Paul Thomas: A hiding a day keeps the punters away

COMMENT

Sydney is a city of four million people; cricket is Australia's national sport; its team is the best and most exciting in the world.

The fourth-day crowd at last week's test between Australia and Zimbabwe was 1312.

When Matthew Hayden reached his century - off 84 balls - with a six into the Bill O'Reilly Stand, the game was held up while a fielder retrieved the ball. He had to because there wasn't a spectator within a Hayden hook shot of where the ball came to rest.

(It brought to mind the old cricketing yarn. A bowler sledges a batsman who's having trouble laying bat on ball. "It's round, it's red and it's got stitches around the middle." The batsman belts the next delivery out of the park. "You know what it looks like," he tells the bowler. "You find it.")

A virtually empty Sydney Cricket Ground is what happens when those running the game serve up meaningless fixtures devoid of intensity, drama and the essence of sport, glorious uncertainty.

Rugby should heed the lesson. As Rachel Hunter used to say, it won't happen overnight - but it will happen.

The World Cup pool game crowds have been good, in some cases remarkable. This can be put down to a variety of things - novelty value, ticket prices as low as A$5, the desire to be part of a major international event and national pride in Australia being seen as a successful host.

But the International Rugby Board is kidding itself if it thinks it can keep running the World Cup in its current format, in which many pool games have no relevance to the overall outcome and bear no resemblance to rugby at its best.

The clashes of the minnows are rugby's equivalent of those Olympic occasions when all is in readiness for the medal presentation bar the fact that out in the pool, the swimmer from the Congo is still trying not to drown.

The mismatches in which amateurs are pitted against professionals are an unedifying spectacle. Professional boxing is sometimes a freak show and can be an utter disgrace, but at least it stops the fight when a contestant can no longer defend himself.

This isn't to say that the likes of the Namibians and Romanians aren't doing their best or that they don't get a thrill from taking part.

But that's not a good reason for maintaining the status quo. The World Cup is the pinnacle. Teams shouldn't be there to take part, they should be there to compete for the game's greatest prize.

These games do little to improve standards in rugby's third world. The lesser nations would derive far greater benefit from a year-in, year-out commitment of money and resources than the dubious privilege of being cannon fodder every four years.

Even if the nettle is grasped, it will be a long time before rugby can stage a 20-team World Cup worthy of the name.

Until then, the tournament should be restricted to the 10 or 12 countries which have a realistic, outside or even faint chance of winning.