The battle to get to the cup

By CHRIS RATTUE

Cancelling a training camp because of the weather is about as zany as it gets for the All Blacks.

As long as they manage to tuck themselves into bed without getting into any late-night trouble, winning footy matches is about all our heroes have to worry about.

Okay. So they had a little pay dispute. But it was nothing like the Welsh pay dispute.

And they don't have to troop around running raffles just to make ends meet, like the Canadians.

Their journey avoids the mad, mad rugby world of places like Korea - where the Tongans found themselves this year.

And at least the All Blacks have a fair idea who their assistant coach and first five-eighths will be - which is more than can be said for the Italians.

New Zealand's opponents in pool D will arrive in Australia next month via some dirt tracks far removed from the smooth highways laid out for our All Blacks. So here's a slice of rugby life, Welsh, Canadian, Tongan and Italian style.

TONGA

We might as well start off close to home. Real close. The Tongan coach is Jim Love, who lives in Rotorua. The Marlborough man is battle-hardened after years of playing, then coaching, including assisting New Zealand Maori.

It's put him in good stead for this job, where the greatest health danger is overuse of a TV remote control syndrome.

Tonga's squad is spread around the globe, playing for clubs in Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. The budget has never allowed Love to travel to Japan or Europe, where a third of his players come from.

Instead, a stream of match videos arrives at his home and he gets constant reports from about 25 contacts around the planet.

Getting hold of videos can be a nightmare in itself. It can take two or three weeks, which is frustrating and time-consuming for Love, who spends 30 per cent of his working life running a rugby academy in Rotorua for small-town teenagers.

Love heads into the "wop wops" to find these lads, but that's nothing compared with finding players for Tonga.

Chiefs prop David Briggs is among the players who opted to concentrate on their professional rugby careers, rather being available for the World Cup.

Love says: "I've just lost another player, Aisea Havili, who plays in Wales. The pressure comes on these guys from their clubs. The loser is always Tonga - I can't even get all my top players to the World Cup, which is really sad."

Bradford league players Lesley Vainikolo and Tevita Vaikona also escaped Love's net. "Bradford wouldn't even answer my calls, which is totally ignorant in my mind. We're all professional people," he says.

He even tried for controversial league player John Hopoate, after watching trial games in Australia, but a league contract ruled Hopoate out.

There have been other problems. Frontrowers Aleki Lutui and Taufa'ao Filise, from Bay of Plenty, and Tevita Taumoepeau, from North Harbour, were ruled out for "disciplinary reasons," says Love.

We get on to money. The players and management will earn $300 a week at the World Cup.

When a player asked about bonuses, Love replied: "The bonus is we shout you there and we shout you home."

He adds: "These players and their families sacrifice a lot to play for Tonga."

Love describes his own pay as "laughable," and the cheques do not always arrive on time. Not that he seems to mind. He has a passion for Tongan rugby, and loves a challenge.

Tonga have got the standard IRB grant of $275,000, but as for sponsorship, it's minimal. Nike gave each Tongan player a pair of boots and trainers, which doesn't quite rank with the $20 million a year adidas hands the New Zealand Rugby Union.

Love has faced friendly fire from Tongans opposed to another foreign coach.

"A lot of Tongan people wanted their own coach ... There were a lot of personal attacks, abuse. When I walked around Tonga a lot of people would say, 'Go home, you Kiwi bastard.'

"Being a realist, I looked at their side of it. A lot of foreigners come into their country and wield the big stick. They are 100 per cent behind us now."

If Love was looking for the freedom of anonymity, he and his team certainly found it when they played a qualifying game in Seoul this year. When they couldn't locate a training ground, the team played kick basketball on a patch of paving in the middle of the city, then playfully jumped on an adjacent strip of grass, to the bewilderment of passersby.

What the match venue lacked in grass, it made up for in rocks and glass. Tonga protested. There weren't even any markings - and the ones they did manage to put down blew away as Tonga beat Korea 75-0.

"Changing rooms? There was a bunker next to the ground, but there was someone living in it so we had to change back at the hotel," says Love.

"You have to look at all of those things with a smile, or you'll go crazy. It's all part of the excitement - you never forget those things."

ITALY

It's the Italians who are supposed to have the Latin temperament, but they've got nothing on their national coach John Kirwan.

Kirwan has been in a flamboyant mood, with the cup just three weeks away. In the past two weeks he's not only sacked Italy's first five-eighths, but also ditched his assistant - fellow ex-All Black Leicester Rutledge.

This is more Latin than the crazy Latins.

After heavy losses to Scotland and Ireland, and an unimpressive win over Georgia, first five-eighths Ramiro Pez got the heave ho, even though the next player in line - Francesco Mazzariol - has hardly figured for Italy this year.

Better the devil you don't know than the one you know, seems to be Kirwan's twist on the old saying.

"We had pinned our faith and hopes on Pez, but unfortunately he hasn't lived up to our expectations," Italian manager Marco Bollesan said. "He's got huge potential, but he just can't seem to show it on the pitch. It was too great a risk to trust him in the World Cup."

So be off in your Fiat, fella.

Which is great news for the unheralded Rima Wakarua, Pez's replacement.

The 27-year-old Wakarua's previous claim to fame was a couple of early-season games for North Harbour in 1998, before the province shipped back an ageing Frano Botica - the man Wakarua modelled his game on.

"I was the ball boy for Frano when I was a kid at North Shore. I used to take the sand on for him to take the kicks," Wakarua told the Herald from his home in Brescia, northern Italy, where he plays for the local club.

"When I grew up and played for North Harbour he was still around. Then I got a good offer from overseas."

Not only has Wakarua never played an NPC game, he's yet to play in the Italian first division.

Leonessa Brescia, coached by Frank Bunce and Wakarua's old club coach Matthew Vaea, have only just won promotion into the first division, moving out of a second division that Wakarua describes as of mainly senior B standard.

Despite playing in the lower division, the drum beats started for his national selection when Wakarua qualified for Italy through residency last year.

But until this week he has had no contact whatsoever with the national squad, which includes three other New Zealanders.

Kirwan rang on a Monday, the day after an Italian journalist had called.

"A journalist rang me on Sunday and asked 'Is it true, you've been selected?' I said I didn't know. He got back and said from what he had heard it was true," says Wakarua.

"I was thinking, 'That's pretty strange. I can't get too happy yet. I need confirmation'."

Wakarua, who trained as a greenkeeper at the Waitemata club in Devonport, added: "To think, a little Maori fellow on a golf course, leaving to see the world and now off to the World Cup. It's a dream come true. I don't think it will hit me until I get on the plane."

So how Italian is he? What about the Italian national anthem?

"I asked my [Italian] girlfriend to sing it to me and she didn't know it either."

Wakarua's father, Mike, who lives in Devonport, quickly booked a flight to the World Cup for himself and one of Wakarua's nephews.

Meanwhile, Rutledge, who thought he had a flight booked to Australia, has headed home.

WALES

Like Tonga and Italy, Wales have a New Zealander in charge. That's if anybody is in charge of Welsh rugby.

Steve Hansen might regard coaching Wales as a stepping stone, but millstone might be a better description.

Where do you start with Wales, one of the great disasters of world rugby?

Fresh from seven straight defeats, the players went on a mini-strike at a motorway service station on the way to catching a plane for Australia this year.

British journalists wrote of scenes reminding them of the slapstick Carry On films, as team management sat on a bus outside their Glamorgan hotel, while "there was hardly a player in sight".

After their service station pow wow, the Welsh were further delayed by a motorway accident, and arrived just in time to see their plane taking off from Heathrow Airport.

The players were then ordered to pay for their accommodation at the unexpected stopover in London, although the union fronted up for the management bill.

The Welsh players certainly do get paid - their wages over the past four years totalled $15.4 million. In that time, Wales have won just six of their 20 Six Nations games, three against Italy.

When Wales lost to Italy in Rome early last year, a fans' website dubbed captain Colin Charvis the most hated man in the world after Osama bin Laden. Saddam Hussein was third.

Charvis replied: "It shows that people in Wales sometimes lose a little bit of perspective when it comes to rugby."

It is Charvis who will lead Wales in this World Cup, and it is sure to end in tears.

A lasting impression of the Welsh test in Hamilton was the sight of Charvis lying unconscious at Waikato Stadium, after being hit by a Jerry Collins special.

The Charvis story sums up the weird world of Welsh rugby.

He was without a club contract and needed private sponsorship from "patriotic businessmen" - after being discarded by Swansea - to make himself available for the World Cup.

This came after he was dropped from the Wales squad by Hansen's predecessor, Graham Henry, for putting a family holiday before training commitments, and he was also sidelined by Swansea for missing training.

After scoring the first try of the last World Cup in Cardiff, Charvis was cited for punching in the same game against Argentina and was banned for two matches.

The 30-year-old Charvis is one of eight Welsh captains since 2000, and the last of four used by Hansen in successive tests recently.

He will have a plethora of vice-captains under him at the World Cup, but unfortunately for their passionate supporters, none has any hope of lifting the Webb Ellis Cup.

CANADA

Like the Welsh, the Canadians have also been on strike, even though they know that if they want to get rich, there's no point in being a Canadian rugby player.

A couple of years ago the players took the unusual step of withdrawing their labour for the sake of their boss, Australian David Clark, who had just been fired as national coach.

Tests against the Wallabies, Ireland and Scotland were even cancelled.

Clark got reinstated, and he's still there, enthusiastically preparing the side while also putting together a committee which spent five months organising a golf day that raised $63,000.

Any additional money such as this supplements Clark's World Cup budget of $330,000, an amount largely made up of the IRB's grant.

So coaching and playing for Canada involve a lot more than scrums and lineouts. It is a world of fundraising dinners and golf days.

The tournament was held at a new Jack Nicklaus-designed course, with 144 golfers forking out about $300 each to play. Prizes included a car for a hole in one, and a trip to the British Open.

"We were just greeting people at the tees and greens," Canadian captain Al Charron told the Herald from the team's training camp near Victoria.

"We would have liked to be golfing, that was the initial plan, but the fewer players golfing, the more people paying to play."

Charron's place in his fourth World Cup team was uncertain at the time, as he recovered from a knee reconstruction, but it didn't dim the 37-year-old's financial drive.

He spoke at the tournament dinner, where the attractions included raffles and lucky balloons with $1250 inside, and Charron donated an Ottawa Senators ice hockey shirt and an encased jersey, signed by the World Cup squad, to the night's auction.

Later, the players sold team T-shirts for $25 to students at a private school where a benefactor has set up an $8 million rugby and rowing centre, the base for the pre-World Cup camp.

About two-thirds of the squad (with occupations ranging from students to a fishing guide and a car exporter) qualify for $16,000 each from Sport Canada.

The rest are rated professionals.

Clark's aim is for every player to get a lump sum of $6000 on top of a two-month World Cup wage.

"The money we got at previous World Cups was almost embarrassing to talk about it," says Charron, who has played professionally in England and France.

"I think this time we get about C$235 a week ... The All Blacks get that in an hour.

"It's not about money, but at the same time money does help.

"There's been some letdowns and hardship, but I'm not looking for any sympathy because rugby has given me a lot.

"Fundraisers are there for us to beat down the cost for the guys who are away from their jobs."

Clark, a Queensland fullback in the 1960s, has helped prepare Australian World Cup teams and was Canada's assistant in 1999.

Canada qualified after winning the America group - their only loss came in Montevideo, a match he complained was played on a sandy pitch "the size of a postage stamp" which suited Uruguay's limited game plan.

Like the coaches of other minnows, Clark is angered by the hurdles put up by professional clubs and the IRB's impotence.

Top halfback Morgan Williams is missing from the pre-World Cup camp because Saracens re-called him when Kyran Bracken joined the England squad.

"It's ludicrous that the IRB regulations have been flouted. It's not only us, it affects Tonga, Fiji, Japan," says Clark, who adds that the game has become stagnant in Canada and is crying out for a top World Cup performance.

"Two contracts are put on the table. This one is worth, say, C$200,000 if you don't play in the World Cup, this one is worth C$100,000 if you do. You make the decision.

"Here we are at the World Cup, the ultimate, and we are restricted because we don't have our No.1 halfback because of a selfish English club."

But once in the national team's camp, money is no longer an issue, according to Clark.

"You've got the pro players from New Zealand, South Africa and Australia all clamouring for money, but whether we get $5000 or $50,000, it will not make these players play any better than they can.

"At the golf day they manned the par threes, drove carts, socialised, marked balls.

"The All Blacks would want $10,000 for the day probably - our boys got a free feed."


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