Loose Pass

This week we will be mostly concerning ourselves with traditional tours and soccer…

Welcome to Loose Pass – our weekly assortment of disjointed thoughts. This week we will be mostly concerning ourselves with traditional tours and soccer…

Ring out the church bells! The return of the “traditional tour”, as decreed by the IRB, promises to breathe new life into what has become a fatuous format.

Admit it: when was the last time you genuinely got excited about the prospect of your side's end-of-season dash to the far side of the world?

The exotic became commonplace, and the lack of tangible rewards (asides TV cash, of course) sullied the concept of Test rugby and made a mockery of our game.

We had a glance of the brave new world in Perth, where England kicked off a, well, semi-traditional tour with a helter-skelter clash with the Australian Barbarians.

Sure, it lacked a certain finesse (and anything resembling defence) but it served its purpose as an appetiser ahead of the main course.

The smash-and-grab tours of the recent past saw too many youngsters consumed by their sudden immersion into the Test caldron. Many never returned.

Yet the mid-week games shape like a mountain base-camp where those that flourish can be called upon to push for the summit, and where those that don't are sent back down to sea level – with lungs and reputations intact.

All of which gets fans talking. We consider ourselves dab hands at selection and nothing exercises our mouths – if not our minds – more than seeing a teams form before our very eyes. And not only will we talk, we might even begin to tour once again.

But the return of the one-stop, three-Test tour does have one glaring drawback: the sums just don't add up.

With only three (at a push, four) major venues south of the equator, only a select number of incoming sides (with the requisite calibre) will be called upon to lace their boots in anger.

And we're not talking about the exclusion of just the so-called minnows. The All Blacks have sketched out their schedule up to 2019 and it features just four incoming sides: Ireland, France (twice), England and Wales.

This leaves big sides like Scotland and Italy in limbo and threatens to add an extra tier to rugby's hierarchy – one which opens yet wider the gap between rugby's haves and have-nots.

But do the positives outweigh the negatives? Can the marginalisation of “lesser” nations be avoided? Over to you. Bright ideas are most welcome.

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Say what you will about the quality of the players, but England still packs the mightiest wallop in world rugby.

Well, in court.

The law team selected by Sir Clive Woodward pulled off some spectacular wins during RWC 2003, but they were made to look like mere amateurs by recent events in Perth.

England's current crop of pin-stripes managed to get Dave Attwood off not one but two charges of stamping by accusing citing commissioner Scott Nowland of being Australian.

The devastating counter-charge stuck and Attwood walked on the grounds that Nowland could not be considered an “independent authority”.

Whilst this publication has long rallied against the Super 14's policy of picking officials on “merit before nationality”, Loose Pass can't help but feel that accusing someone of conscious bias against foreigners (xenophobia's flatmate) is against the spirit of the game.

Let's hope that the return to traditional tours will be accompanied by a return to traditional manners.

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Whilst England's legal skills have come on leaps and bounds since those heady days of 2003, Rob Andrew made it clear that the meticulous preparations that marked Sir Clive's reign have long since fallen by the wayside.

“We didn't even know it was an Australian citing commissioner until after the game,” said England's elite rugby director of the aforementioned incident.

Let's see what Andrew's new boss, John Steele, makes of that little omission of failing to prepare.

As gormless statements go it takes some beating, but South Africa hit back to continue their winning streak with this effort from Bok boss Peter de Villiers: “He called me soon after he arrived there and said he had made the wrong decision.”

And just like that, Jean de Villiers's season-long stint with Munster was exposed as nothing more than a money-driven sham.

Thanks, boss! With friends like that, who needs enemies?

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Finally a team to challenge the All Blacks in their own backyard: the All Whites.

World Cup fever is running high in New Zealand as the nation's soccer team limbers up for battle in South Africa – and it seems to have hit a nerve in the offices of the NZRU.

Responding to the growing interest surrounding their round-balled brethren's World Cup warm-up games, the NZRU launched a poster campaign promoting the forthcoming Tri-Nations series by besmirching the idea of soccer 'friendlies'.

Should the NZRU be worried? Surely not. Three trouncing in South Africa (the All Whites face Italy, Paraguay and Slovakia) will quash soccer's uprising in its infancy.

But underlying stats suggest that rugby's grip on the national psyche is not what it once was, prime among them being the fact that Wellington Phoenix FC averaged crowds of about 17,400 for their home matches this year. The Hurricanes managed an average of 15,188 during their five home games.

And rugby's shaming at the hands of dastardly soccer does not end there.

It has been revealed that the video for 'Shout', England's toe-curling unofficial anthem for the World Cup, was shot at the Stoop.

Even 'Bloodgate' looks dignified compared to this. Come back, Deano, all is forgiven.

Compiled by Andy Jackson