SPIRO: Solve rugby's northern hemisphere problem with a global season

The myth of superior northern hemisphere rugby practice, organisation and knowledge has been shattered at the 2015 Rugby World Cup tournament, even before the final. There needs to be a recognition that the driving force in World Rugby now has to come from southern hemisphere nations.

For the first time a host nation, England, has been booted out of the Rugby World Cup before the finals.

Its union, against all the evidence, rather pretentiously calls itself the Rugby Football Union. It has the most registered players of any union, more than three times that of the ARU and the New Zealand Rugby Union. It has opposed every initiative, since 1895 and the breakaway of the northern leagues, to improve rugby as a spectacle and a game of skills.

England, Ireland and Scotland, for instance, opposed the Rugby World Cup concept when the ARU and New Zealand Rugby Union pushed ahead with the venture in 1987. These unions took on all the financial risk and produced a tournament that made a profit, which is unprecedented in the establishment of this sort of venture.

For their pains, the ARU and New Zealand Rugby Union faced demands from the Scotland Rugby Union to take a share of the profit!

The money, in fact, was snatched by the then IRB. It was used to set up a permanent secretariat, led by a Welshman, Vernon Pugh QC. As president, Pugh spent a lot of energy and money in trying to set up laws and practices that would help the slow-plod style of rugby that England favoured and still favours.

The latest example of this John Bully-boy determination to oppose expansion of rugby outside of the venerable institutions is the opposition from the Home Unions to rugby becoming an Olympic sport. It took a Frenchman Bernard Lapasset as chairman of World Rugby to push through this crucial initiative in rugby expanding throughout the world.

A first step to returning English rugby to any position of proper influence and power needs to be a change of its title to England Rugby, an acceptance that it is one union among over 100 in World Rugby and not the rugby union.

For the first time, too, all the teams competing in the Rugby World Cup semi-finals are southern hemisphere sides: Argentina, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand.

That constant critic of New Zealand rugby, Mark Reason, on Stuff, notes (and he is to be applauded for his honesty in this) that in this 2015 Rugby World Cup England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland played seven matches against the big four southern hemisphere teams. Result? All seven of these matches were lost.

The average score in these matches was 35-17. The total points scored in these matches was northern hemisphere 121 and southern hemisphere 245.

The top try-scoring teams going into the quarter-finals were: New Zealand 25, South Africa 23, Argentina 22, Australia 17.

I have no doubt that part of the faux fury about Craig Joubert’s so-called refereeing ‘mistake’ (which I have analysed on The Roar) has been a beat-up to cover up the woeful performance of northern hemisphere teams in this tournament.

The point here is that the northern hemisphere unions, especially the RFU, have always claimed a higher understanding of the practice and ethics of rugby than the southern hemisphere powers.

Using this claim, the RFU and its Celtic Chums have run rugby through their dominance in World Rugby in their own interests, which involves stopping as many initiatives as they can that aim to make rugby a worldwide game and a spectacle involving skills, pace and entertainment value.

This dogmatic and stupid belief that all the rugby wisdom in the world of rugby begins and ends with the so-called Home Unions (the ‘home’ of rugby, get it?) has bitten the RFU on the bum when they rejected advice from John O’Neill not to schedule the pool match for the 2015 World Cup three years before the tournament.

O’Neill pointed out that doing this created the Pool of Death, which would have dried up into a wading pool for England if the schedule had been drawn up, as it is in the Football World Cup, six months before the tournament.

But it never seemed to have occurred to the arrogant, diehard RFU officials that England might not get out of the pool. After all, they were playing at Fortress Twickenham. And England had invented the game on the playing fields of Rugby School and rah, rah, rah!

This same arrogance and stupidity is revealed in the persistent refusal of the European diehards to bring in a global season, March to November, for professional rugby.

The main argument raised against the global season for professional rugby is that it would interfere with the traditional presentation of the Six Nations tournament, regarded by the diehards as ‘the jewel in rugby’s crown’.

What nonsense! It is clear from this World Cup that the Rugby Championship, which involves all the semi-finalists, is the most prestigious and best rugby tournament.

While protecting the Six Nations, World Rugby has no regrets about down-sizing the Rugby Championship every Rugby World Cup tournament year by half.

The better outcome would be for both tournaments to flourish in World Cup years. This would happen with the global season for professional rugby.

Argentina coach Pablo Bouza has insisted that the Pumas would have struggled to reach the Rugby World Cup semi-finals had they played, as they had originally hoped to do, in the Six Nations tournament. Typically, the Six Nations authorities rejected Argentina’s advance.

“I think playing in the Rugby Championship,” Bouza has told reporters, “has been great for us.”

This World Cup, the Pumas playing southern hemisphere rugby at its best have a quality about their play that gives them a shot at winning their first Webb Ellis trophy. It is a long shot, to be sure. But it is a more likely shot than any team from the northern hemisphere.

Starting from 2016, too, Argentina and Japan (a team in the southern hemisphere sphere of influence which accounts, in part, to their historic victory over the Springboks) will have teams in the Super Rugby tournament. The rugby performance of the Pumas and the Brave Blossoms will benefit greatly from this exposure.

Rather predictably, too, World Rugby boss Brett Gosper, an expat Australian who has spent the majority of his working life in France, has rejected the theories that a performance ‘gulf’ exists between the southern and northern hemisphere sides.

Talking about the quarter-finals, he said this: “Anyone could have won those games. So I think if you drew that conclusion, I’d say it would be probably be wrong. Whether it be Wales or Scotland, you could have seen two teams progress through.”

What nonsense. Why didn’t Gosper take notice of the other alarming fact (for northern hemisphere adherents) that in eight World Cups, the northern hemisphere will have won just one, England in 2003.

Ireland have never played in a Rugby World Cup semi-final, with Scotland playing in just one and Wales two.

At least the French authorities are awake to the need to do something about what is wrong – on and off the field – with their rugby performance. French Rugby Federation president Pierre Camou told reporters France’s World Cup campaign was a total failure: “You have to admit it. We are in a difficult moment, it would be stupid to deny it.” (Brett Gosper, take note!)

The FRF should accept All Blacks coach Steve Hansen’s point that the French season is too long, with some players having to endure more than 40 matches. The owners, too, according to Hansen, rely on buying talent from other countries. There is a policy, too, to buy African and Islander youngsters, some as young as 16, and then give long-term contracts to one or two them and get rid of the rest of them without any consideration of their futures when they don’t make the grade.

This is nothing more than a modern, rugby form of black-birding.

In a general comment on northern hemisphere rugby and its system, Hansen further elaborated.

“They won’t agree with this and certainly the owners won’t. But there are so many foreigners playing in their teams and leagues here that they’re taking the chance off local talent to grow and develop and so they limit who they can select at the international level,” Hansen said.

“You only need to look at the soccer model which everyone here follows – England haven’t won anything for years … I think down there we have our model right, we are all on the same page, we want to support international rugby and want the game to go in one direction.

“Whereas up here is that the case with private owners? If you want to be successful at international rugby you have to be united from the top to the bottom and I’m not sure they are up there.” (Brett Gosper, take note!)

As an example of what Hansen was talking about, Scotland recruited about 30 per cent of their players and their coach from the southern hemisphere nations. One of Scotland’s best against the Wallabies, the New Zealander John Hardie, is yet to play in a club match in Scotland.

Paul Hayward writing in The Telegraph (UK) made a relevant point about the outcome of the quarter-finals.

“The common denominator? New Zealand, Australia and Argentina venerate skills,” Hayward wrote.

“They believe that to play rugby to the international trophy-winning standard you have to put skills first. Handling, running, tackling, retrieving and all the minutes of play in and behind the scrum. South Africa, less so.

“The Springbok calling card is still power. But that physicality often comes with a degree of sophistication the Six Nations struggle to match.” (Brett Gosper, take note!)

I would put forward a modest set of proposals towards fixing up rugby’s northern hemisphere problem:

1. A global season running from March to November which would give the players a decent rest period and provide the vehicle to drive the game towards a worldwide coverage.

2. Re-introduce the full ELVs. This would include allowing the rolling maul, that legal-illegal blight on the running game, to be pulled down. It would introduce clarity at scrums and rucks, where only three offences would warrant a full-arm penalty.

3. Make ring-ins sit out six years rather than three to be eligible to represent a country other than their birth country. Parents rather than grandparents must be born in the country that caps someone born overseas.

4. Put the tax authorities on to the European-wide rort that gives tax dispensations to overseas players and coaches that are very much more lucrative than anything the southern hemisphere countries can offer.

5. Move the headquarters of World Rugby from Dublin to Sydney. This would be an indication of the long-term shift of power, intelligence, organisation and performance of the southern hemisphere countries over the northern hemisphere nations.

In historical terms, it could be said that moving from Dublin to Sydney resembles switching the capital of the Empire from Rome to Constantinople, after the Barbarians ransacked Italy in the fifth century.