Rugby: Rugby World Cup 2023 was never going to be fair

World Rugby were dreaming if they thought the 2023 World Cup hosting vote was going to play out under the administrative equivalent of Queensbury Rules.

There was never a chance that the voting members were going to stay perfectly in line and vote for the independently assessed preferred bidder which was South Africa.

There was never any real prospect that a sense of obligation to honour the new process would outweigh the more compelling question of what each voting member could leverage for themselves.

New Zealand played by the rules like they always do. They are the goody two-shoes of world rugby, a kind of teacher's pet up the front of the class with a near chronic aversion to getting involved with office politics.

Their three votes went to South Africa. Another 17 needed to follow for South Africa to win the needed majority and some media outlets were naive enough to suggest prior to the vote that's exactly what would happen.

Naive because they felt that if World Rugby, by agreement with its members, had gone to the massive expense of commissioning a major, independent report into the three respective bids, that it would be an extraordinarily embarrassing state of affairs, not to mention a colossal waste of money, if the recommendation was ignored.

It may be the South Africa bidding team were also naive enough to believe they had it in the bag after being named the preferred option two weeks ago.

If reports are to be believed, France and Ireland were frantically lobbying voting members these past two weeks while the South Africans supposedly weren't.

Presumably they were thinking more about what to say in their acceptance speech, not realising that New Zealand and England, stand alone as the only two voting members big enough to forgo self interest to instead make decisions that are for the greater good of the world game.

Clearly, given that France were not the preferred bidder but are going to host the 2023 World Cup, the majority of voting members were willing to sit down and have a good old chin wag about how their respective backs may end up being scratched.

Some members probably didn't need much of a shove to come round to backing the French. Their bid, after all, was promising World Rugby more money than the other two and give that is the pot from which so many Tier Two unions are ultimately fed, they may have needed no other reason to vote for the French.

But no doubt some members will have concluded that their vote is one of the few, maybe the only, asset from which they can obtain any kind of leverage.

Tier Two nations have barely had a crumb swept in their direction off World Rugby's table and who could blame any executive from one of rugby's outposts, sick of the glacial pace of change, if they looked the French bid contingent in the eye and asked: "Voting for you...what is in it for us?"

The answer to that won't become immediately apparent if it ever does at all. But if the
French have agreed to investing in some capacity or another in rugby's less loved territories in return for votes, then it can't really be seen as a bad thing.

World Rugby will inevitably be infuriated that they went to considerable lengths for the 2023 World Cup hosting rights not to be decided by secret deals being made in smoky backrooms.

But then they should have realised that with each of the three bidders having forecast that they should be victorious and win the hosting rights, they would be worth in excess of $1 billion to their respective economies.

To imagine that the two non-preferred bids would quietly and gladly accept their fate and was patently silly as was the failure to realise that with barely two brass farthings to rub together, some of the smaller voting nations/regions were going to be open to negotiating favourable terms for their vote.