Rugby's future in IRB's hands

Gary Boshoff

What was encouraging about the past weekend’s international fixtures was the improved performances of the Northern Hemisphere sides against their Southern Hemisphere opponents.

England and Scotland in particular gave impressive performances against Australia and Argentina respectively. Even Italy staked a claim for Northern Hemisphere rugby with a much improved performance against the Springboks in Witbank. This is especially meaningful as Italy have not really been able to shed its Cinderella status since joining the Six Nations Championship – they have been the wooden spoonists since joining the competition years back.

These are important developments ahead of the Rugby World Cup scheduled for New Zealand in 2011. Add to that the performance of Wales, which though being thumped by a Daniel Carter-inspired All Black side, was way, way better than their recent performance against the Springboks. Despite the improvement, they still lost by a huge margin – this mainly due to fantastic individual performances from Carter and Joe Rokocoko. The Welsh completely dominated the first half with excellent phase play and controlled tactical moves and it was only disciplined and resolute defence from the New Zealanders that prevented them from scoring.

Levels of competitiveness defines the health and commercial sustainability of a professional sport and it is one aspect that rugby hasn’t been able to get right since the code turned professional some 15 years ago. The past World Cups has been dominated by the three Southern Hemisphere giants with England being the exception in 2003. The globalisation of the sport as well as the increased mobility of top-class professional rugby players and coaches to emerging rugby nations has had a gradual impact on the quality of the game. Some of these players have become naturalised citizens of their new countries in order to play representative international rugby and nations like Japan, Russia, Spain, Portugal, Scotland and even France and England have benefitted from the increasing mobility of professional players and coaches.

While it is important for the IRB to ensure that levels of competitiveness improve all the time, the challenge is to find a sustainable solution that in my opinion must involve the establishment of sound grassroots systems and structures to build a culture of rugby within the respective emerging countries. The migration of professionals to and from countries provides a short-term stop gap solution at best and is not the answer for a long-term competitive competition structure.

Nick Mallett stressed this aspect about Italian rugby and underlined the importance of developing sustainable feeder systems as the lack of player depth is presently the one constraint that is preventing Italy from moving to the next level of competitiveness. I believe that this is the same challenge faced by emerging rugby playing nations like Russia, Romania, Canada, USA, Uruguay, Japan, etc.

While it is primarily the responsibility of countries themselves to ensure that the right systems and structures are developed to grow the game, it is the responsibility of the IRB to ensure that the level of competitiveness between rugby playing countries improves so that rugby can become a truly global sport, rivaling the beautiful game of football.

The future of the game depends on the effectiveness of the IRB strategies to take the game to a new level of competitiveness. We will know this is being realised when we begin to see countries other than South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, England and France challenge for the World Cup title. As it stands now, rugby still has a long way to go before it reaches the desired level of global competitiveness, like in football, where any one of the 32 World Cup finalists stand a good chance of winning any given match they play.Buy online Six Nations Hospitality Packages with the best prices available! We are covering in Six Nations 2011 Hospitality and Tickets.