A World Cup draw should not be conducted three years before the tournament, writes SimonBorchardt.
A World Cup draw should not be conducted three years before the tournament, writesThe draw for the 2023 Rugby World Cup was made on 14 December 2020 in Paris, exactly 1,000 days before the opening match of the tournament between hosts France and the All Blacks on 8 September 2023.
The folly of having the draw almost three years before the tournament – based on rankings from 11 months earlier – was glaringly exposed after the draw and the 2022 Six Nations. By 21 March 2022, the top-four ranked teams were the Springboks, newly crowned Six Nations champions France, the All Blacks and Ireland. All four of those teams will be in the same half of the draw at the 2023 World Cup, which means two of them will not progress past the quarter-finals, while lower-ranked teams in the other half of the draw, like ninth-placed Wales, could.
The whole point of using a seeding system for a tournament is to provide a pathway for the top-four ranked teams to get to the semi-finals and for the top two to contest the final. Obviously, results often don’t go according to seedings, but at least you avoid a situation where the best two teams meet in the quarter-finals, while a clearly inferior team in the other half of the draw gets an easy ride to the final.
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