate the tongue-flapping, thigh-slapping, hypnotic ceremonial dance is tantamount to blasphemy.

The dance itself is extremely old and cloaked in legend. The All Blacks have been doing it before Tests since the turn of last century, although the current ferocity did not materialise until big ticket sponsorship came on board with the advent of professionalism. And not any old person can lead it – tradition dictates that the person delivering the initial commands (loosely translated as “Slap your hands on your thighs, stick out your chest, bend your knees”) is of Maori heritage. And anybody who shows less than knee-quaking reverence to the dance is branded “disrespectful”, because performing the haka also demands a sense of humour bypass.

So Matt Dawson was putting his life in his hands with his video that did the rounds last week, in which he led a band of blokes in England colours (apparently an amateur rugby team from Battersea, south London) in the “Hakarena”, to promote something which has nothing to do with rugby.

After shouting at his on-screen team-mates that the All Blacks use the haka “to intimidate us” and “they think they have an advantage over us, they think the game has been won before a ball is even kicked”, he growls: “We have got our own secret weapon,” before adopting a haka-like pose.

He then grabs his nipples, sways his hips like a hula-hooper as a pastiche of Los del Rio’s irritating 1990s hit “Macarena” begins, while the rest of the team look uncomfortably at each other. And most right-thinking members of the public avert their eyes.

For those brave enough to keep looking, they get to see Dawson gyrating for a minute or so before finishing with a flourish and a roundhouse kick that is so camp it should be approved by the Caravan Club. “Why don’t you have a go and maybe we’ll put the All Blacks off their rhythm,” Dawson says.

You know what? I won’t, thanks all the same, Matt. Mainly because I don’t want to look like a dork.

But, sadly and all too predictably, howls of outrage came emanating from New Zealand as soon as the video went online. Sir Pita Sharples, a Kiwi politician, called Dawson’s act “shameful” and “insulting”.

Sharples is half-right: the video is not insulting unless you are sensitive enough to let it get up your nose. This is presumably the intention of the company which paid Dawson what we hope was a massive wheelbarrow of cash to act like an utter goose. Such are the rules of viral marketing.

But Sharples is right in saying the dance itself is shameful. Because it is. It is everything that is wrong with ex-sportspeople who have “media presence” outside their own discipline. It is the end result of Dawson being allowed to trade on the image he has cultivated on the interminably chummy and reliably unfunny A Question of Sport. It is the televisual equivalent of the loud and boorish posh bloke who gets away with telling off-colour jokes when tipsy because nobody has had the courage to tell him to shut his gob And, most importantly it is just not bloody funny.