by Mike Martin @thefootietweet
The 2007 Rugby World Cup began with a bang. Argentina beat France 17-12 at the Stade de France, providing a result which turned the entire tournament inside out. Suddenly there were questions. Would France even get out of the group in their own World Cup? Could they recover to beat Ireland? Would Ireland now be the victims of the vact that three into two does not go?
Argentina, for some time, have been the ideal Rugby World Cup opening fixture opponents. Against Wales in 1999 and Australia in 2003, they were good enough to give the hosts a genuinely competitive contest but not quite good enough to spoil the party.
Unfortunately, the IRB do not 'fix' the World Cup draw and, anyway, Argentina were seeded when the draw for the current championship was made in 2008. New Zealand, the host nation this time around, were drawn with France, Tonga, Canada and Japan.
The opening game plainly should have been New Zealand v France. As it was, the game was decided after twenty minutes as Israel Dagg and Richard Kahui ran in tries against a Tonga side so plainly beset by stagefright. In fact, when Tonga finally started playing in the last quarter, New Zealand looked quite ordinary. Yet by then the match was decided.
After a spectacular opening ceremony this, alas, felt like an anticlimax. Indeed, there is an argument for questioning whether the holders, not the hosts, shouldn't be the team with the honour of opening the tournament. South Africa v Wales in Auckland? Now that's an opening fixture.
This used to be the way in the FIFA World Cup. Having an opening game with no home advantage for either side increased the chance of a shock, as Argentina discovered against Cameroon in 1990 and France against Senegal twelve years later.
From the 2006 World Cup onwards, FIFA removed the right of automatic qualification for the World Champions. Opening match duties reverted to the host nation given the possibility, albeit a slim one, that the World Cup holders would not qualify. Germany faced Costa Rica in Munich in the first fixture of the tournament: a 4-2 win and a classic but no thanks to the organizers. Had Germany's defensive line not been preposterously high and slow, it would have been a mauling.
World Cups, be it football, rugby or cricket, need a proper contest in the opening fixture to whet the appetite. Unfortunately, the suspicion lingers that what the domestic organizers wanted was a guaranteed win for the All Blacks on the opening day. How the already brittle confidence of a nation used to finding ever more inventive ways of not winning the Rugby World Cup would have fared had New Zealand slumped to their usual shock defeat to France is a matter best left to conjecture; for the rest of us, a chance of such a close contest would have been a fine thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment