When, as they surely now must, Scotland secure their place in the World Cup quarter-finals there will be a curious side issue because it will confirm that no Pacific island team will have automatically qualified for the next World Cup.
The victory registered by Mamuka Gordoze’s wonderful, all-homegrown Georgian team over a Namibian side whose frantic defending held them out for long period but also saw three of the Africans sent to the sin bin.
As uplifting as it has been to see the hard work of former Scotland and Glasgow Warriors head coach Richie Dixon pay off as it has with the performances of the east European sides it would, however be unthinkable to have a World Cup without the men from the South Seas given what they have brought to this tournament down the years.
In particular it has been desperately unfair on the Fijians who would have been serious contenders for the quarter-finals in any other pool yet had to beat Uruguay in their final match to avoid going home without a win.
Nothing has done more to expose the imbalanced nature of this draw and John McKee, their head coach, was entitled to feel hard done by.
“For Fiji it's been a very good tournament, frustrating in a way that we weren’t more successful in terms of results but we knew we had some massive challenges coming here and being in Pool A,” he said.
“We played well against the Tier 1 nations and we had high hopes and perhaps if we caused an upset or got a result against England, Wales or Australia we could have got through. Sadly it wasn’t to be.
“For Fijian rugby it's been a very positive tournament, we have shown we can compete. There was a lot of talk before the tournament on our set plays and our fitness and whether we would cope, but we have proved that we are a competitive nation.
“We played well but we let ourselves down every now and then against the big teams.”
“When you look at the scheduling you do wonder if this benefits one team more than another, certainly it looked like the bigger teams were playing smaller countries in their short turnaround times.”
“We had a massive task to play the opening game and then play Australia five days later. I give massive credit to our players and my backroom team who helped recover the players. They did a really good job to make sure they were fit and played well over the 13-day period. That would be a massive challenge for anyone.”
The consequence of the scheduling is stark as he noted when asked what he had learned in terms of preparing for the 2019 tournament.
“We have to qualify first and that is a challenge in itself,” said McKee.
“With Samoa and Tonga needing to qualify as well it will be tough in the Pacific and Oceanic region looking forward to 2019.”
“We have got about 27, maybe 28, tests between now and Japan 2019 so we really need to be smart in our cycle and seeing it as a four-year cycle rather than on a yearly basis.”
The culpability of administrators goes far beyond this particular tournament, however, because in many ways the teams from the South Seas are rugby’s equivalent of Africa’s soccer players.
Loved for bringing something different to these festivals, a touch of the exotic, they have not been given the support necessary to develop the collective technical structures to allow them to capitalise fully on their natural attributes and that is a failure of the entire sport.
The likelihood is that all three will be in Japan, but rugby would be much better served, but as the Japanese and Argentinians get ready to have teams to support in Super Rugby next season the authorities need to look again at how best to develop Pacific Island rugby.
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