Rugby: World Cup teams face 2011 roadtrips

Rugby New Zealand 2011 (RNZ) will this morning announce the team hosting arrangements for the World Cup, with mobility set to be the key theme.

The blue-chip teams that could have large contingents of travelling support, such as England, Australia, Ireland and South Africa, are all expected to be hosted by multiple cities or centres.

The Springboks, for example, have two pool matches in Wellington followed by two on the North Shore. It is widely expected they will be hosted by both those cities during that time.

England have two matches in Christchurch and one in Dunedin before playing Scotland in Auckland in their final pool game. Coach Martin Johnson was in the country recently looking at training facilities and hotels in those cities, as well as Queenstown and Invercargill.

New Zealand, in keeping with the theme of a "Stadium of Four Million", are expected to be active around the country. Moving around would also avoid boredom within the teams.

Although all four of their pool matches are in the North Island, they will be expected to spend some time on the mainland before the quarter-finals.

This will be a move away from previous tournaments in France and Australia where the major teams in particular would base themselves largely in one city. This would see them travel to their pool-match venues a few days before the game before returning to their base the day after the game.

The All Blacks used Marseille as their city host in France, though they also spent time in Aix-en-Provence, a short journey north of Marseille, and Edinburgh.

In 2003 they were based almost exclusively in Melbourne but all reports after that campaign suggested the players went stir crazy in the Victorian capital and felt largely divorced from the World Cup while based in the AFL-mad city.

RNZ 2011 chief executive Martin Sneddensaid: "Feedback from the participating teams demonstrated a clear preference to travel from region to region for their matches rather than being based in one host city for the duration of their stay."

In many respects the major teams will be the anti-Lions, who copped flak in 2005 for basing themselves almost entirely in Auckland, before embarking on hit-and-run missions into the provinces for their matches.