Let the games begin

TOKYO — RUGBY union’s ground-breaking move to bring the World Cup to Asia has taken its time. Football staged its mega-global gathering in Japan and South Korea in 2002, and the Olympic Games were in Tokyo all the way back in 1964, for goodness’ sake. So others have been there, done that, but still this feels special and potentially pivotal and just a little daunting as a tournament that might have been in Japan in 2011, but for a last-minute vote to go more conservatively to New Zealand, finally kicks off this Friday with the hosts taking on Russia in the first of 48 matches spread across six weeks.

England’s head coach Eddie Jones – Japanese-descended, Australian born and raised – was hired four years ago, in the dark dog days immediately after the dismal World Cup failure of his predecessor’s Stuart Lancaster’s home-grown regime, with the express task of winning this competition. Anyone unfamiliar with England’s traditional rugby prowess of rudimentary battering can refer to the footage of the country’s current Prime Minister once flattening a 10-year-old Japanese boy on what was meant to be a hands-across-the-water event in Tokyo in 2015.

The England team under the direction of Jones and two fellow Antipodeans, John Mitchell and Scott Wisemantel, plus the Cumbrian line-out guru and former captain, Steve Borthwick, remains capable of intimidating any opponent through the physical presence of Billy Vunipola, Kyle Sinckler and Maro Itoje, but their greatest problem to date has been unveiling a Plan B when the power game is negated.

Mix of brutal and balletic

And it is this mix of the brutal and the balletic which the winning team in this World Cup will need. In a country where rugby has long had a foothold among students and a corporately-funded club league, you sense the victorious squad will be the one with the characters who can wander down a quiet street in Fukuoka or Sapporo, or through the dizzying slot-machine buzz of Electric Town in Tokyo, and say: “I feel comfortable in this place, I can produce my best rugby.”

You are bound to read and hear the terms “tier-one” and “tier-two” preceding different nations; as a quick explainer, the ten teams competing annually in the Six Nations and Rugby Championship are tier-one; the other 10 teams at this World Cup come from the theoretical next rung down – and the likeliest tier-two giant-killers are reckoned to be Japan – in with Scotland and Ireland – and Fiji in Wales’s pool.

New Zealand and South Africa from the top rank are heavily favoured with pundits, with the All Blacks fly-half Beauden Barrett and Springboks scrum-half Faf de Klerk possessing that imperturbable classiness. Apart from, in Barrett’s case, the closed skill of goal-kicking, which sometimes gets the better of him.

Rugby in administrative turmoil

Rugby is also bringing a batch of parochial problems to the sushi and soba restaurants and izakaya pubs. It would be amazing if Agustin Pichot, the vice chairman of World Rugby, keeps his mouth shut on the increasing disparity between the big-earning unions and the rest. It is only a few months since his plan to re-organise the Test schedule with a Nations Championship between World Cups was controversially shelved. Then there is worrying injury rate, including concussion, to the extent that the great Welsh captain and flanker Sam Warburton – who would have been playing a third World Cup here had he not retired early – recently expressed a fear of a player dying on the pitch. What on earth would that do for breakfast-time TV ratings back home? Meanwhile, red cards issued by protective referees are high on every coach’s list of problems to avoid.

Typhoons and earthquakes are natural hazards that might play a part, and a match cancelled on the day in the pool stage will not be rescheduled, and will go down as a 0-0 draw. This could cause huge ructions if it unfairly affects who goes through to the quarter-finals. If such a cancellation had happened to England vs Wales in 2015, England and not Wales would have gone through.

What we hope is for audiences old and new to be wowed by rugby’s bewitching domino effect of a tackle by a big prop on one wing leading to space for a flashing back like England’s Jonny May on the other – or the opposite effect if the first action goes wrong. We are told almost all the tickets will be sold and the cast list from Springbok and Wallaby and All Black to Russians, Namibians and Canadians, and all our home players in between, will fight hard, shake hands and get riotously protein-pumped on their high-energy drinks.

The contenders

Ireland under Joe Schmidt have huge potential if they can rouse their Grand Slam pack and experienced half-backs Conor Murray and Johnny Sexton to their form of 2018 and come through their pool relatively unscathed. Then they can rip into a quarter-final against either New Zealand or South Africa – both of whom they’ve beaten since the last World Cup – with the carrot of, amazingly, a first-ever appearance in the semi-finals.

Wales’s captain Alun Wyn Jones leads a tight-knit squad coached shrewdly by Warren Gatland, hoping to win as well as they sing, while if it’s fast rugby you are after look no further than Scotland’s back row and their conjuror of a No 10, Finn Russell.

As Jones told his England squad recently: “They can become someone who changes the whole course of history. The number of kids playing… the impact on their lives, the status benefits, the financial benefits and they get their own personal happiness so it’s pretty special.”

England’s pool schedule looks perfectly set for them to swipe Tonga and the USA aside with a high-tempo game, before the stakes inexorably rise against Argentina and France on the way to a quarter-final in Oita against Wales or Australia (or maybe Fiji) for the right to meet probably New Zealand or South Africa in the semi-final in Yokohama.

All these predictions may be scattered asunder if some new and unexpected forces blow through this innovative World Cup. But on the eve of the big kick-off, if England are going to win this thing for the second time – doubling their tally, and that of the entire northern hemisphere – it looks like they will have to do it the hard way. Which is just as it should be.- inews.co.uk