Ireland's Call? Let it go to voice mail.

News from Ireland this week suggests that the countries GAA stadiums may be allowed to become part of an IRFU 2023/27 World Cup bid, with the final being played at Croke Park.  An Irish world cup would undoubtedly be great fun and has many positives including being in the best time zone for TV audiences and its place in Europe making it easy for travelling fans.

But it shouldn’t happen.

Rugby needs to grow internationally, the 2011 World Cup should never have been given to New Zealand and, despite the anticipation I’m feeling for the 2015 World Cup awarding it to England was also a mistake.  New territories need to be grown into, the same old countries need to move over and give the rest of the world some ownership of the game.  Other bidders for the 2023/27 World Cups are said to be Russia, Argentina, Italy, South Africa and the United States, with the exception of South Africa all would be virgin territory for the World Cup.  Some in authority are worried that the 2019 Japan World Cup will be a bust and that 2023 needs to be a commercial certainty, this negative attitude is why Rugby never grows and never gets anywhere, the Blazers always say that we’ll play more teams in the future when they’re competitive but until you play these nations they’ll never become competitive.  Likewise until we go to these places, play them, treat them as equals and give them a sense of ownership then any attempts to grow the game will result in failure.

The next World Cup in Europe must surely go to either Italy or Russia (accepting that Russia is in Europe of course!).  Italy are prime to host a World Cup, they are becoming ever more competitive on the field at both club and international level and are also showing growth in both spectator and grass roots playing numbers.  Russia would be a brave choice, truly opening up Rugby’s frontiers but the game is growing there, they have a professional domestic league and the game seems to enjoy the favour of the government.

But the tournament should first take place on the American continent.  If either the United States or Argentina (or both) were awarded the World Cup then the IRB could proudly boast that Rugby has taken its show piece even to every region on the planet, something that FIFA can’t yet boast with the Football World Cup.  The two American contenders have the advantage of multiple time zones so European teams could play at times to suit their audiences as could Australasian nations, with the United States being the single largest market to advertise to in the world.  If, as is often claimed, it’s all about money then surely the United States will be awarded a World Cup.

South Africa has many of the same advantages and disadvantages of Ireland; it is already a major rugby nation in a desirable time zone but perhaps could be used as a kick start for the game in wider southern Africa such as Zimbabwe, Madagascar and Namibia.  It also last hosted the World Cup in 1995 so would have waited 36 years for the tournament to return if it was passed over for 2023 and 2027.  That is a long time in anybody’s book.

Hopefully the IRB council will at the very least be brave and award one of the 2023 or 2027 World Cups to an emerging nation, but with the IRB’s faintly corrupt voting structure it is only a hope that we are spared from Ireland 2023 and South Africa 2027.

Olympic Lessons

Team GB’s historic performance in the London Olympics has led many to ask what can Rugby learn from Team GB?  There has been the fawning over cycling’s “aggregation of marginal gains”, something England Rugby pioneered, and much admiring in some quarters of the aggressive centralisation of many sports. 

But the most important idea Rugby can take from the Olympics is the no excuse attitude that UK Sport and the British Olympic Association takes over results.  The best sports get more funding and the losing sports have their funding cut.  A prime case for the RFU to consider is the delivery of their Academy programme and the delivery of their outreach work.  Is every pound working as hard as possible? 

Currently all 14 RFU Regional Academies receive the same central funding from the RFU despite producing wildly differing results, in fact there have been murmurings that the underperforming Northern Academies getting more resources despite failing on their current budgets.  This would be the equivalent of the giving swimming a funding boost because it failed.  The logic is nice and friendly: give the failures a leg up so they can compete with the successful.  But that ignores the underlying reasons why those Academies have been failing and encourages other clubs to fail as there is no incentive to have a well run Academy.

There is no auditing of Academies, those that are there are there and aren’t going anywhere and any other club that wants an academy, well tough luck you’ve got to fund it yourself.  This is no way to run an elite performance plan.  The RFU should start straightaway an audit of all 14 academies, how many internationals have they produced?  How many premiership players?  How many hours a week do they train?  How many coaches do they have?  They should then accept bids from other clubs to have their facilities audited, such as Bedford, and grade the Academies.  The best Academies would receive more central funding providing the kept producing the results and the worst performing academies would have their funding cut until started turning things around. 

A similar system could be used to audit provision of community work with the best community projects receiving more funding and growing.  This would also make community funding independent of league position, currently the RFU outsource parts of the community work to the Premiership clubs which means that when Leeds get relegated on top of losing the £3.26m PRL centrally generated revenue they also lose £50k that was funding their community work in schools (even if that £50k only helped them reach 12 secondary schools).  Then if the Cornish Pirates were doing better community work than Sale they would be able to grow and improve even more.

Currently money is wasted on bad academies and bad community work by the lucky 14 clubs that the RFU have given the permanent Golden Ticket to, the B.O.A. or UK Sport wouldn’t stand for the waste and the RFU shouldn’t either.

"International" Rugby Board or Old Colonial Tie?

Undoubtedly Rugby’s biggest problem internationally is its lack of depth.  The top of the game is actually reasonably wide, if stagnant in terms of new blood, with 4 different winners of the World Cup in 7 tournaments and no team ever retaining the trophy.  But outside the 8 foundation unions of the IRB only 4 others have got to a quarter final or better, Argentina in 1999, 2007 and 2011, Samoa in 1991 & 1995, Fiji in 1987 & 2007 and Canada in 1991.  That is really an indictment of the IRB’s efforts to spread the game.

The reason for this?  The fundamentally unfair and uneven way Rugby is governed.  Those founding 8 members get 2 votes each on the IRB’s central council whilst Canada, Japan, Italy and Argentina get 1 vote and the other 90 odd countries associated with the IRB get 6 between them through the 6 continental associations which of course the 8+4 are also members of!  Given the distain Sepp Blatter is treated in the British press, despite being elected in a true one man one vote system, you’d think the IRB would get an even worse treatment for a “democracy” that would make F.W. de Klerk blush, but no the cosy club that controls Rugby gets away with next to no scrutiny by the press.

So would a FIFA style one man one vote system be the best option?  Possibly not, even a staunch expansionist such as RM can see that giving the Bahamas the same voting rights as South Africa is perhaps not the most sensible way to grow the sport; “pork barrel” politics where favours are given to nations for their votes has lead FIFA down a difficult route.  A better option might be to look at the UN, with both permanent and termed members of an executive council elected by the full council.  England, France, New Zealand and South Africa could be the permanent members of the council with a further 5 elected from the full congress on a one man one vote system on two year terms.  The World Cup host should be decided in an open ballot, no more secret horse trading that blighted the 2011 vote where New Zealand pipped Japan to the post with some dodgy deals.

Rugby has a big advantage with the spread of the few teams it does have, Asia is the only region not to have provided a semi-finalist of the Rugby World Cup (if we follow the IRB as regarding the Americas as one region) and Rugby is well established in Japan with a professional league and a World Cup to host in 2019.  The bridgeheads into Africa and the Americas that South Africa and Argentina provide have never fully been utilised but remain as hopes for the future.  Argentina does a good amount for the other South American countries as it continues to play test matches, and compete in one of two truly continental championships rugby has, against their neighbours Uruguay and Chile as well as allowing those countries to take part in its domestic tournaments in a similar arraignment to the Pampas XV playing in South Africa.  South Africa have toyed with a similar idea for their Vodacom Cup, Namibia have competed in the past, but have never really fully bought into the idea that they have a duty to spread Rugby throughout southern Africa let alone the whole of Africa.  The, pretty outrageous, capping of Zimbabweans like Mujati or Mwatarera might be welcomed by those players as a chance to compete at a higher level but with props like that and someone like Pocock in the backrow Zimbabwe would have surely qualified for another World Cup, and that might have acted as a spur for improvement and populised the game further domestically as World Cup success has in Argentina and Georgia.

But whilst those nations are no saints they aren’t the real bad guys.  That is surely reserved for the arrogant elite that dominate and stifle European Rugby.  Georgia have consistently been the 7^th best side in Europe, winning 5 European Nations Cups, yet shockingly have NEVER played an old 5 Nations team outside a World Cup or its qualifying tournament.  In the past two World Cups they have run Ireland then Scotland extremely close, they are clearly a good side, as good as the Pacific Island sides that seem to still get international invitations, but get NO exposure against “Tier 1” nations.  If each of the 6 Nations committed to playing Georgia once at home and once away during the November Test series over the next 6 years then Georgia would have 2 tests every year until 2020 to measure themselves against their European peers whilst each nation would only have to give up 1 home November Test series match out of 18 (or more as the likes of Wales play matches outside of the International Window).   That is an incredibly small sacrifice to make to widen European Rugby horizons.  Perhaps cynically the reason this hasn’t happened is such a series of fixtures would make the case for reforming the 6 Nations into a true European Championship almost unavoidable.  It is also due to economic snobbery.  The RFU blazers and committee men just aren’t interested in going to Tbilisi, if Spain or Germany had produced Georgia’s results over such a sustained period of time the Blazers and their Wives (and their wives’ tennis partners) would be knee deep in tapas guzzling Rioja in Madrid or downing Steins of Weissbier and munching on Pretzels in Munich in no time, but a trip beyond the Iron Curtain?  No thanks chum.

I suppose to be fair to the RFU blazers (and their wives and their wives’ tennis partners) they never lowered themselves to playing Italy in a test match either nor have they ever deemed Canada or the USA worthy of a test match, and those would all be wonderful trips.

The Rugby World Cup is the pinnacle of the sport and has been the greatest driver of growth in international Rugby, but it too has challenges it must face.  The biggest challenge is threat to its integrity that uneven and unfair scheduling creates.  It seems perverse that those nations most able to deal with short turn arounds are the only ones which don’t face them.  In the 2011 Rugby World Cup it was the weaker nations who faced 4 day gaps between games where the 8 foundation unions got no less than 6 days between games.  This also has the unhelpful effect of lengthening the tournament, the Rugby World Cup must be the longest major championship.  It is pretty obvious that this is a symptom of the uneven voting structure of the IRB, after all those nations with votes are the ones least affected, perhaps this will be the issue that brings about change in the voting structure.  We can but hope.

The knock out element of the tournament also needs to be shortened, a week’s gap between the end of the group stage, the quarter final, the semi final and then the final lose all of the momentum that has been generated during the group stage.  That is perhaps a challenge too far as you want the best sides available to decide the tournament.

Refereeing is also a contentious subject.  Hopefully the ascension of Argentina to the Rugby Championship will provide a pathway for elite referees better than Italy’s acceptance into the 6 Nations has for Italian Rugby.  The total domination of elite refereeing by the 8 foundation unions is a disgrace and is highly damaging to Rugby’s appeal and growth.  Samoa have already raised the issue of bias, both overt and subliminal, but have been rebuffed with the typical arrogance that is associated with IRB.  The perception of a refereeing cosy club is damaging even though I do have faith in the IRB that it isn’t true.  More to the point someone must be refereeing the domestic Argentinean competitions that produce such prodigious players, someone is refereeing matches in Japan, Fiji, Canada and the professional league in Russia.  These countries produce high quality players by the bucket load but not a single referee to the standard of Greg Garner?  Give over.  This could be the easiest of all problems to fix, if only the IRB recognised it as a problem.

But it all comes down to the inequitable foundation stones upon which the whole edifice of International Rugby is constructed.  A move to fairer voting system at the heart of the IRB is a complete must.  At the very smallest of incremental steps that MUST be taken would be the increasing of Argentina and Italy to 2 votes each and the creation of votes for the USA, Samoa, Fiji and Tonga.  That would leave a handful of European nations outside the formal voting structure rather than the majority of major world nations.  A UN style mix of permanent and elected board members would be even better.  Fix that and a lot of the other problems would soon follow because those at the sharp end of the decisions would finally have a voice.