Eagles stretching their wings

US Eagles coach Eddie O'Sullivan is not fazed by the thought of four World Cup games in sixteen days in New Zealand next year.

US Eagles coach Eddie O'Sullivan is not fazed by the thought of four World Cup games in sixteen days in New Zealand next year.

The Eagles start their campaign against O'Sullivan's former team Ireland on September 11, play Russia on September 15, Australia on September 23 and finish against Italy on September 27.

It's a tough schedule, one which many teams in past World Cups would have baulked at with the lack of recovery time, but O'Sullivan has accepted it as just a quirk of the current game.

“When you qualify as a lower ranking seed you tend to get a difficult schedule, it's a fact of life,” O'Sullivan told Reuters at a windy and cold Newtown Park in Wellington on Wednesday, where he has been scouting out his team's potential base for the tournament.

“When you look at our guys we have 30 guys who are pretty much in the same boat, so we can use them all,” he said.

“The difference (in skill levels) between our first XV and second XV is not as much as it might be for other countries, so we just rotate our players.

“There are some standouts, like our captain Todd Clever, who played for the Lions in South Africa but has now gone to Suntory in Japan, our full-back Chris Wyles who is playing at Saracens, and (winger) Takudzwa Ngwenya playing for Biarritz, but we have a pretty balanced pool.”

The USA often enter World Cups with the aim of winning one pool match, but last time they ran eventual finalists England close.

Having established countries such as Italy, Ireland and Australia as pool opposition is a tough draw and leaves the match-up with Russia, at their first tournament, as the USA's obvious must-win game.

But it is the knock-on effect the global exposure will have on the domestic game that O'Sullivan is most keen to exploit, particularly now as NBC have declared their intent to broadcast the games live on television in the USA from the next two World Cups.

“We also play Italy, Ireland and Australia and I'm not predicting we will beat any of those (teams) but those are games when you want to have a crack at upsetting the apple cart, because a World Cup is like that,” said O'Sullivan.

“In the 10 years I was away from the game in America it certainly changed for the better and it's got stonger and has a better structure.

“The (big) difference between the '90s and now is that the collegiate programs are getting much better, there are more of them (and) a lot of those players play their first game of rugby at college. They may have been (American) football players at high school but begin to play rugby in college.

“So those collegiate programs are very, very important (because) a lot of those players come out of the collegiate program and go straight into the Eagles.”

Irishman O'Sullivan added the collegiate system, was “something Americans understood”, which was creating more interest in the sport, with a recent collegiate rugby sevens tournament being broadcast live by NBC.

“That got a huge reaction because it's easy to sell collegiately.

“Teams like Cal-Berkeley, Utah, Notre Dame — they're easy to sell to the American public because they're marquee colleges.

“Whereas trying to sell a club to America is tough — no-one knows about clubs, but they all understand the collegiate system.”

Rugby is also being introduced into schools but O'Sullivan confessed “it will be a bit of time before that pays off” and the game is still concentrated in certain areas of the country.

“It's like pushing a rock up a hill. Sometimes it's two steps forward then it rolls back a step,” he said.

“The big difficulty is financial, we don't have a professional game … (even) Russia has a professional league … so if we could achieve that it would be a huge step forward but we don't have the money for that.

“Our route forward at the moment is to get our players overseas and follow the model Argentina used (having international-calibre players based abroad for their development).

“It's a hard sell at the moment, because most teams in Europe will look to the southern hemisphere for a finished product rather than look to an American player.

“But we are working hard to change that.”