Phil Gifford: The real reason World Rugby changed their rules

(L-R) Alan Gilpin World Rugby CEO, Sir Bill Beaumont World Rugby Chairman and Aiman Ezzat Capgemini Group CEO pose in front of the Rugby World Cup trophy. Photo / Getty Images.

OPINION:

Judith Collins might still be Leader of the Opposition if she'd had World Rugby chairman Bill Beaumont as a shrewd advisor.

Beaumont, a likeable England captain from Chornley in Lancashire, whose charm saw him spend a decade as a team leader on the BBC's high rating programme "A Question Of Sport", is also, in the words of a former NZRU board member, a politician to the core.

In the last 19 months Beaumont has mastered the boardroom at World Rugby in ways that have belied the jolly, big, bluff retired lock image.

On the one hand, he steered through the once-thought-impossible three year stand down eligibility rule that will allow Pacific Island teams, in particular, to be much stronger at World Cups. Two former senior NZRU board members I spoke to this week said they'd thought that change would forever be impossible.

Basically allowing veterans from the All Blacks and the Wallabies to play for the country of their ancestors won't be an all purpose panacea for Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa.

But it's a huge improvement on a draconian rule that, to spare the blushes of teams like Italy, has made a rookie playing just a couple of minutes in an international team, even a sevens side, forever barred from playing for another country.

It won't mean that suddenly Pacific Island sides in non-World Cup years will be at full strength for the northern hemisphere's autumn rugby season.

Many European clubs will still block their Polynesian stars from playing test rugby. But, as Pita Alatini, one of the management group of the 'Ikale Tahi Tongan squad for the World Cup in Japan, said at the start of the month, "If the rules had been different (in 2019) , my gosh, we'd have been looking at winning games, not just surviving, or trying to keep the score down."

The World Cup will be vastly improved by more depth in the competition, and the fact is that Pacific Island players, whether born in the islands, or in New Zealand or Australia, are now probably the major source of rugby talent in the world. That's what scared the likes of Italy, Wales, and Scotland.

Sir Bill Beaumont, World Rugby Chairman speaking during the 2021 Rugby World Cup Launch Event at Eden Park. Photo / Getty Images.

So how, and why, did Beaumont, manage to get northern nations to vote for the change now?

For a start, the alteration wasn't a switch of positions for Beaumont and England. In 2010, when the NZRU tried to revise the no-change of country rule that blatantly punished Pasifika teams, England was the only northern union to back New Zealand. Beaumont was England's delegate to what was then the International Rugby Board.

And as a rugby politician, Beaumont had needed the help of Pacific Island countries when Argentina's Agustin Pichot challenged him last year as chairman of World Rugby.

Beaumont won what was believed to be a knife edge victory in May, 2020. New Zealand and Australia voted for Pichot, and Brent Impey, then the chair of New Zealand Rugby, suggested Fiji and Samoa voting for Beaumont had been vital.

"I've spoken to the chair and CEO of Fiji (Rugby Union), and the sports minister of Samoa," said Impey. "All we know is Bill Beaumont met representatives of Fiji and Samoa in Tokyo at the Rugby World Cup – we don't know what's been offered."

It now seems clear that changing the eligibility regulations was almost certainly a major factor in Fiji and Samoa voting for Beaumont as chairman.

There's nothing sinister in that, but it may be short sighted.

Good on Beaumont for righting a wrong. But the reason NZR wanted Pichot was that he offered bigger changes, even the prospect of a world competition that would allay the money concerns of, as a prime example, Australia, and New Zealand.

In 2018, after two years as deputy-chairman of World Rugby, Pichot would say to British journalist Robert Kitson from the Guardian, "If rugby wants to be big and a sound business, we cannot behave like an old-school organization. I'm not going to be an accomplice to rugby's ruin."

It's the concern that Beaumont, on the board of World Rugby for 22 years, and chairman for the last five, won't offer change for the 21st century, and a sport wracked, like the world, by Covid-19, that led New Zealand to vote against him last year.

If there's a ray of sunshine, let's cling to the hope that Beaumont's steering through of the three year stand down law is a sign that at 68 he may be open to innovation in other areas too.