Rugby must learn from football to help Pacific Islands rise again

I WAS lucky enough to spend time with Dan Leo at Twickenham last week discussing the Samoa situation and the problems facing the Pacific Islands generally. It was quite an education.

Dan is a former Samoa lock and current chairman of Pacific Rugby Players Welfare and what impressed me most was his insistence that we move away from the ‘sticking plaster’ approach — a handout from the RFU here, some crowdfunding there, the occasional donation.

Such generosity is much appreciated but just masks the problem. A proper solution is needed. And for that to happen World Rugby must decide how badly they want Samoa, Fiji and Tonga to remain part of the Test scene as meaningful competitors. If they do, they must urgently put together a high level group to see what can be done.

Any solution will probably cost tens of millions of pounds, not the £1.5million annual grant World Rugby give Samoa, for example.

A radical approach is needed as international rugby in the Pacific Islands is going backwards. In 1991 and 1995 Samoa reached the World Cup quarterfinals but now it is becoming an annual mismatch when they play the wealthy tierone nations.

For anything to happen, though, rugby must accept that a fully professional selfsustaining set-up is not viable in the islands.

There is not the population, the wealth, the commercial market. These are rugby-mad, but very poor countries. Yet at the same time the island teams need more Tests at home against the bigger teams, where they are potentially much more competitive. So the big tier-one nations must take the generous loss-leader approach.

It’s certainly high time England, for one, went down there — they have yet to play a Test in the Pacific Islands in the professional era, which is embarrassing and wrong.

Then I would do two things. I would consider setting up a professional Island team in Europe with a view to competing in the Top 14. I read that there are already 300 professional Fijian players in France through their divisions. Gather some of that talent together under one umbrella and they could be pretty special.

Or perhaps the concept of the Pacific Island team — which took off for a couple of years in the noughties — could be revisited.

A huge part of the Pumas’ rise between the 2011 and 2015 World Cup was the creation of an Argentina franchise to play in the Vodacom Cup in South Africa every season.

Second, there needs to be a more even distribution of the gate receipts when they play away to the big tier-one nations.

In the FA Cup the minnows are acknowledged as an essential part of that tournament. Everybody accepts that the pay day they receive when they play away to a big club helps sustain them — and the enduring value of the competition.

Rugby should take a lead from our friends in football.