World Cup Daily: Could this image rule Richie McCaw out of World Cup final?

The All Blacks' advance to a second successive World Cup final appearance was feted in New Zealand on Sunday, but local media fretted that a stray elbow could rule talismanic captain Richie McCaw out of the title-decider.

The defending champions will play the winner of Australia and Argentina for the Webb Ellis Cup after a tense 20-18 win over South Africa at Twickenham on Saturday.

But rugby-mad New Zealand faces a nervous wait to see whether McCaw will be cited for his contact on Francois Louw after he felled the Springboks flanker early in the match.

Video footage posted online shows McCaw charging into a ruck after 20 minutes of the match and Louw reeling from a blow as the New Zealand captain brushed past in pursuit of the ball.

However, it is far from clear that the hit came from McCaw's elbow - and stuff.co.nz's slow-motion video strongly suggests that the contact was between McCaw's hip and Louw's shoulder, not elbow and head.

The loss of the inspirational 34-year-old to suspension would be a big blow to the All Blacks' hopes of a back-to-back championships and a likely sad ending to the playing career of one of the game's finest players.

McCaw has not declared he intends to retire from the game after the World Cup but is widely tipped to do so.

New Zealand's top rugby pundits went into overdrive defending McCaw's honour on Sunday, blaming a British media conspiracy and claiming suggestions the contact might have been deliberate were "insulting".

"It's typical that the knives are out for Richie McCaw right to the end of his celebrated career," Duncan Johnstone wrote in Christchurch newspaper The Press.

"Next weekend's World Cup title match is the perfect finale for the game's finest player.

"But with their usual impeccable timing, his place in that match is now being scrutinised by his good mates in the British media."

New Zealand Herald columnist Wynne Gray also declared McCaw's contact with Louw "innocuous" and "accidental".

"McCaw is no saint as he runs the legal margins every time he challenges for possession at rucks, breakdown and tackled ball zones," Gray wrote. "However, he is no cheap shot merchant."

That description of McCaw as "no saint" is right: he's a man who has made an artform of playing rugby right at the very limit of the rules, and in so doing he has done the All Blacks proud for a decade.

Brian Habana came to Twickenham hoping to keep his last hurrah in World Cup rugby going with one more top drawer performance. Instead, he ended up in the sin bin

As the Daily Telegraph's Oliver Brown put it: "For Bryan Habana, quietly seething on the loneliest chair in rugby, this was not how it was supposed to end. A cynical challenge on Nehe Milner-Skudder to put the All Blacks wing out of the game, a deliberate knock-on, and then 10 chastening minutes in the sin-bin as South Africa’s World Cup campaign dissolved around him in the Twickenham rain."

As for the man himself? "Words cannot describe it,” said Habana, at least selfless to the last. "I’m just hurt for mates who have become brothers.”

It's happened before. Could it happen again?

New Zealand 3-10

Australia 7-2

Argentina 16-1

Not a picture exactly, today, but a brief moment caught on video showing the respect between two of rugby's great nations in what is arguably one of the strongest rivalries in world sport.