World Rugby boss Bill Beaumont must tackle the north-south divide

Having won another term of office as World Rugby chairman, Bill Beaumont will be presiding over a game that is divided roughly along the line of the equator. Picture: AP

Hopefully the victory celebrations that followed Bill Beaumont’s election win in the World Rugby chairman’s ballot lasted barely the time to knock back a champagne flute. As the vote clearly indicated, he has been re-elected to head a deeply divided game.

The final margin, 28-23, shows how desperately hard fought the race was with his Argentine opponent, Gus Pichot. Had just one Six Nations country broken ranks and switched sides to Pichot, the former deputy chairman of World Rugby would have been elected World Rugby boss 26-25. In the final analysis, the margin was less than the difference in voting strengths of the collective Six Nations (18 votes) compared to the unified SANZAAR vote (12).

The rugby world could have, at a single stroke, recast itself under Pichot as an enterprising spirit on the global sporting stage. Instead, it has lapsed back into the well-leathered comforts of its old boys’ den, yet again having missed its date with destiny, just as it did a year ago when the Six Nations rejected the Nations Championship.

What now for Australia? When you plot the overthrow of kings, don’t miss! And that’s what Australia did — it missed. At least we are in good company, along with New Zealand, South Africa and Argentina.

Beaumont, like Pichot, is a tremendously personable man. But what he seems not to recognise is that he takes a very northern-hemisphere view, indeed a very English view, of things. There is nothing inherently insidious in that but, for a man based in Dublin and having his northern-hemisphere worldview reinforced in virtually every conversation he has, he cannot help accepting that the way they see the rugby world is the only way to see it.

It is, by the by, identical to the argument I often make in relation to Sydney and Rugby Australia. The power elite, based in Sydney, only hear views that make perfect sense within the NSW capital. But that is not how the rest of the country necessarily sees the rugby landscape. While there were conspicuous exceptions on both sides, observe how the Wallabies captains from NSW and Queensland lined up on opposite sides over that protest letter to RA. Not all of Australian rugby sees the world through the prism of what makes sense in the 2088 postcode.

That is Beaumont’s problem, writ large.

The vote clearly shows that the rugby world has cleaved along the fault line of the equator. The majority of the money is north of that line and generally speaking it is simply a case of following the money to determine which side will come out on top. There is, however, one small problem with that scenario. The north has won the World Cup only once in nine tournaments — and that final, in 2003, was about 30 seconds short of heading to an extra-extra-time kickoff before Jonny Wilkinson landed “that” field goal.

So while the general view up north is that “we’re OK, Jack”, the south is doing it much tougher and, by voting as a bloc against him, SANZAAR wasn’t at all hesitant about expressing its displeasure to Beaumont.

The World Rugby chairman has spent the past four years overseeing a system that has seen French billionaires sweetening the pensions of southern-hemisphere stars — way before they should seriously be thinking about retirement. (And yes, players are always conscious that they are just one serious injury away from being forced out of the game.)

It’s not just France, of course, and Beaumont was hardly solely responsible but, almost imperceptibly, the game is being divided into haves and have-nots. And when World Rugby had the opportunity to restore some balance to the mix by forcing through the Nations Championship — which could have eased the south’s financial pain immeasurably — it dropped the ball badly.

Instead of locking all Tier One chief executives in a room and not releasing them until they had reached an agreement, they acted merely as a passive facilitator. And with a senior World Rugby executive actually white-anting the Nations Championship he was supposed to be selling, the Six Nations hived off and went their own lucrative way with private equity. Meanwhile, the rest of the world missed out badly, none more so than that so-called Tier Two nations, which were left with no avenue of advancement once the north had vetoed the idea of promotion-relegation.

(It certainly raises the issue of why Fiji and Samoa would have voted for Beaumont, not Pichot. Talk about turkeys voting for Christmas, although with new deputy chairman Bernard Laporte acting as Beaumont’s numbers man, be on the lookout for some France-Fiji, France-Samoa Tests in the near future.)

Beaumont has the more immediate problem of the COVID-19 pandemic to address — and this, ironically, could in fact prove to be the crisis that finally opens the door on a global season. But one senses that it will be how he handles the north-south divide that will determine whether Beaumont emerges as the Lincoln-like figure who saved the (rugby) union or the man who squandered a golden opportunity.

Allied to this is the issue Australia largely is fighting on its own, law changes. Australia’s lament is that the game is killing itself with laws that make possible not only less attractive play but actually less play.

It was always former Australian Rugby Union CEO Gary Flowers’ argument that Australia is the canary down the rugby mine. If it is being overwhelmed by the poisonous “gasses” being omitted, it is only a matter of time before everyone is overcome.

Beaumont could point out that, on his watch, World Rugby has approved six post-2019 World Cup law amendments for trialling — although three of them were to have been tested during the NRC in Australia and the chances of that competition going ahead would seem to be slim to none. Yet still there is no sign of World Rugby moving on the most vexing but seemingly easily fixed banes of the modern game:, time-wasting.