We could have been preparing for the hosting of the Rugby World Cup in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Belfast and around the country.

But as we look on wistfully to France enjoying the benefits, we decided to take a flashback to the day back in November 2017 when World Rugby published the technical assessment of competing bids from France, South Africa and Ireland that took the wind out of our sails.

A lot has happened since, including war and a global pandemic but it still feels a little raw, even at such a remove, that it could have been us…

 

November 1st 2017 – Learning From the Blow of a Third Place Finish

The talk afterward was of this being a setback but not an insurmountable one. Nonetheless, the World Rugby evaluation which placed Ireland third of the three bidding nations to host the Rugby World Cup in 2023 is a blow to national pride and to the confidence which had been expressed throughout the bid process.

It is only a recommendation and the final decision will be taken at a meeting of the World Rugby Council on November 15th.

But the wind was clearly leaving the sails of the Irish bid team in that first hour yesterday when they had exclusive time to consider the comprehensive 139 page report.

Two appendices have been redacted on grounds of commercial sensitivity so we do not have a full picture but we certainly have enough to join the dots.

Size, scale and experience

Our chief area of falling short appears to be in the area of size, scale and experience of hosting a major event.

Attention is drawn towards Killarney as one of the host cities having a population of only 14,000, compared to the smallest of the French city venues at 200,000.

The additional work needed to bring our stadia up to the standard required is also identified as a concern and while it was accepted that the work could and would be done, it still led to a lower score than our rivals in the area where most weight was given.

Experience seems to have played an important role and coming up against nations who had built and delivered for the FIFA World Cup in 2010 and the Euro 2016 Finals was always likely to leave us looking optimistic at best, naive at worst.

In the end we may have fallen somewhere between those two. A comment on our Fan Zone strategy that it was good but lacked imagination in providing a ‘unique’ fan experience will be particularly harshly felt in a country where that precise fan experience was a central part of the vision for the 2023 World Cup.

Financial

In terms of financial guarantees we met all the minimum standards required of the bid but our rivals promised more and that seems to have been accepted at face value.

The tactics now for our team will be between casting doubt on areas that have been accepted by the World Rugby Executive on the one hand or promoting the concept of ‘a different kind of tournament’ as stated by Bid Group Chair Dick Spring in comments immediately after the publication of the report.

Both contain a level of risk but this is a high-stakes game where we now have nothing to be gained by caution, little to be lost by tackling hard.

The main stumbling block is that we ourselves were invested in the transparency of independent assessment.

We perhaps believed more than we should have, that the vision of Ireland’s hosting reaching much further than these shores, would carry more weight.

The reality is that while the 70 million US Diaspora is referenced in the report it is in an area of content and vision where much less weighting was given than in the size of host venues where Killarney’s population of 14,000 appears to have drawn more commentary.

Commercial forces

We are a small nation. One with big ambition to be sure but physically still small. New Zealand carried that off in 2011 but would they do so now given the new commercial forces at play around the Rugby World Cup and for it to underpin the development of the sport each four year cycle?

Big sport is getting bigger all the time. The World Cup in soccer is now arguably at a scale that precludes a single nation ever being able to effectively host outside of China, Russia or at a push the United States.

Rugby is nowhere near that threshold yet but the scale of the commercial operation this time around is bigger than was the requirement for Japan, England or New Zealand.

If we cannot pull a rabbit from this hat it may well be we will always be the one of Rugby’s senior playing nations never to host the pinnacle tournament of the sport.

There is a real shame in that and the sense of disappointment among those who have poured their every sinew and fibre over the last few years will be bitter.

Carry on

They must though carry on. Like Leinster at Half Time in that Heineken Cup Final when victory looked an impossible dream, they have to believe.

If they do persuade 20 of the 39 votes to go against the numbers, go against the assessors, and say yes to Ireland then they will deserve statues to be raised and stadia named in their honour for generations.

And if they don’t then we will have time to reflect, to appraise what others have said about us in clinical terms of precision over passion, slide rule economics over stories of Celtic charm.

It will be hard. Losing always is, but at least if we learn from the defeat then it will not all have been in vain.