The global game

Former All Black Chris Laidlaw believes the Rugby World Cup has made a mockery of the sceptics who believed it wouldn't work.

They said it wouldn't work. They said an idiosyncratic amateur sport, administered by an old boys club with direct lineage to the dinosaur age, couldn't possibly turn itself into a global attraction.

There were sceptics aplenty when the International Rugby Board took a deep breath in the mid-1980s and announced that there was to be a World Cup tournament every four years.

Rugby quite obviously wasn't a global game at that time. It was played seriously in half a dozen countries and for fun in a dozen more and that was it. But it was growing; much faster than many of the sceptics imagined and there were signs that a widening out of the exclusive little club might not be a bad thing.

As things have turned out it has been a spectacularly good thing. But it took time to gather momentum.

The first tournament in Australia and New Zealand was a cautious affair, held in a part of the world where the likelihood of audience failure was minimised. Television wasn't a major consideration but, surprisingly, the international TV networks took an immediate interest and from that moment rugby's accession to a global game was assured.

There are some who argue that the decision to have a World Cup made the professionalism of the game an inevitability. They are probably right. By the time of the third tournament in South Africa in 1995 the game was professional in all but name.

That tournament was a spectacular success so far as the media was concerned, capped by the stunning appearance of the world's most-loved man, Nelson Mandela, in a cameo appearance at the final that captured the world's imagination.

It sparked a bidding war for the rights to cover rugby, a war that escalated to the point where the future of the game itself rested in the hands of a few media mega-barons.

The Rugby World Cup is now firmly lodged in the international sporting calendar as one of the biggies, not as big perhaps as soccer's World Cup but closing the gap with each tournament.

It has worked wonders for the game in so many of the countries where it has perennially struggled to maintain a foothold - in Japan, Canada, Romania or the United States. In others like Taiwan, Spain or Uruguay it has given it a grounding where it would never have been possible otherwise.

The IRB has carefully set about giving the tournament substance by building around it a series of regional tournaments that act as elimination rounds and which provide an international framework for competition where none existed before.

Income from the sale of television rights is being used to promote that spirit of competition in the South Pacific, in Latin America, in Africa and Asia and standards are on the rise.

There is of course still a long way to go. The gross imbalance between the top half dozen and all the rest is still very obvious and it may always be that way. After all, nobody expects New Zealand, or Israel or Korea for instance to go very far at a soccer World Cup tournament. There will always be a pecking order no matter what the sport.

At least we now have a coherent international structure within which the new nations can set their goals. And we wouldn't want too many pretenders knocking at the door of world rugby supremacy. Life is hard enough for the All Blacks as it is.