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England icon Brian Moore has taken aim at World Rugby for their ‘blunder’ in the pooling format for this year’s World Cup and believes Steve Borthwick’s side reaching the semi-finals would highlight the mess of a tournament. The knockout stages of the 2023 World Cup are now set with England topping Pool D with four wins from four.<\/p>\n
On paper, it was the perfect group stage for England but they were fortunate to beat Samoa in their final match on Sunday. But Moore argues that England’s progression to the knockout phase was helped by the draw for the Rugby World Cup, which was held all the way back in November 2020.<\/p>\n
The landscape of world rugby has changed since then with the current top five teams in the world all ending up on the same side of the draw. Pool B saw Ireland, Scotland and South Africa all battle it out for the top two spots with the Scots falling short of making it through.<\/p>\n
France and New Zealand comfortably made it out of Pool A, but they now face South Africa and Ireland respectively in the quarter-finals. It means just two of the top five teams in the world will make it through to the semi-finals, with England likely to go up against France or South Africa.<\/p>\n
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Moore wants drastic changes to be made by World Rugby going forward to avoid a similar situation happening at the next World Cup. He wrote for the Telegraph: “History is littered with teams that appeared to be lucky when they were, in fact, just very good.<\/p>\n
“You cannot put England in that bracket at the moment and with each repeat of their failure to properly drive mauls, poor ball retention and sloppy distribution it gets harder to believe that they will master these basics. That said, they are the recipients of the most favourable of draws and should be confident they will beat Fiji in the quarter finals. Some will say that a semi-final appearance would be a sufficient achievement, but that should be qualified with this caveat \u2013 if England limp through the Fiji game, with another average performance, and then get pumped in that semi-final, this should not automatically be accepted as acceptable improvement under the current management.<\/p>\n
Don’t miss… <\/strong> We use your sign-up to provide content in ways you’ve consented to and to improve our understanding of you. This may include adverts from us and 3rd parties based on our understanding. You can unsubscribe at any time. More info<\/p>\n “This should be so because it has become even more obvious that the draw for this tournament is the most one-sided seen in any World Cup. Of the seeded teams in the bottom half of the draw, only Wales can legitimately claim they have got near to performing somewhere near their best, and even then, only sporadically. The remaining seeds have badly underperformed, which has magnified the injustice of seeding the teams three years before the tournament started.<\/p>\n “To their credit no country from the top half of the draw has whinged inordinately about this, but with each unfolding week their lot can be clearly seen as unfair. I do not care what practical considerations were said to have been behind this draw, it can now be seen as a blunder and World Rugby should find a way to ensure it does not happen again.<\/p>\n “Although the top qualifying teams effectively swap sides of the draw with the semi-final pairings, that does not alter the fact that is being seen as ludicrously lop-sided. Other major team sports manage to avoid this sort of error, so it cannot be beyond the competent organisers. World Rugby should simply put up their hand and admit that they made a mistake and that it will not happen again.”<\/p>\n
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