Peter Bills: Rugby World Cup a great success - despite the IRB

Romania fans added a bit of colour to the occasion when their team took on Georgia in the Pool B match at Arena Manawatu in Palmerston North. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Arise the people of New Zealand, a collective knighthood to the lot of you!

By your multiple selfless acts, not least in a financial sense, you have turned the 2011 Rugby World Cup into a memorable occasion. Hats off to the local communities who have "adopted" the Russians, the Namibians, the Tongans, the Scots or, crikey, even the French.

To those people, like a friend of mine who paid $800 for one ticket for a semifinal, the sport will forever be in your debt. Likewise to the housewife I know from Matamata who, with no real rugby association, spent $1000 on four tickets to see New Zealand run up a cricket score against the Japanese in nearby Hamilton.

Do the IRB and NZRU mandarins actually know how much $1000 out of a retired couple's disposable income actually is? One heck of a lot, I can tell you.

It is thanks to such people that we know that this World Cup, more than three weeks before it reaches its denouement, will be remembered with far more warmth than its 2007 and 2003 predecessors.

But note I praise only the people of New Zealand. The International Rugby Board, responsible for the organisation of this event, scores few plus marks.

For this is manifestly a World Cup flawed financially and with the wrong format. This event needs radical surgery to right its many wrongs.

It is, as some of us have said for a long time, grossly elongated. The better part of seven weeks is an absurdity for a single sporting event, especially when the Olympic Games are completed in just 16 days and the Fifa World Cup in 28.

The rugby authorities sitting in their five-star hotel suites all over New Zealand would have us believe nothing shorter is possible. They would suggest that because of its physicality, rugby players need greater periods of rest.

But no slickly run, professional sporting event would be spun out for almost seven weeks.

And the second flaw runs commensurate with the first. The IRB says that to give all teams a level playing field in terms of equal preparation time, you would have to cut down the number of teams participating. Well, how appropriate that would be for there are at least four teams too many involved here.

Some of the scores in the past three weeks of pool matches underline that point. Results like 87-0, 83-7, 81-7, 67-3, 67-5, 62-12 and 49-3 are merely processions, not contests.

They simply emphasise to the watching world (or at least those not so bored by the succession of slaughters that they have switched off long before the end) that this tournament cannot justify so many teams of lower rank.

Rugby is not a truly worldwide sport like soccer, no matter how much the IRB bangs on about its 117 countries of (partial) membership.

By all means invite them to the World Cup. But, as England suggested a few years ago, put them in their own competition, a Bowl or Plate, once they have lost to one of the big boys. The final of the Bowl and/or Plate as a build-up to the World Cup final would be a competitive, colourful occasion. You would get a real contest in those finals, not a series of one-sided, irrelevant romps.

The second problem is the financial breakdown. For the privilege of staging this World Cup, New Zealand as a nation will lose between $40 and $50 million. That is obscene in anyone's language. The host nation ought to be making a nice profit to sustain it for years to come, not passing around the begging bowl to its taxpayers.

Even the CEO of the NZRU, Steve Tew, moaned at the prospect of his union losing $13.2 million on the event. Ridiculously, he even threatened the All Blacks might not compete at the next World Cup if the financial structures were not altered.

There's gratitude for you, for the board's decision to award the event to New Zealand.

But Tew has a point. Especially when you hear people from the Pacific Islands saying that unions like Fiji and Samoa have no money. Some island nations cannot even find a commercial partner to sponsor their jerseys.

In some respects, professional rugby has made considerable strides. But its showpiece event needs major changes to go forward.