Editorial: Wrong here and wrong now

Photo / Sarah Ivey

It's hard to decide what century Rugby World Cup chief executive Martin Snedden and his colleagues think they are living in.

It can hardly be this one, since they have decided to use a 1990 song by a flash-in-the-pan band of Londoners to lure people down to this end of the world in 2011.

Snedden has sought to deflect criticism of the choice of the song - Right Here, Right Now by the evocatively named British band Jesus Jones - on the grounds that the version used is by New Zealand band The Feelers and that it is not, in any case, going to be the theme song for the tournament but only for the ticket-selling campaign. But those admissions, far from excusing anything, simply compound the blunder.

Gary McCormick, the genial cultural nationalist who is trying to foment opposition to the song, demolishes the first excuse by wondering pointedly how long we want to be "a covers band people". And the second excuse would topple over in a gentle breeze.

The reality is that we are stuck with the ponderous World in Union as the tournament's theme song. The status of that doleful ditty, which uses 1916 music by Gustav Holst, an Englishman of Swedish and Latvian extraction, was set in stone by the stuffed shirts at IRB headquarters before Jesus Jones had even walked into a studio, though at least, if history is a guide, a New Zealander will get to sing it next year.

But the song designed to fire the imaginations of rugby fans and persuade them to spend a small fortune on tickets - not to mention the food, lodgings and other goods and services they'll need when they get here - was entirely the choice of Rugby New Zealand 2011 Ltd. And to say they dropped the ball rather understates the case.

We are constantly told how useful this tournament will be in projecting our image to the world. How hard would it have been to come up with a song that had a Pacific and/or Maori and/or Kiwi flavour? This is a country that brims with brilliant songwriters and performers. Here was a chance to put our distinctive brand on a tournament which, as is the way with world sport, is becoming more and more culturally homogenised by the involvement of global brand marketers.

It is in the nature of these things that it is almost certainly too late to turn back now. Deals have been done, contracts signed. We will just have to live with a song and an image that is wrong here and wrong now. For shame.