Mark Reason: No one likes England at this Rugby World Cup and that should make them care

Mark Reason is a sports columnist for Stuff

OPINION: “No one likes us and we don’t care.”

The infamous chant of the Millwall football fans could appropriately be taken up by the followers of England at this World Cup. They are privileged by money and they have used that advantage to crush the life out of the opposition with a style of rugby that is stultifying.

England’s captain Sarah Hunter said after her team’s 13-7 victory over France: “Hopefully it was a great showcase for women’s rugby.”

At that point the yoghurt pot splattered the TV screen. It may not be fair to shove a microphone at a sportsperson after a high intensity game, but those words were utterly self-delusional. As a showcase for women’s rugby, it was as bad as it gets. As a showcase for women’s rugby, the match put on display the potential horrors of professionalism.

England had 68% of possession, they had 70% of territory and they managed one try. Yes, the defence of Les Bleues was magnifique, but England’s attack was dreadful. It had had all the life coached out of it. The England women have spent so long on the training field that they have forgotten to think for themselves.

France made 214 tackles in the match but they rarely looked stretched. England’s one try came after another session of bashing. The centre Emily Scarratt took an inside ball after 26 minutes and cut past the defence to go over the line from five metres. And that was it. With all that ball England could not manage another score in the game.

Well, if that is the future of the women’s professional game, then I can tell you that only a few peculiar souls will turn up to watch. Rugby has always had room for all shapes and sizes and all styles of play, that is its unique glory as a sport – but when it becomes stifled by modular coaching, then it becomes a borefest.

Already the men’s game is struggling. Wasps and Worcester are heading down the gurgler and there are more English clubs to follow. Until World Rugby wakes up and has the courage to make real changes, then rugby will continue to slide down the league table of sports.

Many of the changes are simple. Stop awarding penalties at scrums. Free kicks without the option of a scrum reset are the only appropriate sanction. That would have two clear benefits. As most top props will tell you, the refs don’t have a clue what they are looking at anyway. And secondly, and most significantly, it would reduce the amount of ball pinged into the corner in supplication to the dubious splendour of the lineout maul.

Secondly reduce the amount of players on the pitch to 13. The fitness and speed of the modern player has outgrown the size of the rugby pitch, just as technology has usurped the relevance of many great golf courses. But make those two simple, fundamental changes, and rugby would start to become attractive again.

Mercifully Wayne Smith and his Black Ferns have given us a glimpse of what the game could look like. No 10 Ruahei Demant was a pleasure to watch at the weekend. Everything she did was about liberating space for others.

The Black Ferns have problems. Their tight five is going to have to improve in a hurry and nearly all the forwards are going to have to work on their body heights. Apparently they have been working on defending lineout mauls against men, but after Sunday’s shambles there is clearly more work to be done.

Smith said: “Really disappointing. A lot of them [penalties] are avoidable. It really annoys me when I see it. You do so much work during the week from staying up, hitting low, and we go out and do that…“It’s disappointing because a lot of them are just stupid, avoidable penalties.”

Wow, it’s a long time since I have heard Smith talk like that. But you can understand the frustration. The Black Ferns were poor in those areas.

Yet in their search for space, they were again a joy. Demant said after the game: “I’m happy with the way we had the courage to play to the spaces that we saw regardless of where we were on the field and we didn’t take the easy road of taking contact all the time. We tried to shift the ball. I’m proud of the way we did that.”

So she should be. Demant and the Black Ferns are showing the way forward for the women’s game if they want to make professionalism work. A sort of pale imitation of the men’s game – which is what the England women are offering – won’t grow a fan base. Nobody wants to watch that apart from a few English people who are only interested in winning.

No, women’s rugby will have to entertain if it wants professionalism to work. But will it have time to get there. Because the danger of hothousing professionalism is that it creates a great schism in the game. It creates sporting capitalism. It creates a gulf between the haves and have nots.

It is ridiculous to suggest that England and the rest are on an equal footing at the moment. I have seen comparisons between the Black Ferns’ salaries and the salaries of the England players. But that is window dressing.

The gulf is where the RFU can afford to pour millions of pounds into development of the women’s game and the UK government are able to bung in a couple of million dollars during the pandemic. The RFU have already developed a strategic plan for the women’s game, ‘Every Rose’, that takes them through until 2027.

The RFU plan to grow the club game in order to “Improve the overall quality of play and produce sufficient world class talent for the Red Roses by investing in high quality training environments”. That is projected to cost “£222m (NZ$446m) over a 10 year period, with projected revenues expected to be £174m. From 2023/24 the RFU and clubs will invest the remaining £48m.”

What chance have Canada or Fiji or New Zealand or Australia or even Wales and Scotland of competing with that vision? We are staring down the barrel of a huge schism in the women’s game, where money will buy success and England will dominate for years to come.

We already see it in football despite Liverpool beating Manchester City at the weekend. Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp said of City: “You have the best team in the world and you put in the best striker on the market. No matter what it costs, you just do it.”

It was literally a bit rich coming from Klopp, because most clubs can only dream of having access to Liverpool’s wealth. Professionalism has made it impossible for them to close the gap. Money is at the root of the evil of the haves and have nots.

But football is big enough and tribal enough to manage the grotesqueries of professionalism. I very much doubt whether women’s rugby is. Perhaps the only solution is for World Rugby to impose some sort of global salary cap, but I suspect that would probably not be legal. Workable in America’s sporting markets, but not on a universal scale.

So be careful what you wish for. By hothousing professionalism there is a real risk of crushing the market. If the England Red Roses fulfil the RFU strategic plan of multiple successive World Cup wins, then the global game will wither and perish.

That’s why most neutrals will be getting behind the Black Ferns at this tournament. They play the beautiful game. The future is Black.