On top of the world looking down
Haven't seen it posted here, and surprisingly good considering the source.
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Stephen Jones | October 22, 2007
AH, LES JOURS de gloire! This was the greatest World Cup of them all, there is no doubt. This is not to deny the political significance of South Africa 1995 or the open-hearted and meticulous events of Australia 2003.
But France 2007 has been magnificent, and it is difficult to believe that it will not remain the best World Cup for some time to come. Perhaps the infinite cultural variety of France itself was the backbone, on and off the field. And if rugby union was smug already about its essential inner goodness, now it is going to be insufferable. And rightly so.
Among the thunder of the play and desperation for success, among the modern-era commercial rapacity and the tumult, rugby's magnificent spirit was burnished to a glossy gold. The standards of sportsmanship on the field, the lack of rancour surrounding the matches and the fabulous interaction among the travelling supporter multitudes was phenomenal.
After Fiji went down to South Africa in its quarter-final in Marseille, it marked its exit with the longest lap of honour of all time. The Fijians wandered around the field, apparently acknowledging each of the 55,000 crowd individually, full of Fijian ritual and thanks. It must have been about 45 minutes after the end of the game when they came back to the top of the tunnel. There, still waiting to clap them off, were the Springboks. That was class.
The figures are impressive. The tournament will make more than $200million profit, most of which will be reinvested in the sport around the world. I hope a great chunk of this will go to the Tier Two and Tier Three nations, whose amazing improvement gave this tournament an edge and a colour and a tear-jerking quality.
The crowd numbers have also been amazing. Many times we walked to a stadium expecting to be reasonably lonely at what seemed to be an unattractive match - say, Argentina v Georgia - and found every seat in the house taken. Better still, we found the French were open-hearted, generous, eager to party and with a love of the underdog that was positively British.
The French public, in the stadiums or in the country at large, grasped their responsibilities to the rugby world and discharged them superbly. This was some feat of multi-tasking, as they were all smoking at the same time.
The standard of play was also higher, on a different planet to 1995 and 2003. The previous World Cups were played chiefly by those for whom the professional game had arrived in their mid-careers or later. The players of France 2007 were children of the professional era. They had learnt their basic skills, their rugby excellence, their grasp of conditioning and nutrition and the mental side, right from the sporting cradle.
So if you accept that rugby union was never meant to flow continuously, that it is meant to have aggravations, that there are odd intervals when players bash the ball up round the fringes at about one foot per minute, if you grasp that the desperation not to turn the ball over in midfield will lead to periods of aerial hoofing, as if the crowd is watching a celestial tennis match, then the rugby here was sumptuous.
Another delight was the evidence that rugby is in a phase when it can be played in different styles. We have been through some horrible homogenous eras, in which all that distinguished the teams was that they played in different coloured kit. But consider what we have seen in France.
We have seen the all-out attacking brilliance of the Fiji-Wales match, with both sides launching themselves early in the phases - no need to bash on until the defence collapses with boredom.
But we have also seen Argentina thrive. No wide team this, but highly compelling and completely front-on. We saw England-Australia in the quarter-finals, a thunderous blast at the contact points, which was won not necessarily by the team with more rugby skills, but by the team that had more men standing at the end.
Hail rugby's variety. It was not infinite, and we have not been presented with a torrent of new attacking ideas. But coaches can once more choose a way to play. This was the World Cup that could elevate the jagging sidesteps of Fiji's Seru Rabeni, the gorgeous all-round class of Argentina's Juan Martin Hernandez and the frightening power of England's Andrew Sheridan and South Africa's Schalk Burger.
What we feared most - too many predictable outcomes - never came to pass.
If you disagree, you must have expected New Zealand and Australia to be packed off home, and known Argentina would beat France in the opening game and then smash Ireland to pieces. You must have been sanguine as Georgia led Ireland, as Tonga and Samoa menaced England and as Fiji came level towards the end with South Africa. You must have expected the cheetah-quick Habana to be beaten for pace on the outside by an American, and not been surprised as Habana, prone, gazed at the retreating back of Takudzwa Ngwenya.
The old world order is changing. Therefore, it is incomprehensible that the International Rugby Board, whose investment in the other tiers of rugby did so much to bring about the improvement and is amazed by the pace of it, should even countenance the possibility of reducing the number of teams in the World Cup finals. But it is.
And so today I repeat the call we made last week. Would the New Zealand Rugby Union, host of 2011, please announce immediately that it wants 20 teams? Otherwise we shall see merit in the arguments of those who say New Zealand has over-reached itself, that it does not have the beds, the stadiums or the public to stage a proper World Cup to rival this French phenomenon. For New Zealand and for the IRB, it is more than a question of beds and crowd numbers. It is a question of morality, of a vision, and a question of rewarding those so-called lesser nations that have made the past two months a joy.
What next? How big can rugby get? On these occasions, everybody seems unable to avoid comparisons with soccer, as if rugby's progress will drag it into soccer's orbit. It is nonsense. Soccer will always be far bigger and different. Rugby does not want to be soccer, to emulate it, to rival it. It certainly does not want to import any of soccer's vicissitudes, although in my opinion, rugby is best in those places where it shares soccer's appeal to the masses.
In November, all of rugby's so-called stakeholders will gather - among them unions, professional clubs, referees, sponsors - to discuss the future of the game.
The idea is to reorganise Test rugby, to avoid burnout and silly tours, to fit all the competitions into a structured season and to ensure that it can continue to prosper without devaluing the currency of the international game; and to talk about the shape of the game itself.
It would be wonderful to think they will take a global view, rather than sitting around trying to feather their own nests. If rugby makes the correct decisions in the next few months, it has a future in terms of size and prosperity and a pull on the world's sporting public that was unforeseen as recently as a decade ago, or even five years ago. It has not only a playing attraction, it has values that appear to be more coveted as time goes by.
What else must we demand of the game? Most definitely, that rugby should not try to copy soccer. Rugby was put on this earth for a purpose. It was put here for those who want to be irked, occasionally. It was put here for those who do not expect perfection but who are prepared to wait, sometimes for ages, for the perfect moment; for those who do not want to be patronised by the idea that only smooth sporting action can be entertaining. For people who want things to come tough.
It was put here for participants who expect to have to fight for territory and honour, and for people of all shapes and sizes and both sexes. It is 15 against 15, using a violently unpredictable oval ball, carrying the action through an arcane series of set pieces and loose conflagrations. Sometimes in wind and wet, with a useless ref. Was rugby ever meant to be perfect?
And yet again we find it at the crossroads. Yet again we find people in authority, or people who think they are in authority, have decided it must be made simpler, more flowing, with more scores. Yet again people are reacting to the success, especially in Europe and especially in France 2007, by making potentially catastrophic assertions about what comes next.
Swilling around at the moment are the ELVs - experimental law variations. They are being trialled. Some of these will profoundly alter the face of rugby. Their sponsors, and the committee that breathed life into them, point out they do not depower the game, do not reduce the importance of the tight phases and produce quasi-basketball. Last week the three southern hemisphere rugby giants demanded they be allowed to use the experimental laws in all their big rugby almost immediately, before the trial periods have even been assessed.
I do not fault the motives of the IRB's technical people. I am suspicious of the motives of people in authority in Australia and New Zealand, who have recently been pasted by European teams. The laws are meant to be for the good of the sport. When was the last time you heard a major southern hemisphere union pass a resolution that was for the benefit of everyone? I strongly suspect that south, the ELVs are seen as a means to fight battles against other sports, and to try to reduce the playing and commercial power of rugby in Europe.
How fatuous can rugby get? At a time when the box office has never been so busy, when it is playing to packed stadiums and when a clamour of television and commercial interests are hammering on the door, it wants to make the same mistake that it has made several times in the past, and wants to chase a bogus concept of entertainment. The truth is that rugby, in its lovely, teeth-gnashingly frustrating way, has never been so entertaining.
It has been impossible to spend time in France these past two months and not be assailed by a barrage of images on the eye and the mind. Yesterday they removed the giant rugby ball and the laser posts from the Eiffel Tower and the old Meccano was restored to its austere self.
All that is left are the warm memories of the emotion and competition of the sport and the aftermath, with the giant brotherhood and sisterhood that the game attracts. In my mind I can still see the scene at the end of the first game, when Argentina had sensationally beaten France. A riotous group of Pumas were celebrating on the field.
In the middle of them was the tiny figure of Agustin Pichot, the man of this tournament. The Argentina captain was trying to cool the frenzy. He knew that the job had started stunningly but had not yet finished. Gus was fighting a losing battle. His team was enveloped in something high as a kite. It has been impossible to pour cold water on the experience.
In France 2007, even for the cynical and the seen-it-all, it was impossible not to be all- consumingly excited by the whole thing.
(The Sunday Times)
