LONDON, 10 October 2007 — France 2007 as a sporting spectacle has shown how a World Cup should be run and how fast rugby union is emerging as a global sport. In the parochial US, there is even talk of rugby eventually replacing basketball as the fourth top sport in the country.
Rugby’s globalization is now inevitable. From Georgia, Russia, Canada, Uruguay to Japan, Portugal, Namibia, Morocco, Tonga and Samoa, rugby is enjoying a growth and proliferation which is the envy of football — these days riddled with so much corruption, spin, hype, financial excess, celebrities and underachievement.
Argentina’s spectacular march to the semifinals this coming Sunday against the mighty Springboks of South Africa, has caught the imagination of the whole nation, if not the rugby world. Last Sunday’s local football derby between Boca Juniors and River Plate in Buenos Aires had to be moved to an earlier time to accommodate millions of television viewers watching the quarterfinal against Scotland.
Perhaps for the moment rugby will not overtake football as the national sport, but if the Pumas beat South Africa and progress to the final, and even win the World Cup, then who knows. Argentinian football had a disastrous early exit in the last World Cup in Germany; but the rugby team, thanks to its heroics on the field since that opening stunner against host nation France at the Stade Francais, is now officially ranked the fourth top team in the world.
The win against Les Blues was one of the greatest and most embarrassing sporting upsets in recent history.
There is growing pressure on the International Rugby Board (IRB) to invite the Pumas to sit at the top table in world rugby. Argentina will most likely join the New Zealand All Blacks; the Australian Wallabies and the Springboks in the annual southern hemisphere rugby tournament, which would have to be renamed the Quatro-nations Tournament. Alternatively, Argentina could be invited to play in the Six Nations tournament in Europe alongside France, England, Irelands, Wales, Scotland and Italy. In that case the tournament will become the Seven Nations championship.
Whatever happens, the IRB can no longer afford to ignore the likes of Argentina, who are an infinitely stronger side than three of the four British home nations - Scotland, Ireland and Wales - and Italy. The IRB is in danger of losing credibility if it refuses to open up the sport to newcomers. For so long, rugby has been dominated by the Anglo-Saxon nations — the British home nations plus the dominions of New Zealand, Australia and South Africa — sometimes bordering on the chauvinistic. Who would have thought that the French were once treated the same way and barred a place at rugby’s top table at the IRB for decades. Maybe this inspired General De Gaulle to say ‘Non’ to British membership to the then European Common Market.
The French even set up a rival International Rugby Federation (IRF) which was so instrumental in spreading the sport to other European and Mediterranean countries including Russia, Romania and Morocco.
France of course has never looked back since the late 1960s. Michel Crauste’s tricolors, for instance, in 1968 became the first country to beat the Springboks in South Africa in a test series. In the following two decades, a new term emerged in the rugby lexicon — ‘Champagne Rugby’ — as France together with the great Welsh teams dominated Northern Hemisphere rugby. The French used to regularly wallop the English team at Twickenham or at the old Stade Colombes playing fast flowing vintage rugby.
One of its greatest proponents was center Jo Maso, a member of the staff of current head coach Bernard Laporte.
France 2007 has also shown how the gap between the minnows and the mighty has significantly narrowed. Georgia was one score away from beating the Irish. Tonga similarly was robbed of a victory over the Springboks by an unlucky bounce of the ball. Italy should have kicked itself to victory over Scotland.
Apart from one or two scores, the margins of most of the matches were much narrower than in the past, when the top nations used to run up cricket scores with monotony against the emerging nations. This is now history as many of the so-called minnows are now regularly scoring tries even against the mighty All Blacks and Springboks.
Already this World Cup has reached a number of milestones even before this weekend’s semifinals. No All Blacks or Wallabies. Indeed this is the first World Cup in which New Zealand has not progressed beyond the quarterfinals. Similarly, Argentina has for the first time reached the semifinals. New Zealand has already sacked its coach Graham Henry and has ordered an independent enquiry into the failure of the national team at the World Cup.
Rugby in New Zealand, like in South Africa, is not a sport, but a ‘religion’. It is part of the national psyche. A defeat in a rugby test match let alone the World Cup is an assault on national pride. In South Africa, during the apartheid years, the then nationalist governments often used to see a defeat in a rugby test match as ‘punishment’ on the nation.
In a global sporting culture increasingly dominated by obscene money, television rights and schedules, and the odd few Russian oligarchs, rugby has managed to retain much of its sanity and has set the benchmark in behavior both on and off the sporting field.
France 2007 has shown a fantastic support for a game still largely bereft of the excesses, greed, corruption, drugs and opportunism that is such a feature of other global sports. Just look at the 50,000-60,000 crowds that watched Tonga play Samoa or Italy versus the US. Let us hope that the powers that be who run rugby union do not succumb to such antics.
