Mike Greenaway: Two-finger salute to money-grasping IRB

Mike Miller, chief executive of the International Rugby Board. Photo / Brett Phibbs

Opinion

Every four years the Irrational Rugby Board uses the Rugby World Cup stage to raise its benchmark for being (unrivalled) world champions at being dry, humourless and faceless gits.

George Orwell could well have had this Dickensian bureaucracy in mind when he conceived Big Brother in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, his critique of an all-seeing, all-controlling monolith that seizes on dissidents that have strayed from the party line and sentences them to unspeakable punishments.

In 2011, that translate to fines such as $10,000 for wearing the wrong mouthguard.

Do you know that if you enter a Rugby World Cup ground with so much as a Big Mac in its original packaging you (or rather 'it') will be refused entry? Same goes for anything else that displays branding.

Considering one of the chief charges against the IRB is that they are money-grasping scrooges, you would think that they would hire a public relations company to address their appalling public image. But they don't seem to have an inkling of the disaffection in the rugby ranks, and care still less.

And that stony image is why the rugby public love it when there is a rebellion and the IRB is given the two-fingers by a rebellious player or coach.

Back in 2003, a champion of the poor was the populist Namibia coach Dave Waterstone, who during the course of the World Cup held in Australia pointed the finger at the IRB for serving caviar to the affluent unions and cat-food to the outcasts.

When Waterstone spoke out about the plight of the impoverished South West Africans having to borrow tackle bags from a local rugby club for training sessions ahead of their 142-0 lossto the Wallabies, he was charged with bringing the game into disrepute.

He famously replied: "What are they going to do? Ban me from coaching? What difference will that make to Namibian rugby?!!! Fine me? I haven't been paid! ... "

At this World Cup, Samoa's Eliota Sapolu compared the IRB's treatment of his team and other smaller unions to the holocaust and apartheid.

Horribly over the top, of course, but the thread you can identify is a deep discontent among the second-tier nations. The lower-seeded teams had four to five day turnarounds between matches while the top-ranked teams often had eight. That literally meant that the weak got weaker and the strong got stronger.

No wonder Sapolu invited the IRB to "kiss my bum".

- Independent (SA)