The top priority for World Rugby is to protect Australia

Italy are the perennial strugglers in the Six Nations tournament. Picture: Getty Images

It didn’t take long for the sound bites to flow. Bill Beaumont, the 68-year-old chairman of World Rugby was re-elected to the world governing body’s top post last Saturday and straight away he was telling the rugby public: “We must make this great sport even better, simpler, safer and more accessible.”

This translates broadly as “we will improve the sport by making it easier to understand and play and, in doing so, spread the great game around the world”. Ever since the International Rugby Board rebranded itself as World Rugby in 2014 it has adopted the role of latter-day sporting missionary.

Agustin Pichot, Beaumont’s deputy and rival for the post, was selling the same product — The Global Game was his version of Get Brexit Done. The big difference was he had an understandable outsider’s aversion to the Six Nations’ refusal to open its borders to promotion and relegation. As Irish poet Derek Mahon wrote, “ours is a culture dazed with money/a flighty future that would ditch its granny”. Hence the continuing obsession with the American and Asian markets.

The American rugby market is in trouble. So too the more established Australian one. I know which one should be the focus of World Rugby’s attention. Beaumont spoke at length about the challenge of COVID-19. And he is right too. Rugby union is not the global game of which his Argentine rival dreamt of. Great countries like Australia need aid.

Union is too complex to be football, or basketball for that matter. And right now the old foundations of powerhouses such as Australia require propping up more than the developing countries need assistance.

To bastardise Marie Antoinette, “let them play football” for a while. World Rugby would take the game global and leave derelict pitches and rusting posts instead of ruined churches.

Beaumont, with his simpler comment, is opening the game to newcomers by making it more accessible. Few people ask why. Not having an international rugby team is not a betrayal of human rights. If there is any betrayal it would be the dumbing down of a game that is a brute mixture of the physical and the cerebral.

It takes time to work out this game. Hence the US are as much a threat in sevens as they are walkovers in 15-a-side rugby. One game is easy to understand, the other a monster to master. Just ask Italy, who are making little progress.

Sevens, relative to the full-blown equivalent, is simple and that’s what makes it so accessible, another significant word in the World Rugby construct. Players from Kenya to Spain have got the hang of the game in no time.

A tournament can unfold within a weekend. Fourteen minutes of action before the fans can concentrate on the next round of drinks as Lego Man heads off to the bar. Fun for everyone, profit for World Rugby and a foothold in the Olympics.

The Olympics is another priority. The greatest Games in the world are a shortcut to sending rugby to all corners. In the end, a thinned-out version of the game becomes the advertisement for the whole sport.

The leap from seven to 15 for any nation is of quantum proportions. World Rugby plans to assist. By simplifying the game. The breakdown? It is so difficult for referees, let alone players and fans, to understand. I am delighted the jackal (where a player contests for the ball on their feet but using their hands) is being squeezed out but if players get the hang of rucking what comes next will look cosmetically terrible with shirts ripped everywhere.

We’ll have to simplify the tackle area for reasons of safety and ease of understanding. How can we replace that? I know. We can cut the complexities of the breakdown by stopping the game at the tackle and rolling the ball through the legs and starting again. Simpler, safer.

And those scrums. Why not prevent pushing and have them as a restart after a certain number of tackles? It could be a speedier game but it will be a simpler one and a less strategic one. This is no judgment on the one we know as union and the accessible one (let’s call it league) but it is where this simple accessible route could drive the game.

Make it a global game so a vast potential audience might show more interest. As for the fans who like it, warts and all, as it is, tough luck. The game has to “grow”. Well, it doesn’t and at this delicate juncture in time it should not.

The Six Nations should have an open door via a playoff, and international leagues are welcome. What is not is a prioritisation that deprives those who love rugby of their messy, complex, muddled game and gives it to an audience that might just say, “you know what, I’ll stick with football”.

THE SUNDAY TIMES