It will be played this coming Saturday in France between New Zealand and South Africa. The former beat Argentina quite easily in the first semi-final game but in the second England almost pulled off an upset over the highly favored South African team. In a forwards-dominated game played in rain with a slippery ball, there was a lot of kicking back and forth and England led throughout until almost the very end. With the score 15-6 in England’s favor, South Africa scored a goal ten minutes before the end to make it 15-13 and then made a difficult penalty conversion to edge England out 16-15.

You can see the highlights.

These two finalist have dominated the rugby World Cup, each of them winning three of the nine played to date, and winning all four of the most recent. I think it is good for the game when more teams win the big tournaments so while no one will think either of them unworthy of the title, it is kind of disappointing to me at least that other teams did not make the final.

One of the things that made me prefer rugby to American football is that there were so few stoppages of play. But I had not watched top-level rugby for decades before this tournament and noticed that stoppages had become much more frequent, slowing down the action. I can understand when players are injured and need tending but there seemed to be a large number of stoppages for drinks. There were also a large number of breaks for substitutions of players.

Another thing that I liked about rugby was that once the game started, it was the players who made all the tactical decisions on the field, not the coaches. But it appears that the ‘drinks breaks’ are used by coaches to send instructions to the players through the drinks carriers. In fact the referee at one point seemed to be admonishing the two teams to stop having so many drinks breaks, probably suspecting that they were being misused by the coaches.

Today (Sunday) saw two interesting quarter-final games. In the first England beat Fiji 30-24. It was a close game and Fiji had its chances but England were more disciplined while Fiji gave away away penalties at crucial moments and failed to convert two penalty goal attempts.

The other match between France and South Africa was a real thriller with South Africa edging out a 29-28 victory. France led 28-22 towards the end but South Africa took the lead with a goal and then their dogged defense held off a furious French attempt to get back the lead. This was another match that was worthy of a final.

One feels sorry for France. They have never won the World Cup since its inception, reaching the finals in 1987, 1999, and 2011 only to lose each time. This time they had a really good chance, especially since the tournament was being played in their home country.

The semi-final games will be Argentina v. New Zealand on Friday and South Africa v. England on Saturday. New Zealand and South Africa are favored to win. Each nation was won three times before, sharing equal honors in the last four World Cups.

The quarter-final game between top-ranked Ireland and #4 New Zealand was an excellent game, closely fought and displaying a high standard of play by both teams. New Zealand won 28-24, defending a ferocious Ireland attack in the last five minutes. It was a game worthy of a final but due to the unfortunate seeding, these two teams met far too early in the tournament.

In the other semi-final game, Argentina beat Wales 29-17. Argentina had a good second half. Argentina has benefited from this draw that placed them in the weakest pool D where England was the only top eight team in it. Wales (#7) also had an easy path to the quarter-finals, having just Fiji (#8) and Australia (#9) as their most serious contenders. Argentina now meet New Zealand in the semi-finals, which is going to be very tough for them, and one does not expect a close game.

The other two quarter-finals on Sunday involve France (#3) v. South Africa (#3) and England (#6) v. Fiji (#8). The first match is another pairing of teams that should not meet this early. The winners of these two games will play each other in the semi-finals and that too may not be a close game.

The 2023 World Cup rugby tournament has entered the quarter-final knock out stage and one thing that had puzzled me all along was the draw that placed the 20 teams that started out into four groups (called ‘pools’), in which the five teams in each pool that would play every other team, with the top two going to the quarter-final stage. You would expect that the teams would be seeded so that the top eight teams would be split equally among the four groups in such a way that, in the absence of upsets, the top four would meet in the semi-finals and the top two would meet in the finals.

But when you looked at the pools, you see that pool A had France (#2) and New Zealand (#4), while pool B had Ireland (#1), South Africa (#3), and Scotland (#5), pool C had Wales (#6) and Fiji (#8) along with Australia (#9), while pool D had just England (#6). (These rankings were those just before the current tournament started and may have changed as a result of the matches already played.) As a result, Scotland did not qualify for the last eight, even though they are ranked #5, because their pool B also had the two of the top three teams of Ireland and South Africa. Even though England is ranked lower than Scotland at #6, they easily made it to the quarter-finals. Their toughest opponent is when they meet Fiji in the quarter-finals and the first time they have to play any team that is higher ranked than them, assuming they get by Fiji, is in the semi-finals.
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The final pool game in the preliminary rounds of the 2023the World Cup was a thriller between the favorites Fiji and Portugal, the latter having never won a game at the World Cup. The lead kept switching constantly until during the very last moments, Portugal scored a try and converted from a difficult angle to give them a historic 24-23 victory.

You can see the highlights.

You would never guess from the scenes of wild jubilation among the Portuguese players and fans and the dejection of the Fijians that it was the latter team that advanced to the quarter finals while Portugal was eliminated. This was because as Fiji got a losing bonus point for the margin of defeat being seven points or less, their points score in their pool was tied for second with Australia but since Australia had lost to them in their earlier contest, the tie-breaker favored Fiji.

The four quarter-final games will be played next Saturday and Sunday with Fiji playing England on Sunday. England had the easiest pool opponents and has not really been tested so far, so this will be an interesting game. The other quarter-final games will be Wales v. Argentina and Ireland v. New Zealand on Saturday, and France v. South Africa on Sunday. Those last two matchups involve the four top teams in the tournament.

I am not a fan of American football but one nice tradition they have is that, at least at the college level, it is considered bad form to run up the score on your opponents once the game has been effectively decided. This is because there is no tangible benefit in college games to having a huge margin of victory. Rubbing the opponent’s noses in the dirt is frowned upon and even though it does happen, coaches who do that tend to be criticized. So once a win is assured, coaches tend to take out their top players and give the second and third string players some playing time and do not try as hard to score more.

However, in the World Rugby Cup being played in France, the rules do favor lopsided scores during the preliminary group stage. This is because when it comes to qualifying for the quarter-final knockout stage, only the top two teams from each of the four groups of five teams can make it, and hence you need some tie-breaker rules if two teams happen to have the same number of points based on wins and bonus points. And almost all those tie-breaker rules depend upon the number of points and tries scored by each side. So running up the score is a form of insurance in case you depend upon tie-breakers to see if you qualify for the second stage.

As a result, we have had some enormously lop-sided results, mostly at the expense of Namibia and Romania. Namibia lost 52-8 to Italy, 71-3 to New Zealand, and 96-0 to France. Romania lost 82-8 to Ireland and 76-0 to South Africa.

In general, I watch just the highlights after each game is over but I had no desire to see Namibia and Romania humiliated like this so I skipped those games. Close games are much more interesting.

In rugby, there is a style of game that is attractive to watch and that is where a team advances by passing the ball back and forth among teammates while running, and even when there is a breakdown due to a dropped pass or a tackle, quickly launch a second or even third phase by getting the ball out to its fast running backs. This attacking style is fun to watch.

Then there is the slower defensive game where the burly forwards dominate and ground is gained slowly with the ball frequently obscured by the masses of players converged on it and piled on top of one another, with the referee then blowing the whistle for a penalty or to start a set piece scrum. This game is definitely not as exciting to watch but is often the option chosen when playing in rain and the ground is muddy that makes the ball and ground slippery and the fast passing game difficult to pull off. Some teams choose the dour defensive game as a strategy even when the weather conditions do not require it

Robert Kitson clearly prefers the fast game and he chides England for playing ‘robotic’ rugby against Japan in the current World Cup, when they scored all of their 27 points by penalties and drop goals, all kicked by their incredibly accurate fly half George Ford. Kitson says that Portugal (who lost to Wales) and Uruguay (who lost to France) and Fiji (who also lost to Wales) are playing better rugby even as they lost to higher ranked teams.

While fans of rugby who have no strong partisan allegiances will clearly prefer the fast, open style because it is so entertaining, those who are ardent supporters of their team will undoubtedly prefer an ugly win to a pretty loss.

My high school team in Sri Lanka consistently had one of the best school rugby teams in the country. For a few years they had a coach who carried the desire for fast, attacking play to the extreme. The players were forbidden from doing the standard defensive move of kicks to touch to relieve pressure even when they were deep in their own territory or even behind their own goal line. They always had to run and pass the ball. This gave their opponents chances to win ugly because since they knew that our team would not kick the ball to touch, they could anticipate better what our team would do and move their own defensive players into attacking positions.

So while my school team was the most fun to watch, and they won a lot because the coach was very talented in teaching them how to play this type of game and motivating them to do so, they were vulnerable to opponents who executed a careful game plan that could exploit the lack of defensive plays.

Fiji caused a major upset at the World Cup being played in France when they defeated Australia 22-15 in their group match.

It was not just Fiji’s first win against Australia in the World Cup, but their first of any sort at all since they beat them by two points at the SCG way back in 1954. Given that, the surprising thing was Australia never looked close to winning this one.

You can see the highlights.

I will not try to explain the rules of rugby, except that scoring a touchdown (also known as a ‘try’) gets you five points. If it is followed by a conversion, you get a further two points. A penalty goal or a drop goal gets you three points.

But the tournament has an interesting scoring system. It gives four points for a win, two points for a tie, and zero points for a loss. But to encourage teams to try to get points by scoring tries (which are more exciting) instead of penalty goals, a team gets a bonus point if it scores four or more tries in a game. But even more interesting is that a losing team can get a bonus point if the margin of their defeat is seven points or less. So in the case of the Wales-Fiji game that Wales won 32-26, Fiji got two points even though they lost: one point for scoring four tries and another for losing by just six points.

There are three teams from the central Polynesian archipelago region among the twenty playing in the tournament and they represent by far the nations with the smallest populations. Fiji has about 900,000, Samoa has about 200,000, and Tonga has just 100,000. That they can manage to field teams that can compete at the top level with countries that have far greater populations says something about the quality of their rugby programs. I noticed that some of the other teams also had players with Polynesian names on their squads, that further shows the strength of the Polynesian rugby traditions.