Mick Cleary: Cap needed to help growth in Pacific

Tonga line up for their national anthem ahead of the Rugby World Cup Pool C game at Sapporo Dome between England and Tonga in Sapporo, Japan. Photo / AP

COMMENT:

There is no such thing as a level playing field in rugby, but there is such a thing as fair and equitable treatment. World Rugby can do nothing to correct disparities in population, whereby England, with 55 million, can take on Tonga, with 100,000.

Much as World Rugby provides the same standard of facility and accommodation once the tournament begins, it still stuck in the craw to read the Sunday Telegraph story that the Rugby Football Union had moved to secure extra funding of some £250,000 ($490,000) to top up its World Cup budget of some £3 million ($5.9m), while Tonga just do as Tonga and all the other Pacific Islands, as well as tier-two countries, are obliged to do, fly economy and get by on £800 ($1569) a week per man. The begging bowl is in the wrong hands.

It is about time there was some sort of cap on budgets in and around tournaments with, maybe, a cut-off period three months before the start of a World Cup. That way, at least, there might be some correction to the scales, whereby the rich are obliged to prepare for tournaments on the same footing as the poor. There would still be inequalities, of course, but you could not help but feel at the Sapporo Dome on Sunday that Tonga would have given England even more of a hurry-up if they, too, had been able to afford a land army of back-up staff as well as extensive training camps. It is not the meek who have inherited the earth. It is the rich.

We do as we always do at these events and praise the fight of teams such as Tonga, for their verve, their resilience and their sheer presence. A World Cup would be enormously devalued without them, merely an internecine play-off between the ruling classes after the below-stairs lot have had their day out in the sun.

World Rugby has worked hard to put resources into the Pacific Islands over the last four-year cycle, investing in staff as well as training programmes. Tip of the hat on that front. It is the in-and-around competition parts that now need scrutiny if that gap is to close properly. There are other more nuanced disadvantages suffered by Pacific Island teams.

For instance, can we find another term to replace tier two? I have never liked it. It sounds elitist, pompous and patronising, as if the little fellas are to be forever classified as country cousins, barefoot in the sand, happy-clappy but not of the same ilk as the grown-ups in tier one.

There are plenty of other issues to address — the ridiculously restrictive eligibility laws, where the likes of Bristol's Charles Piutau is prevented from representing the country of his birth, Tonga, because he played for the All Blacks years ago?