Rugby World Cup: Empowering a Sport to overcome important challenges

We’ll never have it as good again, said Peter Jackson. Peter didn’t get many things wrong, and, no, we won’t be stating his back page splash on the morning of the 1999 Rugby World Cup Final, barring a last-minute catch, Jonah Lomu will today become the game’s first millionaire as he turns his back on New Zealand to join Bristol. As we now look forward to the next edition to be held in the Ovalie, it’s easy to imitate that perhaps he did have a point 16 years ago.

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Premiership clubs going broken, Welsh rugby attacked all fronts, frantic for an uplift on and off the field, contribution numbers dropping, leaving the sport reeling as if it had been knocked senseless as so many of its bothered former warriors have been. Concussion is a blight and despite the long-overdue focus on trying to address the issue, remains even more of a concern than any economic pressures.

There is little doubt there are grave issues in the sport anyhow fact the Rugby World Cup 2023 will surely be a great achievement, full of snarl as well as sublime skills. That’s the glass-half-empty picture. There are sunny highlands out there. Munster in Cape Town, the scenes in La Rochelle, Ireland and France going toe-to-toe, Antoine Dupont, the growing women’s game, the list is abundant.

Many high-drama games during the Rugby World Cup 2023 pool stage

It’s not a black-and-white comparison we’re trying to work out here, to prove decisively one way or the other that such-and-such a viewpoint is the right one. It’s far more nuanced than that. But there is little uncertainty there are grave matters in the sport notwithstanding the fact the RWC 2023 will surely be a great triumph, full of snarl as well as sublime skills, launching with that deafening clash between France and New Zealand on the opening night.

That there are too many breaks during the pool stage thereafter will be offset by a knockout phase that possibilities to be never less than gripping and significant. But back to Jacko and his wistful remark. Given that this is a man who enclosed some 500 Test matches since he first crossed the Irish Sea from his natural Derry and an early period in the Belfast media to work for the South Wales Echo and on to the media in 1974, his viewpoint merits attention.

He may have been raising to our trade and the fast-changing nature of the paper business but it holds for rugby as well. It was only newly as we toasted Jacko’s 80th birthday in Cardiff that we also had cause to raise a glass to the passing of an ex-Global Rugby Board powerbroker, Bernard Lapasset, one of those hordes of managers who oversaw the move from amateurism to expertise in 1995.

That RWC 1995 event was only the third played

There was no other. The game would have gone pro with or without the blessing of the IRB (the forerunner of World Rugby). There was too much tension on its amateur rules as it was. That dam had pretty much been broken. The Kerry Packer-type rebel circus was an honest entity which would have featured all the Rugby World Cup leading players. If you had a blank sheet of paper, what would you draw up now for the forthcoming sport?

The world cup is a must-have. It was accurately on the eve of the Rugby World Cup Final in the 1995 competition in South Africa that the real deed was done. The statement that day was of the mega-dollars deals to hold an annual Tri-Nations event in the southern hemisphere, underlined by Super Rugby. The death knell for amateurism had been announced even though it was another couple of months before the change was ratified in Paris.

That 1995 event was only the third staged. The sport would barely exist as an acceptable global expert entity without it. Witness the fights of rugby league and even Test cricket which struggles for worldwide rationality to understand just how important a proper global event is. Athletics, for example, tolerates almost solely on the strength of its Olympic and challenges profiles. Rugby fans can book RWC Tickets on our website at exclusively discounted prices.

France Rugby World Cup 2023 is a big deal for sports

That’s how big a pact RWC 2023 is. It offers the sport reliability as well as gives it exposure beyond its normal confines. Club rugby may be struggling in England but the set-up is still a far better thing than the once-proposed local rugby. The World Cup, then, is a must-have. And to think the dyed-in-the-wool managers at various unions had grave doubts about endorsing it at all back in the early-to-mid eighties.

Could the setup be improved? We could certainly do without the draw being made three years before the occasion. That has to change to avoid the absurd lop-sidedness of this year’s contest with all the principal seeds stacked in one end of the draw. What else? There was a system mooted once whereby the losing pool RWC teams should then have a parallel competition to run parallel to the knockout stage.

Rugby World Cup 2023: Things I hope to see a revolution in Rugby

The steady rugby season has come to an end. The Heineken Champions Cup is safely tucked away in La Rochelle, rugby medals have repaid to the Stone X since Sale could not stop a well-oiled Saracens machine and Munster finished an ambush in Cape Town to bring the United Rugby Contest to Thurmond Park.

Off the field, the game has gone finished the washing machine. We lost Wasps and Worcester; the Welsh Rugby Union has been on fire with sexism topics and has lost over 220 caps in their national side through departures just months before a France Rugby World Cup. The Irish Rugby Football Union completely stopped caring about the women’s plan and the leaders at the top were all found wanting for such incompetence.

In the Southern Hemisphere, New Zealand suffered from avoidable scheduling issues, as the Black Ferns’ RWC semi-final was strategic for the same time as a regular New Zealand national football union team Test. Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe have had RWC arrivals in the first two world cups but have since coasted into the shadows of the rugby scenery.

RWC: Real progress in smaller rugby nations

There have only been 25 different states at a world cup. I wish to see a violent effort to diversify the world cup demographic. Maybe a fast-track approach to get squads to be able to contest as we saw how consistent financial backing from World Rugby better Namibia Rugby as a whole and helped them put up better performances in the competition.

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