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 Dissatisfied Promotions, refereeing, broadcasting below par
Posted: Tuesday November 09, 1999 12:42 PM
SYDNEY, Australia (AP) -- Australia can learn "a million lessons" from this year's Rugby World Cup on how not to run the 2003 tournament, newly retired Australian hooker Phil Kearns said Monday. Kearns was especially dissatisfied with the way the Welsh-hosted World Cup was promoted, the standard of refereeing and the service provided by the host television broadcaster. The former Wallaby captain also called for field goals to be devalued from three points to one or two points and the introduction of a sin bin to punish the professional fouls, which blighted the tournament that Australia won in Wales on Saturday. Australia will become the first nation to defend the Cup title at home when it hosts the tournament, along with New Zealand, in 2003, and Kearns believed it could produce a far superior event. Kearns watched the latter stages of the five-week tournament from home after injury ended his Cup campaign and his career following the Wallabies' first two pool matches. "There's a million lessons that we can learn from them on how not to do it," said Kearns. "The [ITV] coverage from my television was woeful and reasonably unprofessional. The scheduling of the games was poor, the fact that the home countries never had to travel from their own home base was pretty ordinary. "Scotland played every game at Murrayfield, Ireland at Lansdowne Road, they didn't move from there, whereas we had to travel around the place, not that we were concerned about that, we quite enjoyed doing that. "But it seemed that those countries made no effort to promote the game in their own country. Rugby in Ireland is a dying game and they're doing nothing to build it up, they could have done so much more there." Kearns also criticized the refereeing. "The laws that the International Rugby Board made the referees rule to, were ordinary, the change of the lineout law was silly," said Kearns. "It was done a couple days before the tournament. "Also the fact they changed the footballs to what we use in the Southern Hemisphere was pretty silly, so there's a lot of things like that and I think Australia will do a far better job than what happened up there." Match tickets were expensive, contributing to some disappointing crowds for pool matches, Kearns said, adding that he felt the British unions could learn from the Southern Hemisphere countries who promoted a full entertainment package instead of just the game. Kearns said the best thing about Australia's victory was that it prevailed despite not having much luck along the way. "If you look from day one, we lost Brett Robinson through injury before the plane even left, we lost Patricio Noriega and me through injury and had Toutai Kefu suspended for a couple of weeks and Daniel Herbert had to face a suspension on a ridiculous charge," said Kearns. "We had Timmy Horan sick in the semifinal and John Eales was carrying a groin injury in the tournament so there were a whole lot of things which didn't exactly go our way but we still came up trumps."
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