Every four years the Rugby World Cup pool matches are a festival of rugby that celebrates the game’s global family and reminds us that rugby belongs to us all.
In 1987 at the Concord Oval in the inner western suburbs of Sydney, the first World Cup pool games were played with a wild, carnival-like vibe. At that time the Concord Oval was the home ground of my club team, Western Suburbs. Today it is incomprehensible that a Rugby World Cup could be staged at such a venue.
It was the unholy union between New Zealand and Australia that combined with an exceptionally rare purpose to coerce the conservative northern unions to turn up to a World Cup they were deeply suspicious of.
With Eden Park to host the final, the Kiwis looked on in disbelief as the Australian organisers decided to locate their Sydney matches at Concord Oval. The Sydney Cricket Ground had been the test match venue in the harbour city for over a century.
At the time the poor financial deal offered by the SCG led to the crazy decision by the amateur New South Wales Rugby Union to borrow close to Aus$30 million (the equivalent of about €47 million today) to build grandstands on the suburban Concord Oval. It helped create a debt burden that years later would force the NSW Union to declare bankruptcy and led to the Concord being abandoned as a venue for high-profile matches.
Amid this type of lunacy, the first Rugby World Cup was born.
The blinkered view that rugby was played only in a few countries was dispelled as teams from exotic places such as Argentina, Italy, Romania, Zimbabwe and Japan took to the field in rugby’s first festival. The hidden diversity of the sport was laid bare and the vast extent of the global game was no longer a secret.
[ Ireland's shambolic first Rugby World Cup stepsOpens in new window ]
Ironically, the site of Concord Oval was first used by the British colonialists as a jail to hold Irish and French rebels who had fought in an uprising in Quebec in 1840. Canadian rebels were transported to the west of Sydney Harbour, isolating them from the majority of Irish prisoners lest they infect them with their rebellious ideals of egalitarian liberty. The Concord Oval is literally built on top of the cells that held those political prisoners.
Today the local municipality is named Canada Bay after this event, with Concord Oval on the shores of France Bay and Exile Bay.
The first World Cup pool games, which were played on a site scarred by the tyranny of empire, forced rugby’s power brokers to face the reality that the game did not belong solely to those who lived in – to use that vile term – “the home nations”.
The 1987 World Cup was rugby’s version of Woodstock. A gathering that turned into a festival that forever changed the cultural landscape of the game. The transformative success summoned up tectonic forces within rugby that would later create revolution and chaos. And while the northern rugby elite did all in their power to keep the game rooted in the Victorian epoch, their world would soon collapse.
It took eight more years and the miracle of the former prisoner 46664 from Robbin Island, president Nelson Mandela of South Africa, for rugby’s outmoded administration to see the game spiral from their control.
As president Mandela presented the 1995 Willian Webb Ellis Trophy to the Springbok captain Francois Pienaar even the greatest sceptics were awed by the power that rugby’s third festival had generated.
The dysfunctional global rugby administration was fractured between those in the north, who were clinging to the already dead body of amateurism, and those who were fighting to hold their section of the game that was being targeted by tycoons who smelled blood in the water.
The result was the family farm was forcibly sold off, one giant uncoordinated chunk at a time for relative pennies.
The tycoons made billions using rugby’s power to sell the birth of subscription TV. The game, the players and coaches received a tiny fraction of the revenue the game generated. The birth of professionalism was a mishmash of compromises, half-truths and a financial capitulation that undervalued the game in the global sporting market. A situation from which rugby has not and may never fully recover.
Despite the litany of obvious failings and injustices that persist in rugby’s administration, the game and the community that sits at its heart remain resilient. As it has been since Billy Ellis picked up the ball and ran with it at Rugby School in 1823, the game’s people are its true power.
[ Forwards-focused South Africa could be a sight to behold at Rugby World CupOpens in new window ]
The opening weeks of every RWC are when we celebrate the awesome power of the people in our global community and remind ourselves that no one owns the game. We all have a stewardship that entrusts us with the responsibility of passing the game on to the next generation in a better shape than we received it.
Conceived in grave debt on a former stockade for political prisoners in colonial Sydney, passed through the healing hands of the great Mandela, then sold like a sack of potatoes to uncaring merchants, but somehow still alive. Now passed on to us to nurture and cherish.
Let the festival begin.
