Loose Pass: Thrills, spills and pool length criticism; the half-way report of the Rugby World Cup

Lawrence Nolan
France supporters at Rugby World Cup.

France supporters at Rugby World Cup.

This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with the half-way report of the 2023 Rugby World Cup…

Next Sunday it will have been a calendar month since that remarkable opening ceremony in Paris. We’ve had thrills and spills, we’ve had controversy and brilliance, we’ve had characters and songs, epic games, we’ve got permutations heading into the final weekend. We’ve had it all so far and although there’ve been some teething troubles in the cities and in the organisation, we can’t say with any heartfelt honesty that this World Cup is not going well.

And yet. Next Sunday it will have also taken an entire month to get through the pool stages, which have delivered plenty in colour, but rarely enough to hold sustained interest during the three or four-day fallow periods. There’s three more tournament weeks to go after it too. Fans are going 14 days without seeing their team play at times. The player welfare box has been ticked there for sure, but the other side of the coin is that this is all going on a bit long.

Not enough jeopardy

Once the excitement of the initial fortnight wears off, it is much harder to raise the excitement once again for, say Uruguay v Namibia than it is to look at a game which carries genuine jeopardy and/or meaning to the pool outcomes. Weekends become more cherry-picked than entirely consumed. As we head into the final weekend of pool play, how many games really carry a heavy element of jeopardy? The closest is clearly Japan v Argentina, with Ireland v Scotland in second. You’d be a brave man to put any serious money on any other shocks. A 25 per cent jeopardy rating on the final weekend of pool matches is not enough.

The Rugby World Cup is – disputedly – the world’s third-largest sporting event. It is the catwalk show for the game, the main stand at the sporting trade fair, the prime-time advertising slot that comes around once every four years. Despite it being an awful lot of fun for those already initiated, is it doing enough to grow the game? Or is it a self-congratulating festival for the inner circle?

The questions, as ever, are being answered by the players and the coaches. Chile coach Pablo Lemoine has already fired a broadside at how his team is unlikely to play another tier one nation before Australia 2027 – and Uruguay deserve similar sentiment. Having ignored Georgia for years, is Europe and the Six Nations going to carry on ignoring Portugal as well? What can you do about Namibia, with a great rugby tradition but miniscule resources?

We all perceive the efforts of these nations as gallant and immensely credit-worthy, but the other reality is still that nobody new to the game sees much sense in teams going home having played one close match and lost the other three by 70. Nor do fans of those teams who have enjoyed these moments in the limelight have much to hang on to once it’s done.

A German (in France on business for two weeks and getting his first big exposure to rugby) I watched the South Africa-Romania match with in a bar in Nice was flabbergasted when I mentioned to him that Romania were in the top 20 in the world (out of 113). A Portuguese father of two early teenage boys in Saint-Etienne lamented the fact that the next time Portugal can play anyone like Australia will be in Australia in 2027 – and specifically wondered how his boys would be persuaded to keep up their interest once other distractions came a-calling.

The German, especially, was increasingly astonished when I explained to him how qualifying worked – that 12 of the 20 teams are already set for Australia 2027 by Sunday night. Pertinently, he openly wondered why other countries bothered even playing.

The system needs a brush-up. Apparently we soon get a Nations Championship, stacked full of money-spinning matches for a healthy dozen whose tickets to Australia are almost entirely already booked. This does very little for the tier two nations who have made this tournament so colourful up to now.

As well as the potential to introduce qualifying systems where everybody has to play qualifying matches rather than just the tier two nations, a system has also been suggested with six pools of four producing quarter-finals in the same way the Heineken Cup used to (remember how good so many of those final pool weekends used to be?) and producing a plate competition for the next best finishers, with plate matches filling the midweek slots and ensuring non-stop tournament rugby for the duration. There’ve been many, many worse ideas – not least the one where we go to 16 teams instead of 20.

The German – who had seen a few games on television during his fortnight in France – was also bewildered at the bunker system. Well, you can explain how it works. But you can’t explain how Shota Horie can be yellow-carded only for colliding with a Samoan player when Johan Deysel cops a five-week ban because his incident – not far off a carbon copy – happened to injure the tournament and host nation’s pin-up boy.

Nor is the whole TMO system a good look in general. Again, said German, who also did not appreciate the VAR in soccer, could not work out how so many incidents could result in so many different outcomes but audibly sighed with frustration when a potential head clash was signalled in the game we watched.

Bunker is not working

The bunker is not working. There’s still no consistency, far more frustration than even before (an impressive achievement) and it still is interrupting games. It was a good idea in principle, but the longer it goes on, the more it goes wrong. There has to be a better way.

It has been a great World Cup. Host cities have been welcoming, crowds have been friendly, the locals have given it the colour it needs. The quality of rugby has been greatly enhanced by the improvements of the tier two teams. The game now needs to serve them better, to help them enhance the next edition even more and to help the game take more advantage of its months in the limelight.

As recent experience in England’s Championship is beginning to show, if you leave ambition to its own devices and fail to generate a clear pathway upwards based on merit and not just finance, you run the risk of the second tier ruining itself in frustration.

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