Tough call, but rugby must help the islands
When the Bristol scrum-half Richard Harding led England onto the field in Suva for their first game on Fijian soil in 1988, the tourists found something of a curiosity awaiting them on the far side of halfway. His name was Jone Kubu and – how weird was this? – he liked to play his rugby abroad.
Everyone else in the Fijian line-up was island based, with a variety of local teams – Nadroga, Nadi, Rewa – represented in the elite selection. By moving to Australia after the inaugural World Cup in 1987 and hooking up with Easts club in Sydney, full-back Kubu had become an outlier.
By the time England hosted the islanders in the opening match of the eighth global gathering at Twickenham in 2015, the world of Fijian rugby had long been turned on its head.
Of the 15 players who started that contest, the number of non-exiles was a big fat zero. They were all Jone Kubus now: nine based in France, two in England, one in Australia, another in New Zealand, yet another in Scotland.
As for the powerful tight-head prop Manasa Saulo, he was in the middle of a three-season stint with Timisoara Saracens in Romania, of all places on God’s earth. These guys were prepared to play their rugby anywhere. Anywhere, that is, except in their homeland.
The Fijian experience, along with that of Samoa and Tonga, is the crying shame of our sport. We have been saying it for years and we all know the reasons why the game in the islands can survive in the professional era only if all the professionals go somewhere else.
If big-time sport is about material interests, the supply of interesting material in the Pacific – that is to say, cash – has never amounted to more than a drop in the ocean.
According to International Monetary Fund statistics, Fiji stands 149th in a 186-strong list measuring the gross domestic product of national economies, a mere 143 places behind the United Kingdom. Samoa? They’re 176th, sandwiched between nearby
Vanuatu and the Caribbean pinprick of St Vincent and the Grenadines. Tonga? They’re 179th, just ahead of Sao Tome and Principe.
On the basis of those figures alone, the islanders’ contribution to one of the world’s major sports is astonishing. But the men with calculators are steadfast in their belief that it is better to chase the dollar in America, a rich country that isn’t much interested in the game, than to throw good money after bad at a hand-to-mouth region that has always lived and breathed it.
There are senior figures in the governing classes who despair at the islands’ collective talent for the basketcase brand of mismanagement.
“The moment we put money in, it evaporates,” one grandee remarked to this columnist some years ago. “We might as well flush it straight down the toilet. At least that would cut out the middle man and save us some time and effort.”
If rugby was nothing more than a commercial enterprise, he might have had a point. But sport is not pure business, any more than business is pure sport. It has a financial dimension, of course, but as the people who run the most successful games in America have long understood, the trick is to nurture the competition, not kill it off. Hence the draft system in gridiron and the well-worn joke about Stateside sport being “socialism for gazillionaires”.
Yes, it is wickedly difficult for World Rugby to invest heavily in the islands while retaining sufficient oversight, without being accused of “sporting colonialism”.
But they must find a way nonetheless. If they fail, the Fijians will devote even more of their energy to the Sevens circuit, the Tongans’ love affair with Rugby League will deepen and the Samoan Union’s long and intense flirtation with bankruptcy will become a marriage made in hell.
Without home-and-away exposure to Tier 1 competition, the introduction of a revenue-sharing formula for all fullcap international fixtures and some intelligent flexibility over eligibility rules, rugby in the islands will never be professionalised.
Instead, we will be left with what we have now: the grotesque inequality of a rigged market.
As we speak, it is possible to select an entire team of top Test-playing Fijians currently under contract at European clubs, from Semi Radradra and Levani Botia to Leone Nakarawa and Peceli Yato.
And when we’ve done that, we can double down by picking a second side of almost equal quality, each of whom is also earning a crust up here in the north.
Rugby needs its Fijians. Can’t do without ‘em. What it doesn’t need, apparently, is Fiji.
“The Fijian experience, along with that of Samoa and Tonga, is the crying shame of our sport”