Rugby Issues

The difference in levels of success between southern and northern hemispheres.

Over the last 50 years, the southern hemisphere sides – New Zealand and South Africa- have been dominant on the world rugby stage. It is in fact; only since the 1980’s and 1990’s that Australia has started to become a feared team. Before this time, Australia was not taken seriously in any sport across the world. Since Australia had a poor Olympics in the early 1970’s, the Australian Government decided to build the Australian Institute of Sport, which has all the top coaches teaching and coaching all the top athlete’s from the age of 14 onwards. Australia are now World Champions in almost every sport and are Olympic champions.

However, the northern hemisphere sides still struggle on the world stage. In the last week, England have defeated the All Blacks second team 31-28. New Zealand decided to leave basically their whole pack at home and strung many changes in the back line, despite this England still struggled to defeat them. This is worrying because England are meant to be the Northern Hemispheres strongest team. So why does the northern hemisphere sides still struggle when they have such good players? Many experts have suggested that

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The French are the best, if world cup results are true, because they have never been knocked out of the competition before the semi-final stages. Another factor is that the players only play 18 games per season and that is if the team progress to the final of the Super 12. 5 out of the 7 players apologised to Steve the next week and Colin Charvis (Wales Captain) still admits he wasn’t playing cards when everyone knew he was playing cards. The overall style of play in the English club game is also impressive, it is probably the closest league to the Super 12. It would also give the player’s who are not good enough to play for district etc. There was a staggering 25 thousand pound in a pot and who ever won the game won the money.

The top nations in the northern hemisphere are England, France then Ireland. We now have in place and operating a national tournament for the winners of our provincial 7s' tournament. It is also believed that teams like Wales and Scotland are only ‘up’ for games against England and France so this leads to poor performances against the other teams and could jeopardise their chances of winning the competition. Below is a quote by Bryce Rope a New Zealand 7 a side coach.

“What has helped them is that their season is structured much better than ours so their players get the fairest chance of performing well at the highest level”

Taken from:

When the Australians played the British Lions in 2001, the Australian captain George Greegan had played 18 games before he played the Lions. For example Auckland Blues trained at 6 am and then in the late afternoon and evening. Sevens also gives a chance for the players who play 15 a side game and aren’t recognised a chance to shine.

It has also been suggested that the southern hemisphere teams have more big games then their northern counterparts. The interest in the sport in New Zealand is also very high with an average attendance of 20,000.

Approximate Word count = 4403
Approximate Pages = 18 (250 words per page double spaced)

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