Yesteryear’s whipping boys – the likes of Scotland, Italy and Wales, have made huge strides in closing the gap between themselves and rugby superpowers – such as world champion All Blacks and the Springboks.
Recent years have suggested so: the end-of-year international fixtures are no more a mere holiday for the All Blacks and Boks.
The All Blacks’ loss to No 2 ranked Ireland, and the Boks’ loss in their last game of this year’s tour to the Welsh, pays testament to this.
However, to say that the status quo on rugby’s hierarchy has shifted to an extent that the upcoming World Cup in Japan is anyone’s to take is to exaggerate the point.
There’s this famous saying in sporting circles that numbers don’t lie; this is true…but partially.
The All Blacks are currently the best rugby nation in the globe, they are the world champions and rightfully ranked first on the World Rugby rankings.
The numbers could not have been a better witness in this case.
The Kiwis are followed by Ireland on the table, with Wales England and the Boks rounding-off the top five respectively.
Following Ireland’s win against the All Blacks, the sporting world, including the media, fell into that old trap: being prisoners of the moment.
Some labelled the Irish the new best team in the world, while some labelled them the new favourites to lift the World Cup and some called the encounter a clash between the world’s two best nations.
Pump the brakes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1-D4sGt1Zs
Beating a team in a once-off game does not suddenly make you better than them. The All Blacks, for example, have struggled towards the end of this year, a situation that can be pointed by just a ridiculous amount of minutes that’s gone into the players’ legs stemming from the almost year-long Super Rugby competition, the Rugby Championship, the Bledisloe Cup and of course, the end-of-year tour.
Perhaps the new ‘best team in the world’ must first at least earn the No1 ranking and win the World Cup, then, and only then, can we maybe talk about it being the best.
I wrote in a recent piece that the Springboks’ rise towards their former self under Rassie Erasmus is right on schedule as the tournament of the game’s biggest prize looms.
Erasmus has apparently done a lot of things right and shouldn’t have lost against England had it not been for some dubious officiating.
The only real Bok loss came in the hands of the Welsh, who simply outplayed the Boks – a sign that some work still needs to be done.
So in a perfect world – the Boks and their arch-rivals won three games apiece. Not mention that both have five World Cups between them.
Until their Northern Hemisphere rivals can even try to match that, talk about them not being the best remains redundant.
They remain my front-runners to again lift the coveted William Webb Ellis trophy, and should the status quo be upset in Japan, I will revisit the topic.
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