Rugby World Cup: Knockout stage starts a week early

Now that the Wallabies have ended England’s Rugby World Cup, all focus rightly turns toward Wales, with top spot in Pool A – and the easier side of the knockout draw – the prize for the victors.

The England-Australia game was billed as ‘the biggest pool game in Rugby World Cup history’, and came only week after the previous ‘biggest pool game in Rugby World Cup history’ between England and Wales. Now that England have been disposed of, it feels like we’re entering a different stage of the competition.

After playing three games in the first 10 days of the World Cup campaign, the Wallabies now get a week to prepare for the Wales game at Twickenham in London next Saturday.

In fact, the rest of the Wallabies’ World Cup can essentially be treated as another Spring Tour, with matches now every weekend from here on. But even better, if they can beat Wales and finish atop Pool A, the Wallabies will simply play at Twickenham every weekend from here on, allowing them to develop something of a ‘home ground’ feel as the tournament reaches its crescendo.

Sound familiar? With Michael Cheika at the helm, HMAS Waratahs charted the 2014 Super Rugby seas with nine straight wins, and five of them coming at their Sydney Football Stadium home, before then winning the final at Homebush. Don’t underestimate the benefit of familiarity and routine in achieving success.

And the motivation in beating Wales this weekend coming couldn’t be more obvious.

Topping Pool A will mean that Australia take the ‘easier’ route to the final, which of course is to say that no knockout game will be easy. Perhaps the route-that-avoids-South-Africa-and-New-Zealand is the better way of putting it.

But this weekend coming is not just about Australia, and indeed, it’s not just about Pool A. With Argentina putting 40 points on Tonga on Sunday, they wrapped up second spot in Pool C behind New Zealand, and will now sit back (they’ll have to rise, briefly, to knock off Namibia in their last pool match next Sunday) and wait to see who takes out Pool D.

And that will be decided by the match between Ireland and France in Cardiff next Sunday. You may or may not recall from the very first Rugby World Cup edition of the Big Questions that we identified this match as one of the top five pool matches of the tournament, and its place in that list is only solidified now that the result becomes more significant.

France have been about as up-and-down as I expected them to be; that is, they’re right on track. The scorelines read as three pretty reasonable wins over Italy, Romania, and Canada, but I haven’t been overly convinced about any of them. They weren’t ever in danger, to be clear, but I don’t think they’ve played with the clinical edge that Ireland have, by comparison.

And I’m happy about Ireland playing as well as they have, and remaining largely under the radar, because they’ve long been my dark horse for the competition.

They were pushed by Italy on Sunday, perhaps surprisingly, but I think that just gears them up perfectly for France. Like the Wallabies, their campaign will consist five really tough games on the trot should they get all the way to the final, and I reckon this can only be a good thing, to have a proper Test match before entering the quarter-finals.

That clash on Sunday is a straight shootout for Ireland and France; winner takes top spot and the loser is rewarded with a quarter-final against a New Zealand side firing on perhaps only five of its eight cylinders. The winner will take on Argentina in a quarter-final in Cardiff.

Pool B is not so easily settled, and it’s here that we could see some proper heartbreak, not this superficial paper-cut kind of heartbreak England are experiencing, when in actual fact they just haven’t been good enough.

Japan, for example, could finish the 2015 Rugby World Cup with three wins and not qualify for the quarters. Their record could be on par with every pool stage runner-up in the tournament – and it would be their most successful Rugby World Cup ever – and they could still go home.

Despite beating South Africa, in what will remain one of the highlights of the World Cup, and accounting superbly for Samoa on the weekend just gone, Japan are left to sweat on another result.

They should and probably will make short work of the USA in the last pool match of the tournament on Sunday, but unless Samoa can beat Scotland the day before, not even a win over the States will prevent the sayonara for the Brave Blossoms.

Before the tournament, if you had offered three undecided pools heading into the final weekend of the pool stage – and one of those pools possibly going down to the very last game of the stage – I reckon the organisers would’ve jumped at it, even if it meant they had to sacrifice a big name casualty.

Yet here we are, heading into the final week of the stage, and it’s still very much to be decided. We have had that big name casualty, and heading into the final game of the stage, everyone in the rugby world could well be donning the headbands in support of the tournament darlings.

And I think the tournament will be all the more memorable for it.