Let’s indulge ourselves in a brief spot of number-crunching, given that the first week of the 2003 Rugby World Cup has thrown up little else to engage the casual observer.

Twelve of the first 13 games have been ludicrous turkey-shoots and a complete waste of everybody’s time. Each victorious side is racking up a mean figure (in every sense) of eight tries, while the showers of shite that they’re wiping the floor with are averaging a miserable 11 points each.
The average winning margin has been 41 points, a figure that would have been even higher but for Fiji’s extremely tight victory over the USA, the one fixture so far to resemble a competitive spectacle (I’m typing these words the day before England v South Africa).
This isn’t top-level sport, it’s gunnery practice involving copious numbers of fish and barrels.
Leaving aside the fact that the tournament stretches out to six full weeks (partly because greater time is required between games for recuperation purposes), there is no good reason why this competition needs twenty teams in it. It could be stripped down to nine sides — the home nations, the three big southern hemisphere outfits, France and Argentina — and the sport would be none the poorer. It would, in fact, be considerably richer, because then the slimmed-down tournament would have a far greater chance of catching the imagination of neutrals.
The reason the likes of Namibia, Romania etc are there, of course, is because they are being used in a transparent attempt to foster the illusion that rugby union is a global game. This wouldn’t matter so much if the small fry were showing a gradual improvement year on year, or at least pulling off the occasional giant-killing that you get in football World Cups. But they are totally incapable of doing either. I would not be surprised if the all-time record, New Zealand’s 145-17 annihilation of Japan at the 1995 tournament, bites the dust in the next week or two. In fact, it may have done so already.
To get a sense of the sheer futility of the exercise, it’s necessary to hark back to sixteen years ago, and the very first match in this tournament’s history, when New Zealand stuffed Italy 70-6. The match is remembered for little other than a blinding try by All Blacks winger John Kirwan. Last week — and remember, this is after a full four years of Italy carefully honing their chops with the big boys in the Six Nations — the two sides met again. The score was 70-7 (you don’t really need me to tell you who scored 70 and who scored 7).
The name of the current Italian coach is, wait for it, John Kirwan.

On a slightly more (but not much more) competitive note, wasn’t that a delightful spectacle in Basel the other week? And how much of an ominous portent for the Germany 2006 qualifiers is it that, when push came to shove and Ireland needed goals, fast, Brian Kerr threw on two midfielders and left Gary Doherty on the bench?
After the performances in the last two games it’s very hard to be anything other than extremely pessimistic about the next few years. Right now we just don’t have enough good players, simple as that. We are truly fucked in midfield — no creativity at all apart from Duff. Healy isn’t the answer and never will be. Kinsella (who has almost certainly played his last game for Ireland) and Holland haven’t been at the races at all in the last year or two.
Duff, Given and (to a lesser extent) Keane are international class. O’Shea isn’t there yet but hopefully will be, though the yawning gulf between his normal club form and his international performances is very worrying.
After those four, and maybe Kenny Cunningham if another campaign can be squeezed out of him, we have nobody, really. Stephen Carr has a great future behind him, Steven Reid doesn’t look any great shakes, and the rest never really looked the part to begin with.
When I look at the current Ireland side, I think back to a fantastically pithy one-liner uttered by Richard Moller-Nielsen in the wake of Denmark winning Euro 92. Responding to a question about how the Danes had managed to produce such a golden generation of footballers in the 1980s and early 1990s, Moller-Nielsen said: “We are a small country and our levels of talent will always vary. Sometimes the tide is in, and sometimes it is out.”
And right now, as regards the Republic of Ireland, it’s so far out that you could build an actual-size replica of the Great Pyramids of Giza on Dollymount Strand.