Rollo Manning has been a rugby tragic all his life since being named after a Wallaby winger and educated at a private boarding school in Sydney, Australia. Manning has been working in publicity and public relations for 40 years, and during that time has commented on the "game they play in heaven" through radio, magazines and newspaper coverage.
As a correspondent for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, he has broadcast in magazine style programs and live coverage of games. He is currently a regular contributor to www.scrum.com and radio shows in his hometown of Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia.
Manning has been contributing to eSports for six years and relishes the opportunity to express his views on the first of the two rugbies. He is currently completing work on a study of the inter play between rugby league and rugby union over the past 100 years, when league was formed as the professional arm of an otherwise purely amateur game.
Since 1995, both have become professional and the drift of players is going back from league to union. Where will it end? That is the question Manning is now asking himself.
The Rugby World Cup being played out in France, Scotland and Wales is heading to the quarterfinals next weekend and already it is obvious that the standard of play from the middle level Nations has improved markedly over the last four years since the last RWC.
Argentina is assured a place, and against Scotland has a good chance to reach the semifinals, while Wales is out at the expense of Fiji, which now has an almost impossible task against the South African Springboks.
The Wallabies play England in the remaining match and are favored to win, thus pitting them against the winner of France and the New Zealand All Blacks. This is where the intrigue lies.
All the aficionados are saying the All Blacks will win the William Webb Ellis Cup in three weeks time, but this scribe still sticks to the theory that in a weak pool with next to no competition, the All Blacks have failed to peak against weak opposition.
In the match against Romania, they were tested by the vigorous Romanian defence, and although the team raced away to win 85-8, they could look back on the opportunities missed.
In total, the All Blacks have scored 309 points to the opposition’s 35, but this will be nothing to crow about when they meet the French team at Cardiff next Saturday evening. The French, while being tournament hosts, will hate to bow out so early and will give it everything they have got to book a semifinal game the following weekend back on home soil at Stade de France in front of 80,000 people, the majority of whom will be countrymen.
The best test the All Blacks could have had was against Scotland and they squandered opportunities a plenty to run out 40-0 winners in unconvincing fashion.
The Wallabies, with hard matches in their pool against Japan, Wales, Fiji and Canada are peaking as predicted at just the right time. Like 2003 the Wallabies are written off by fans at home in Australia who forget that the pool matches can be used to build form and not break it as has happened to the New Zealanders.
The Wallabies should beat England although the World Cup holders put up a much improved showing against Tonga. The islanders had their best ever chance to gain a quarterfinal placing but the England team clearly raised their standard in a second half that saw them move well ahead after a close first half.
The amazing game between Wales and Fiji sees the islanders in the quarterfinals of the Rugby World Cup against the formidable South African Springboks.
While the brand of rugby played by the Fijian side was their usual open expansive game, it is the disciplined approach to scrumaging they will have to tighten up against the best pack in the world next weekend in France. The tries were electric and if it had not been for a lapse in defence in the first part of the second half that saw the men from Wales clock up three quick tries, the Flamboyant Fijians would have won by a lot more that the 38-34 score line and a final 10 minutes that had all the tension of a final encounter.
The sad part of the win came in the final minutes when star Fijian fly half and undoubtedly man of the match Nicky Little was taken off on a stretcher with a serious knee injury.
Given the above, the semifinals in this scribe’s view will be Australia versus France and South Africa versus Argentina, with the final then seeing the Wallabies against the Springboks.