Loose Pass: Pressure now on re-elected Bill Beaumont

This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with World Rugby’s old order and the plight – or not – of the players in the current crisis…

Well it’s his job and he wanted it…

28-23 sounds like a decent margin of victory. It is a decent margin of victory for, say, a handball team. It would also be a decent margin of victory in anything such as a vote in which 51 voters – not votes – were cast.

Alas, the vote for stewardship of our game’s governing body is just not that simple. So while Sir Bill Beaumont won 28-23, the weird system of weights and measures attached to the voting system means that actually, had any one of the home nations, Italy or France sided with Agustin Pichot, Beaumont would have lost.

But they closed ranks, true to their own vested interests as ever, meaning Pichot, who had garnered the support of the four Southern Hemisphere nations, effectively started the evening 18-12 down. Does that seem right to anyone at all?

Anyway, Beaumont won. And despite this column’s professed support for Pichot, Beaumont is not the dinosaur some make him out to be. But he has a much harder sell on his hands for the next four years than in the previous four. He needs to pick up the fragments of a game smashed to pieces by the coronavirus crisis and build them into something new, shiny, sleek and fully integrated. The engineers working on fixing Apollo 13 had an easier task; not 24 hours after Beaumont was announced as the winner he had already conceded that the Six Nations wasn’t moving, and nor could he force a more equitable global revenue model.

Along with all the party-horn emoticons of congratulation flooding his whatsapp screen and email feed, Beaumont would also have received the message from Brett Impey at the NZRU, saying somewhat succinctly: ‘Change. Or one of your most marketable members is gone.’ It might well have been signed by all SANZAAR dignitaries.

Still, it may not have been fully understood. There was Beaumont, on the one hand endorsing the Nations Championship concept, but on the other hand defending the Six Nations’ right to stay where it was on the calendar. “…why would you move the Six Nations?” he said. “It doesn’t affect anywhere else around the globe.” It might do if it became a part of the Nations Championship and the other nations involved had to fit their windows of participation to it.

But then aside from the Six Nations, what does look the same as it did 25 years ago when the game went professional? Not a single thing. The laws are different, the stadia different, the trophies are called by different names. Much of the time, team colours are different.

Perhaps Beaumont has a point about the Six Nations: namely that rugby needs to create a global game and calendar that aspires to precisely the sort of longevity the Six Nations is able to cling on to so proudly.

This is Beaumont’s task: to create a World Rugby order which encompasses player welfare, rationalises travel burdens, enables fans to identify with tournaments, welcomes appropriate investment without selling out or exploiting, strengthens participation from the bottom up, and is both sustainable and exciting enough that when the professional game turns 50 in 25 years’ time, the tournaments we talk about then will be the same ones we start talking about over the next four years.

No pressure…

Leaving on a corona…

Meanwhile, those on the ground in South African rugby have some bizarre issues to deal with. Salary cuts at some Super Rugby teams have meant that the players whose salaries have been cut have 21 days after the cut to find themselves new employers.

Normally, that might be a tough one, considering the whole world is at a standstill, but it has not deterred Montpellier from making an offer to Pieter-Steph du Toit for him to become the world’s best-ever paid player. Du Toit would not be the only one from down south potentially ‘leaving on a corona’ for pastures flusher and Frencher (assuming, of course, that he is able to travel sometime soon) but it’s not a good look.

But would you blame him? Players, as ever, have had the bummest of bum deals from the whole corona crisis – a bum enough deal that Ellis Genge has taken up the cause of the players getting their rights, and bank accounts, a little more in order. Over-played in the good times, poorly-advised and thus under-paid in the bad times, it’s been a rough ride for some rugby players.

Maybe when this is all over there’ll be a measured, organised calendar with a well-structured, sustainable salary scale and improved insurances and contracts for all professionals, not just the lucky ones who get to go to Montpellier.

No pressure Bill…

Loose Pass compiled by Lawrence Nolan