England humiliated as France win World Cup

By CHRIS HEWETT

DUBLIN - Almost exactly a decade ago, England lost 17-3 in a Five Nations match at Lansdowne Road and forfeited their self-respect.

Yesterday, less than a mile up the road, they lost 18-3 in the fight to stage the 2007 World Cup - a serious political hammering by any standards - and saw a potential £40m disappear from the coffers of an impoverished global game.

If Twickenham's top brass were taken aback by the scale of their defeat on the pitch in 1993, they were positively flabbergasted by these latest events in the boardroom. The ramifications could be enormous.

France will host the tournament in four years' time, with a little help from Ireland, Scotland and Wales, all of whom will be granted home matches. They were also backed by the southern hemisphere super-powers of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, plus the Italians, the Argentinians, the Japanese and FIRA, the Paris-based umbrella organisation representing Europe's second-tier nations.

Only the Canadians threw in their lot with England, who could scarcely have fared worse in the final show of hands.

By way of rubbing salt in the wound, the International Rugby Board confirmed that the tournament would take place in September and October, thereby denying England the financial solace of three sell-out autumn internationals at Twickenham and interfering with professional club competitions for a third consecutive World Cup.

"One of our big disappointments is that the issue of the tournament 'window' has not been taken on board," admitted Francis Baron, the chief executive of the Rugby Football Union and one of the architects of the failed bid.

"The September-October option is the most expensive for the game as a whole. It will certainly cause difficulties in England."

The RFU's tender hit trouble the moment the IRB council rejected innovative plans to divide the tournament into two parallel events - a 16-team elite competition and a 20-team "Nations Cup" for the so-called developing countries - and play it in early summer in an effort to minimise disruption to the regular northern hemisphere season.

Baron and his colleagues had insisted this format would generate a surplus of £111m, far greater than any previous World Cup and more £40m greater than the more conservative French bid.

"When our preferred option was taken off the table the Celtic nations, who would have benefited considerably in financial terms, decided to look after their own interests," said Baron.

"As the French had offered them pool matches in their own countries, I was not particularly surprised when they went with them. However, there are issues affecting the world game that will not go away. We wanted to use the World Cup as a lever to address those problems, many of them affecting the developing nations, but the IRB clearly felt it was a step too far at this time."

Bernard Lapasset, the super-suave president of the French Rugby Federation, declined to revel in England's almost total isolation, an isolation that has its roots in past rows over international funding arrangements and the management of the professional game.

"This was not a victory over England, but a victory for one philosophy of the World Cup, one rationale, over another," he said.

But he could not resist pouring just a soupcon of scorn on the English bid.

"Our objective is to combine the two per cent of professional rugby nations with the 98 per cent of amateur nations. There is no superficial element, no artifice, attached to our project."

Ouch. It is now difficult to see how England can host a World Cup before 2015, for the 2011 tournament will almost certainly be awarded to one of the major southern hemisphere powers - quite possibly South Africa, who staged a stunning competition, by far the best of the four played so far, in 1995.

Neither Baron nor Graeme Cattermole, the chairman of the RFU, ruled out an English bid for 2011, but Syd Millar, the vice-chairman of the IRB, gave the strongest of hints that European nations would have to wait their turn. Millar defended the controversial, not to say deeply unsatisfactory, French ploy of offering pool matches beyond her borders.

While the last World Cup in 1999, nominally a Welsh event, was furiously criticised for a hopelessly flawed structure that saw the Springboks based in Edinburgh and the Wallabies in Dublin, Millar insisted that rugby had "entered a new, more professional era" and needed the "broadest possible coverage".

He also rejected the notion that the three Celtic nations would have an unfair advantage by playing in their own capitals.

The only Six Nations powers who will not play in their own backyards are Italy and, more to the point, a chastened England. No wonder Lapasset left Dublin with a smile on his face.

- INDEPENDENT