Have World Rugby the wit to save our game?

There are worrying numbers of lifelong rugby aficionados out there who believe the northern hemisphere game has lost its bite and are losing patience with its efforts to gum the audience into submission.

- CHRIS HEWETT

They arrived at this dire conclusion not by listening to ever-increasing legions of podcasting ex-players, many of whom never thought twice about boring the buttocks off the paying public if it helped them win a match, but by subjecting themselves to the grinding poverty of the Amazonfunded Autumn Nations Cup pool stage, perhaps the worst piece of rugby business conducted by anyone since Bath threw a fortune at Sam Burgess. Is Jeff Bezos really Philip Green in disguise?

Your columnist has warned more than once against the perils of unbridled nostalgia. Today’s version of the union code is, across a wide range of measurables, vastly superior to its forerunners: a significant majority of players are fitter, faster, more driven, and, in many respects, more skillful than they would have been even a decade ago. That sounds like the definition of progress.

The sadness is that rugby is the author of its own predicament and that those principally responsible – certain coaches of the “whatever it takes” persuasion and the law-makers who cut them too much slack – continue to do their worst in full knowledge of the consequences. More than any other major sport, the union is making itself less of a spectacle as a matter of policy.