Ocean's apart - A very thought provoking documentary on Pacific Islands Rugby

Has anyone else watched this?

It’s quite a journey that Dan Leo (former Samoan internationalist) goes on. It takes him from shouting at the PI unions for being corrupt to coming round and aiming his sights squarely at World Rugby (who do not come out of this looking at all well)

Many say the PI unions need to get their own house in order before they come round cap in hand but when you see a Samoan player getting £40 for an international match where an England player is getting 10's of thousands, it really opens your eyes. It also shows why the young lads in the PIs leave home for the pay cheque overseas and why these players are then "lost" to the PI nations.

Because of the infrastructure it actually costs the PI nations to host a touring team so maybe it's not a case of the big bad tier 1 nations not going there to play but rather they are not being invited as the PI nations just can’t afford to host. We really do need to look at some form of gate receipts split. Even a 90/10 to start with would help out surely - but then you penalise the bigger nations!

Total nightmare to sort out and no wonder no one can come up with a solution that gets consensus. The world rugby plan for the world league that was shot down and many "blamed" the 6Ns sides for shooting it down, now looks like the biggest bullet dodge of them all. The plans to roll out this league to further exclude the PI nations was nothing short of criminal.

Aside for the gate receipt split, we also need to look at allowing players to choose to return to a "tier 2/3" side if they are no longer needed but the Tier 1 side that capped them. You could look at a system close to the rugby league model.

World Rugby need to address this pronto as it's simply a shambolic set up right now!

Where did you see it Tigertattie?

Maine man wrote:Where did you see it Tigertattie?

Amazon Prime.

It certainly has provoked a bit of discussion on Twitter. That’s how I became aware of it. I was aware of the corruption beforehand, but things like the fees was an eye opener. The trouble with this pandemic now, is teams will be trying to play tier one teams now, as a lot of them are obviously in debt now.

Daniel Leo is a far better spokesperson for them than Fuimaono-Sapolu anyway.

RiscaGame wrote:

Maine man wrote:Where did you see it Tigertattie?

Amazon Prime.

It certainly has provoked a bit of discussion on Twitter. That’s how I became aware of it. I was aware of the corruption beforehand, but things like the fees was an eye opener. The trouble with this pandemic now, is teams will be trying to play tier one teams now, as a lot of them are obviously in debt now.

Daniel Leo is a far better spokesperson for them than Fuimaono-Sapolu anyway.

Leo is fantastic. He gives you the story into the people affected by everything but he keeps his own emotions out of it and tries to give an argument based on reason and thought. He’s exactly the kind of person you want on the board of world rugby and not like the dude convicted of manslaughter than Bernard Laporte nominated.

Hopefully the film gets airtime on a free to air platform so more watch it. And even more so, hopefully world rugby take things on board to make a change to the set up