Nick Cain: Football could yet kick RWC 2015 into touch

There were cautionary notes amid the fanfare for England’s 2015 World Cup when the schedule and venues were announced at Twickenham on Thursday. Foremost among them was the rebuff that the England Rugby 2015 organisers have received already from the two biggest and most iconic football stadiums in the country, Wembley and Old Trafford.
Just how fickle a beast the administration of the round ball game can be has been highlighted by Manchester United’s rejection of the oval ball World Cup, with Sir Alex Ferguson’s concerns over the damage that could be done to the pitch said to be the main stumbling block.
At Wembley the problem is that they are more concerned with staging a foreign sport, American Football, which has virtually no playing base in England, than they are with making a significant contribution to a global sporting event in Rugby Union, a code which is deeply woven into the sporting fabric of this country.
That is why NFL commitments will take precedence at the 90,000 seater stadium when the World Cup is in full swing in October, with Wembley staging only two matches, as opposed to the eight that were scheduled in initial plans.
What a stark contrast that is to the nitpicking in October over Saracens plans to hold their Heineken Cup pool match against Munster at the MetLife Stadium in New York.
The stadium, which is home to the Jets and the Giants, New York’s American Football franchises, eventually rejected the Saracens overture because they didn’t want to put rugby posts into the artificial turf.
However, where football administration can be fickle, their rugby counterpart, especially in their IRB guise, have been shown on numerous occasions to be bordering on the incompetent. That is not a good mix.
My understanding is that the IRB have not helped England 2015’s cause in securing football venues because of the way in which the initial World Cup schedule, with the tournament starting on September 4, was pushed two weeks later due to pressure from the Southern Hemisphere SANZAR block in the Council room in Dublin.
According to Martyn Thomas, the former RFU chairman who led the successful  England bid to win the hosting rights for 2015, this has had significant repercussions.
“The issue of NFL being played at Wembley was never raised in our initial negotiations with Wembley,” he said.
“One of the problems is that the RFU have been seen as weak in the way they allowed Southern Hemisphere Unions to dictate the World Cup window.
“The window we put forward was for a start date of September 4, and that is where it stood at my last IRB meeting. However, when I left, the Southern Hemisphere Unions got to work and it was moved back to September 18.
“That was a big mistake, because not only would you have had easier access to football grounds because of the Premiership football break for the domestic internationals, you would also probably have had better ground conditions.”
The upshot has been a bonanza for the Millennium Stadium, and therefore the Welsh Rugby Union, which have taken up the Wembley slack and have been awarded eight matches,  including two quarter-finals.
The only hitch is that the stadium is in Cardiff, which the last time anyone looked was not in England.
Crucially, England 2015 have negotiated staging rights at three Premier League grounds – Manchester City, Newcastle and Aston Villa – as well as four current Football League stadiums, Leicester City, Leeds, MK Dons and Brighton & Hove Albion.
This helps to give them the nationwide geographical spread that is essential if the RFU are to maximise on the potential of the tournament to inspire a new generation of rugby players and followers.
Heads of agreement have been signed with each of the football venues, however it emerged after the announcement that the full contract stage has not been completed yet, although an England 2015 spokesperson insisted that this would happen “over the next few weeks”.
England 2015 are also dismissing a scare story that the Premier League and the Football League, the governing bodies of the clubs whose stadia are being used, will not sign any binding guarantees until after their fixture schedules are signed in June 2015.
This is because their paymasters, the TV companies underpinning football’s massive financial float, will not complete their fixture choices until then.
For their part England 2015 reject any suggestion that any of their venue agreements could be jeopardised, after their exhaustive consultation with the football bodies and venues concerned.
For the credibility of the tournament, they had better be right, or the £80m financial guarantee the RFU have made to the IRB could start to assume millstone proportions.