Rugby’s myth-makers have overlooked one catch in the game’s history. It’s time for a more appropriate name on the trophyEvery four years, with more than 100 million people watching, a big bloke hoists a golden trophy called the Webb Ellis Cup. Casual viewers might assume this guy Webb Ellis to be legit, what with his name etched across the most valuable stretch of metal in his sport.A quick Google would reveal him to be the man whose audacious intervention in a 19th-century game of football is supposed to have invented the very sport. As the profile of the World Cup grows, so the boy in that field all those years ago bestrides the rugby world ever more surely as the...
This Ireland side is not without flaws but it finally has the necessary grit and grind to reach the World Cup last fourPerhaps the greatest weakness of the Rugby World Cup is its predictability. Look at the way the pools are filled and from a distance it is possible to see who will be clambering out in first and second place. Of course, upsets happen from time to time, though very few shocks to the system.So while it was painful four years ago for England still to be treading water while Wales and Australia towelled off and headed to the quarter-finals, it was not seismic. Wales finishing third to Fiji in 2003 would have been a bigger deal. Related: England’s...
Fiji, Samoa and Tonga export masses of rugby talent but need more resource sharing and better domestic managementBehind sugar, rugby players are the second biggest export from Fiji. Combined with Samoa and Tonga they provide almost 20% of the world’s professional rugby players. Fiji are Olympic champions in sevens and just won the HSBC World Sevens Series again. Pacific Island players regularly sweep up the end-of-year awards in all the top leagues for player of the season and nearly every top try-scorer in those leagues is from the Pacific. So it’s a no-brainer, right? Slap what’s left of your recently remortgaged mortgage on a Fiji v Samoa World Cup final on 2 November? Maybe don’t do that. Their actual fortunes...
Films about Brave Blossoms and the story of Dan Carter plus a play about Bill McLaren make perfect curtain-raisersFor years it was widely assumed rugby would not translate easily to stage and screen. With the odd exception – Up ’n’ Under, Stand Up and Fight and Invictus, the Clint Eastwood‑directed film of South Africa’s extraordinary 1995 Rugby World Cup triumph starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon – few have felt the need to apply theatrical war paint to help the game woo a wider audience.Suddenly all that is changing. Entering stage left are not just one or two but three intriguing rugby‑related productions, each hoping to capitalise on the extra interest set to be generated by the World Cup in...
Warren Gatland’s final home match in charge of Wales did not go to plan with Ireland’s players responding to criticismIt is difficult to know what will have annoyed Warren Gatland more. The end of his glorious tenure in Wales with defeat, the end of Wales’s 11-match unbeaten run in Cardiff, the end of their one-match reign as the world’s number one? It could be any of the above, but the unifying grief is almost certainly that it should be Ireland who inflict all those maddening niggles, just as he prepares to announce his World Cup squad.No one can say he hadn’t asked for it. Gatland was at it again in midweek, unable to resist a little dig against his former...