IRB must use club rugby to expand

 
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By kingplaymaker, 12 Nov 2010 kingplaymaker is a Roar Guru

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The IRB is a jolly club where some old amateurs of the game can go to earn a good living, travel the world a little and watch some of their favourite sport, rugby.

These men are doubtless good fellows at heart, charming comrades for a beer and should they be English, which a lot of them are, cheery reminiscences over thatched cottages may ensue and a raised glass to the success of Britain in keeping out of the Euro will be easily had.

But perhaps it has not dawned yet everywhere in the rugby world that the game is now professional. This means things like money, efficiency, performance and accountability.

When summoning an image of Will Carling’s old codgers, one that will be found identical to the IRB board today, such ideas do not spring easily to mind. Is the IRB accountable, professional?

How many of these men became involved in rugby during its amateur days, and how many are children of the professional era? Given there is seldom a hair of anything less than purest grey hair in sight at a meeting of the IRB, it is obviously the former.

This warm, nostalgic state of affairs is all very well and good except for one problem: some people in the game may actually want to expand it. Do the IRB have the same desire?

Would they really wish to bring into being a world in which Canada could defeat England, or Romania thrash Scotland?

This is a question that will be left in abeyance for the moment, but the sight of Martyn Thomas, the arch-reactionary RFU management chairman, involved in awarding the next two World Cups should have sent shivers down the spine of anyone interested in rugby becoming a global game.

In effect, there has been no expansion whatsoever of rugby since it turned professional.

The usual argument to the contrary proposed, that teams like Tonga are more competitive than they used to be, is the result instead of the players from these smaller rugby countries plying their trade professionally for clubs in Europe and the Super 14 and hence becoming better at the game. Within countries outside the Six Nations and Tri-Nations, there has been zero expansion.

It should all be straightforward to an ambitious, high-quality body charged with expanding the sport. In Georgia, Romania, Russia, Canada and Japan there is already a very good base on which to build interest further.

The IRB assumes the only way to do this is through the international representative game, but is that the case?

When Rugby league wishes to expand, they create and fund clubs in new countries and persuade the existing clubs to integrate them into their competitions. Witness the founding of league clubs in Wales and France in the northern hemisphere, and New Zealand in the southern hemisphere.

Why can’t the IRB do exactly the same: create and fund clubs in Tokyo, Buenos Aires and Vancouver and persuade SANZAR to accept them into the Super 14, and likewise ask the Magner’s league to integrate clubs from Bucharest, Tbilisi and Moscow.

Obviously money would be needed to make these teams competitive, but the IRB have an awful lot of this, and they spend it on precious little else besides expanding their already fulsome bellies.

I would suggest basing such clubs around the national teams of each country, with a number of high quality players from elsewhere brought in to increase overall strength. Even if this is not possible, teams consisting of mainly foreign players can still achieve their goal.

That is to provide high quality rugby live and on television around the year in developing rubgy countries.

There is considerable interest in the game in Georgia, or Japan, but it is dormant and unexploited.

Then the IRB themselves must be accountable, and should receive a high level of media scrutiny, with their expansion plans called to account and hauled before inspection in the same way as David Gallop and the NRL are. Members should not be chosen because solely because they have histories as players, but on account of their professional ability in what is essentially a business.

Entry into the Olympic Games should not be assumed to work the kind of magic that transforms rugby into a rival of football in the blink of an eye, nor should the IRB leave the clubs to do the work.

When John O’Neill proposes taking the Super tournament to Tokyo, he should be acting on the IRB’s instigation. Instead they are nowhere to be seen. They need not stand aloof, they can work with the clubs should they wish.

If it is in the clubs interest, they will accept IRB ideas.

The club game is if anything a better way to expand a sport, as it runs around the year, whereas internationals are more occasional and in a way rely on the strength of the tier immediately below in any case.

Then there is the generation of countries beyond those I have mentioned to consider. What are the IRB doing to develop the game in Spain, Portugal, Brazil, countries where it has a small foothold?

But do the IRB really want the game to grow? Wouldn’t it be nice to keep the sport one where Scotland can beat someone occasionally, and England are still in the hunt?

Given the huge British Isles presence in the IRB and its amateur nature, the answer might be worrying.

Nonetheless the challenge remains.

The IRB could turn the game global within a decade, or we might still be watching the same little world of ten nations with all its too familiar dramas and tribulations for many years to come.

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