Mike Miller, chief executive of the International Rugby Board. Photo / Brett Phibbs
Opinion
Every four years the Irrational Rugby Board uses the Rugby World Cup stage to raise its benchmark for being (unrivalled) world champions at being dry, humourless and faceless gits.
George Orwell could well have had this Dickensian bureaucracy in mind when he conceived Big Brother in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four,
his critique of an all-seeing, all-controlling monolith that seizes on dissidents that have strayed from the party line and sentences them to unspeakable punishments.
In 2011, that translate to fines such as $10,000 for wearing the wrong mouthguard.
Do you know that if you enter a Rugby World Cup ground with so much as a Big Mac in its original packaging you (or rather 'it') will be refused entry? Same goes for anything else that displays branding.
Considering one of the chief charges against the IRB is that they are money-grasping scrooges, you would think that they would hire a public relations company to address their appalling public image. But they don't seem to have an inkling of the disaffection in the rugby ranks, and care still less.
