Sam Cane had to leave the field for a head injury assessment after his collision with Ofa Tu'ungafasi and France's Remy Grosso.

OPINION: As Steve Hansen rolled his eyes skywards and fended off the latest accusations of foul play and serial cheating, it was hard not to feel some sympathy for him.

Hansen's All Blacks are many things, but cheats is not one of them. Yes, they play the game hard. Uncompromisingly, even, when needs must. This is test rugby, not tiddlywinks, after all.

But they don't lurk habitually on the dark side of the force, as some would have you believe. They don't plot despicable means to win test matches. They don't put in the filth at any opportunity they see fit amidst the hurly-burly of a test match.

MARTY MELVILLE/PHOTOSPORT France's Remy Grosso runs into All Blacks Ofa Tu'ungafasi and Sam Cane in the Eden Park test.

To suggest otherwise is simply to twist the facts to suit your agenda.

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Yes, many of their players are big, strong men who play with a brutish force. And occasionally their commitment and fervour sees them transgress in the eyes of the rugby law. It happens in almost every match these days.

On Saturday night they assuredly did that when Sam Cane and Ofa Tu'ungafasi came in to deal with the threat of French wing Remy Grosso and suddenly found themselves encountering a target that was getting lower to the ground by the milli-second.

So there was some accidental contact to the head, initially from Cane's arm, and possibly from Tu'ungafasi's shoulder. They also banged heads with each other. It was that type of an unpredictable, unmanageable, "fluid" situation, to borrow Hansen's word of choice to describe the modern game.

"Our game is really fluid, there's movement in it, and when you get two guys coming in to make a tackle on one, things can change late. That's what happened," was Hansen's take.

In this case he's dead right.

Referee Luke Pearce agreed too after reviewing the incident on video.

But just because he earlier made an error in yellow-carding French lock Paul Gabrillagues for a high shot on Ryan Crotty, when replays showed there was nothing sinister or particularly dangerous about the play, did not mean he should do likewise with Cane, or Tu'ungafasi.

Two wrongs do not make a right in any walk of life.

Of course French coach Jacques Brunel was emotional afterwards. The second-half yellow card had changed the game, and his side had just been spanked 52-11 by the All Blacks who had rattled off 44 unanswered points in the second half.

So he trotted out words like "dangerous" and "illegal" to describe the All Blacks' play. Maybe something got lost in translation. Maybe not.

It's a common tactic for a coach in Brunel's situation to deflect the real situation – ie, his team had just been played off the park in a seven-try second-half blitz – by throwing an accusation into the mix.

But the truth is the All Blacks don't play dirty. They don't need to. The last half-hour of Saturday's match showed that vividly.

They are a team that revels in high pace, in lightning strikes, in expressing themselves across the width of the park. They are at their best floating in Hansen's "fluidity". They are not nefarious nitwits who like to take heads off at every opportunity.

Yes, in this test they were lucky. They got a call that went decidedly their way, and were good enough to make the most of it.

Just like, on the same ground, against the British and Irish Lions nearly a year ago, they were horribly unlucky, and it cost them a series victory.

But cheats?

In this case Hansen deserves the final word: "We've been called cheats for 100 years, and if you keep winning people have got to find reasons ... You've just got to roll with that stuff and not take too much notice of it."