RWC Ten Questions: Brent Pope
Brent Pope was selected in the the 1987 New Zealand Rugby World Cup squad but had to withdraw from it before the tournament got underway due to injury.
1) Did the best team win? I'll put it this way: the most consistent team won, but whether the best team won, I don't know. I would possibly think that the best team of the tournament in terms of translating resources into effectiveness was Argentina. But to be fair, the most consistent - in terms of turning up for every game - over the course of the tournament was South Africa.
2) How many teams should play at the RWC in New Zealand in 2011? I think the minnows brought a lot more to this tournament than they were expected to. I would have been among the people who were a wee bit worried beforehand about what might have happened if teams were regularly going out and being beaten by 100 points - it could have been damaging psychologically to the development of the game in certain countries - but RWC 2007 proved that as long as you have two seasoned sides in each group in with two minnows, then you have a good balance, because the minnows have their own evenly matched Test game against each other.
For example, we saw Japan get beaten by a huge score by Australia in the first game but then they came back and played some terrific matches after that. Georgia also had an excellent tournament. To a team, the minnows performed well above what was expected from them, and that should be reflected in the structure of RWC 2011.
3) Who was the player of the tournament? Juan Martin Hernandez. Without a doubt. It was remarkable how he was able to come in from being a world class full back to a pivotal position like out-half. There are very few players in the world that can do that. Sometimes players are forced to switch into unfamiliar positions but he went in and was able to play equally well.
4) What changes should Ireland make? Ireland were the disappointment of the tournament given the resources that were available to them and the expectations that were there going into it. Any changes are going to be hard because the world cup threw up some funny trends. On the one hand, people are looking for Ireland to get rid of their older players, but England proved with a pack that had an average age of well over 30 what could be achieved with more experience.
What I would like to see before the next world cup is for a plan to be made that looks at what players they expect to be available and still playing well at the time of RWC 2011. They may then start letting go players not likely to be around over the Six Nations, because that gives three years to work with the next crop. It should also be taken into account that Ireland paid the price for not using a rotation system properly in the group stages, and also for not having any momentum going into the tournament, and they relied too much on their Six Nations form coming back in the games against Namibia and Georgia.
Should the first team have gone on the tour to Argentina? In retrospect, they probably should. At least a few more key members should have gone. They were still tampering with the side a few weeks before the tournament when other teams were in a situation of announcing their team months before. Ireland were in a situation where their players went out of the Heineken Cup a bit early, which gave Eddie O'Sullivan a lot more time to work with the first XV and do the camps to Poland and things like that.
In contrast, South Africa and Argentina had players involved in tough tournaments until the latter stages. I don't know if the team were over-trained, or whether they pumped up on too much weights or whatever. But it will be reviewed and hopefully they'll figure out what to do next time. Specifically, there certainly has to be new players looked at in key areas like prop and out-half.
5) What was the best match of the tournament? In my opinion, Fiji were involved in two of them: Wales v Fiji and South Africa v Fiji were both excellent matches. The other outstanding game was New Zealand v France. In fact, Fiji would be a team of the tournament contender if they had rolled South Africa in the quarter. New Zealand v France, while it wasn't a fantastic in the sense of having tries all over the place, had an unbelievable tension to it.
6) What, if any law changes, should be made? The disappointing aspect of this world cup was the ruck and maul situation, where teams found it too easy to slow down the ball, and also the dominance of the defences in some games. Effectively, we saw the game become more like rugby league then was ever envisaged, and the garryowen and the long kick used far more than at any previous tournament.
Argentina's gameplan in the first match was to kick the ball at 
every opportunity. France's gameplan a lot of the time hinged on the same thing, as did England and South Africa's. Basically, we saw a new kind of game based on kicking the ball up and hoping the other team would make a mistake. A lot of that is due to the backline defences. One solution would be for touch judges have to be more stringent when it comes to looking at where the back lines are in relation to the ruck.
At the moment, teams are winning matches on less possession and with less ambition then their opposition. They just give the other team the ball, then say 'let's defend' and that's it. The 'Stellenbosch Rules' are something they are looking at bringing in and they might have a good effect.
But the basic problem now is that the defensive line can effectively come up in straight line - very flat - and the team with the ball is usually at a bit of an angle. So the team that is defending can move up quickly and prevent the other team from even making the gainline, and the wider the ball goes, the more the attacking side is disadvantaged.
New Zealand tried to change that by playing with what is called a 'flat line' attacking philosophy when they had the ball. The backs stood very flat and tried to offload near the gainline. In the end, it didn't work, and it is a risky strategy. What happened in games was that the out-halves saw that the backlines were coming up fast, and that the up and under was the way to get their own backline moving forward. Aside from that, more has to be done to stop players from lying on the ball and slowing it down.
