KEY POINTS:
It would be intriguing to pit the winners of the Tri Nations against the Six Nations champion - any chance to compare rugby either side of the equator has a certain fascination.
That idea is high on the agenda in Hong Kong this weekend when the International Rugby Board hosts a meeting of senior nations to continue sifting ideas about the test calendar.
But it does seem strange that an inter-hemisphere match is the best the IRB can come up with after all their pompous talk about a global, integrated calendar.
It has an artificial smell about it, some of the whiff of a Harlem Globetrotters circuit, because the timing of such a match will not be suitable to both teams, not when there remains such intransigence about a dovetailed world schedule.
If there was more resolve than rhetoric, the high-powered meeting of nations at Woking last year after the World Cup would have delivered some solutions. Nations would have broken long-standing arrangements, they would have been prepared to swap tradition for progress and to admit the code must make some substantial progress if it is to be truly global.
We hear protests that the meeting made headway, that countries would be required to travel with their best players in the test months of June and November and that northern hemisphere clubs would release their players for 11 tests a year. In the next breath we are harangued about the importance of player welfare while the All Blacks are set to play a possible 14 tests this year without the extra burden of an inter-hemisphere hit out.
Such a global challenge would be a commercial winner, but you wonder whether it would achieve anything else.
It could create a pseudo-World Cup, detracting from the real event. There are also a mix of proposals for home-and-away series between World Cups to accrue ranking points with the section winners eventually meeting.
Big deal. We have just listened to the IRB's quantum leap in thinking to use the rankings at the end of this year to decide seedings for the World Cup in New Zealand three years later. So what, you wonder, would they do with another set of rankings?
Let's face it. There was much to be said for the idea of getting broadcasters, club owners, sponsors and representatives from all nations into one room in Woking. They needed to be locked in that room until they decided on a workable integrated calendar or gave the idea away. But to add a match to an already congested international schedule does seem a bit wacky, even for the IRB.
