Brendan Gallagher tells how the World Cup began 30 years ago
BRENDAN GALLAGHER looks back 30 years at how the inaugural Rugby World Cup came to pass
It’s 30 years ago tomorrow that the first Rugby World Cup kicked off in front of a sparse 20,000 crowd at Eden Park in Auckland, an occasion adorned with John Kirwan’s wonder try when he beat eight, or was it nine?, Italian defenders in his 90 yard dash for glory. The tournament was up and running but only just.
A TV deal had been signed only an hour earlier under the main stand at Eden Park and a tournament sponsor – KDD – had been found only a couple of weeks before kick-off. It was belt and braces stuff and teams’ approaches to the tournament differed. Some of the sides were taking it seriously notably New Zealand, Australia and France, who had pushed hard for the tournament – while others thought the World Cup would be more like a fifteens version of the Hong Kong Sevens, a riotous end off season jolly. The Irish and Scottish Unions disapproved of the whole concept and were only there under suffrance.
As RWC1987 kicked off on May 22 1987 there was no real expectation of there being another World Cup in four year’s time yet the more astute rugby administrators could see the genie was finally out of the bottle. Rugby would never be the same again. A Rugby World Cup made the move to professionalism inevitable. You couldn’t have sponsors and TV deals and a salaried World Cup secretariat running a World Cup and expect the players to perform for nothing.
Which is of course why the old guard had resisted the sumptuous idea of a World Cup for decades. After all, as well as the Empire nations it was also played to a decent level in Argentina, France, Germany, Italy and Romania. Surely the authorities would like to consolidate the game and see it develop in those countries and others?
Wrong! Absolutely no way old boy. By way of illustration here is an extract from an article written by Wavell Wakefield for the publication
Touchdown in 1971 which celebrated the centenary of the RFU. As a former captain of England, president of the RFU and an IRB board member, Wakefield was a fully paid up member of the inner circle and here he comments about a World Congress the RFU had organised to celebrate their centenary.
“There could even be a World Cup for rugby, though I for one hope it does not happen. The Rugby Union made it clear that the main object of its World Congress was to show how the game is played, and conducted, in England. That means an amateur game, played for recreation and enjoyment by people who spend the rest of the week at work.
“A World Cup is quite enough of an ordeal for our soccer players whose living it is. For amateur rugby players it would introduce a much too demanding complication into their daily lives. If every country approached the game as we do it might be a different matter. But these are days when sport is so often used as a vehicle for political propaganda. There is the problem of countries withdrawing from this or that world sporting event for political reasons. Rather than become involved in that kind of thing I would prefer to see our own rugby revert to its time honoured domestic format with as few commitments outside of the British Isles as possible.”
Such entrenched views held Rugby Union back for too long and the tide began to slowly turn only when the success of the early Cricket World Cups – hosted by England in 1975 and 1979 – excited the sporting public who
started asking, reasonably enough, where was Rugby Union’s equivalent?
In 1982 the PR man Neil Durden Smith, whose son Mark has hosted both Sky and ITV’s rugby coverage, presented a detailed proposal to the IRB as to how a Rugby World Cup might work. The fact that he did it on behalf of International Sports Marketing (ISM) didn’t go down well with the amateur died-hards but it did find favour with Bill Mclaughlin, a former president of the Australian Rugby Union. McLaughlin pressed hard for the idea of a one-off World Cup to be adopted by the Australian Board as a way of celebrating Australia’s bi-centenary in 1988.
His proposal was quashed but the idea of a World Cup was beginning to catch on. New Zealand wanted a bigger stage for their All Blacks to strut their stuff while a maverick Australian entrepreneur David Lord – taking a leaf out of Kerry Packer’s book – planned to sign up the top 200 players in the world and launch an eight national World Rugby Circuit (WRC). The idea was pretty much still born – Lord simply didn’t have the financial backing – but the concept of an international tournament received a thorough airing.
Next to up the ante were France, where a quasi-professional scene had existed at club level for many years which had attracted a Nelsonian eye from a toothless IRB. The French tabled a formal proposal to the IRB in 1984 that a World Cup be held at some future date and the IRB finally buckled to the extent of asking Australia and New Zealand to undertake a feasibility study. Those two Unions looked at a crowded sporting itinerary and concluded that the last week of May 1987 and the first three weeks of June was the only practical window. NZ manager Dick Littlejohn and former Australian captain Sir Nicholas Shehadie were tasked with undertaking the feasibility study and then presenting the idea to all eight of the IRB founder members.
And so the IRB politics began. England, Ireland, Wales, France, Scotland, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa all had two votes on the board while the rest of the world had no say whatsoever. Ironically of those 16 votes two belonged to South Africa – a very pro World Cup Union – which at that time was banned from playing all international rugby and therefore had no voting rights. They remained however a loud voice in smoke filled committee rooms.
The horse trading continued. South Africa, with Dannie Craven always their leading voice, would happily lobby for a joint New Zealand and Australia bid but on the understanding that as soon as South Africa were readmitted to the international fold the IRB would look kindly in their direction when it came to the staging of future World Cups.
France meanwhile had decided to come down in favour of a World Cup after their wily President Albert Ferrasse secured an understanding that teams from the FIRA organisation which he chaired – the likes of Romania, Russia, Italy – would not be excluded from any World Cup.
So New Zealand, Australia and France were firmly in favour and South Africa would have contributed another two votes had they not been temporarily disenfranchised. Meanwhile, firmly aligned against that pro World Cup block were the Home Unions. Wales, Ireland, Scotland and England. Between them they accounted for eight votes. The No’s still had it.
It was close enough for the lobbying to continue however at the annual meeting of the IRB in 1985 in Paris, and Shehadie was convinced that his old rugby playing mate from England, John Kendall Carpenter, was ready to break ranks along with Keith Rowlands from Wales. There was, apparently, nothing in the IRB Constitution which said that the two delegates from one nation had to vote the same way. Within the constitution they weren’t obliged to take instruction from their Unions.
That was the situation when the IRB, meeting in Paris on March 21 1985, decided to take a break from negotiations and went for a cruise on the River Seine to clear their heads or, more likely, to take wine and continue chewing the cud.
The convivial party reconvened in their hotel that night to take the final ‘secret’ vote. When the ballot papers were collated it was found to be 8-6 in favour of a World Cup, the assumption being that Kendall Carpenter and Rowlands had switched at the last moment as Shehadie had always thought possible. The 1987 World Cup, rather against the odds, was going to happen and an Englishman John Kendall Carpenter, was appointed chairman of the organising committee. The talking, for a while at least, had stopped. It was time for action.