Gregor Paul: The ‘catastrophic news’ hidden in rugby World League announcement – NZ Herald

OPINION:

Rugby’s top nations have secured their own financial futures by finally agreeing to jazz up the July and November test windows with a competitive format.

Confirmation that agreement has been reached to launch the
Nations Championship – a biannual competition that will feature the Six Nations, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and most likely Japan and Fiji – paves the way for a $10bn broadcast deal to be struck and shared among the 12 lucky participants.

For the chosen nations, it will soon be raining money and those 12 countries in the Nations Championship will have a solution to all their financial predicaments.

And so too will international rugby have a solution to its longest-standing problem of being held hostage by the randomness of its nonsensical scheduling outside of the Six Nations, Rugby Championship and World Cup.

For three decades casual fans have never been able to stay invested for a full season because international rugby hasn’t given them any reason to be.

The Six Nations grips people. The Rugby Championship is a simple and easy-to-follow format, and the World Cup is the big-ticket item where the sport wins an audience of new and intrigued followers.

But then rugby loses so many people tinkering in the brink of being interested by having no meaning, structure or competitive format built into the July and November windows.

It has never made sense to allocate tests years in advance in a haphazard fashion that could see the All Blacks play Italy four times in three years and yet never meet England.

By putting the fans at the centre of their thinking, the game’s elite nations have finally created what will prove to be a valuable concept on multiple levels.

And by extending the invite to Japan and Fiji, there is now the prospect of these two developing into consistently high-achieving international rugby forces.

But while the heavyweight nations have saved themselves and given a leg up to Japan and Fiji, they may have done so at considerable cost to the game’s other emerging nations and perhaps more significantly, to the health and well-being of their own players.

As an international sport, rugby has two wider, driving goals – to grow its standing and profile in a greater number of countries and to protect and prioritise the welfare of the athletes.

The Nations Championship will do neither. In fact, the World League is likely to be a death sentence to the high-performance aspirations of emerging nations such as Georgia and Chile and its possibly catastrophic news for Samoa and Tonga who appear to have virtually no chance of escaping their cycle of poverty and underachievement which has led to their talent flooding into stronger and better funded nations.

While the big boys will be rolling in cash and lining up glamour fixtures in rugby’s greatest citadels every July and November, everyone else will be slugging it out in a second-tier version of the Nations Championship in places such as Tbilisi, Bucharest, Apia, Santiago, Montevideo and Madrid.

The fact that the format or participants for this second-tier version haven’t yet been determined says everything – it’s an afterthought.

It isn’t a priority, isn’t advanced in its planning and it’s easy to imagine that if it ever gets up and running, these emerging nations will barely have their costs covered.

The new world will not give these emerging nations regular fixtures against the best teams and the rich will get richer and better and so when relegation and promotion to the Nations Championship becomes a thing in 2030, the emerging nations will be so far behind as to make it almost dangerous for one of them to be elevated to the top tier.

And while none of this may seem to particularly matter right now, the long-term danger for the sport is that it massively devalues the World Cup as the same 12 teams will be the only ones with realistic ambitions of winning.

Give it time and the Nations Championship and World Cup will start to feel like one and the same thing and then there is the whole business of squaring away how to add yet more tests to the calendar – as the Nations Championship will require the November test window to be extended from three to four weeks – fits this idea of looking after the welfare of the players.

The South Africans and Argentinians are already playing 12 months of the year. Most of the Fijians will end up doing the same once they take their place in the Nations Championship as will increasing numbers of Wallabies as Eddie Jones seeks greater dispensation to select offshore players.

The Nations Championship is a short-term win for fans and the elite nations, but longer-term it may just be storing up a lot of trouble.