World Cup risks being blown away and that’s not unlucky... it’s a scandal
THERE are a lot of surprising things about Japan. Typhoon season isn’t one of them. Cafes where you can go to pet hedgehogs, or owls, yes. The restaurant that serves unfertilised chicken eggs still connected to the fallopian tube, certainly. That the age of consent is 13. Good grief. But typhoon season? May to October each year, without fail. Always has been, probably always will be.
August and September are its peak periods, but mainland Japan is hit on average three times each year, with varying degrees of potency.
Sometimes they get away with a little rearrangement; other storms bring calamity. So a tournament that began on September 20, with 28 matches scheduled for October, was always courting trouble.
The organisers cannot say they were not warned. They have, quite literally, reaped the whirlwind.
That the 2019 Rugby World Cup now risks being blown away as it reaches the climactic weekend for the pool stage will be seen by some as simply unfortunate.
There will have been plenty of years, the majority no doubt, when games could have gone ahead untroubled as they have done so far.
Yet, equally, there was always the possibility of dramatic complications.
And if it is tough on the French players who may now not get the chance to win the group, or Scotland, who may yet fly home without receiving a last chance to qualify, think of the fans.
All week in Tokyo, there has been enjoyable interaction with groups of supporters who have built holiday adventures around this tournament. Some can’t afford more than one week, one game and the showdown in Yokohama between England and France was a popular choice.
Certainly, no-one sold them a Rugby World Cup experience that could be cancelled at three days’ notice. It was close to midnight on Wednesday here when the news leaked that England and France would not go ahead.
Tickets bought, flights booked, hotels long paid for in advance. It is not unlucky, the fate that has befallen these rugby loyalists. It is a scandal. Just as it was a scandal that the IAAF sent their World Championships to Doha.
Just as it was a scandal that the African Cup of Nations has now been moved to some of the continent’s wettest months; or that FIFA agreed to host a World Cup in Qatar at a time of year that would have made the schedule at best unsustainable and at worst lethal.
In their desperation to grow the sport, to explore new markets, or whatever euphemism is currently in vogue to mask quite naked greed, organisers no longer consider the geographical or geopolitical challenges of their plans.
Several matches in the 2010 African Cup of Nations in Angola were taken to Cabinda, an oilrich but disputed territory, that had previously suffered terrorist attacks. The bus carrying the Togolese team came under fire and three died. It was avoidable.
As was this. There were three dead the last time a major typhoon hit mainland Japan, too. That was in September. Typhoon Faxai was the strongest to strike the country’s Kanto region since 2004 and, in addition to the deaths, 147 were injured. As a result of a power outage affecting 934,000 there were two further deaths from heatstroke.
World Rugby will say that the demands of the various domestic leagues make this period in the calendar the only one that is feasible. If so, it is their job to plot and deliver the alternative.
World Rugby should have taken their competition to Japan without the risk of a typhoon stealing the show.
It required preparation, negotiating skills and probably, yes, compensation, too. Yet at the end of those negotiations, there would have been a tournament worthy of its dutiful host nation.