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Give the tougher courses to the tougher horses

When he was asked about his team being given only a short, four-day gap between their momentous win over South Africa and their second match, against Scotland, Japan coach Eddie Jones resignedly said: “When you’re at the bottom of the food chain, you take what you get. The little fish at the bottom don’t worry about what they eat, they just eat it.”

Could Japan (in red and white) have beaten Scotland if they had been better rested? Photo: Getty Images

Could Japan (in red and white) have beaten Scotland if they had been better rested? Photo: Getty Images

When he was asked about his team being given only a short, four-day gap between their momentous win over South Africa and their second match, against Scotland, Japan coach Eddie Jones resignedly said: “When you’re at the bottom of the food chain, you take what you get. The little fish at the bottom don’t worry about what they eat, they just eat it.”

So now, after Japan impressively beat Samoa 26-5 on the weekend, after a 10-day rest, we will always wonder: Had Japan been given a fair period of recovery after that first match, would they have beaten Scotland also?

My gut feeling is they would have. Japan were on top for about 45 minutes, but faded away significantly after to lose 45-20. Even Scotland captain Greig Laidlaw noticed the Brave Blossoms wilting.

Like a broken record, the organisers have been slammed for short-changing the minnows, saddling them with the short turnarounds. The reality, though, is that the fault really lies with the fact that four groups of five teams just does not work if each team is to get the decent six to seven days of rest between matches — unless everyone is prepared for an even longer tournament.

At the moment, with four groups of five teams, the organisers are trying to fit 10 group matches into three weeks (four weekends) when it really needs to be a period of four weeks (five weekends) — check the permutations yourself — if every team is to get a rest time.

As it is, the world’s third-largest sporting event takes six weeks to complete, against the four-and-a-half weeks of the FIFA World Cup and the two weeks of the Olympics.

So, if we wanted the playing format to be truly fair, with no team having to play two matches in seven to eight days, the tournament would need to be seven weeks long — eight weekends, in effect — instead of the current six weeks (seven weekends).

Also, there would be no mid-week games and some teams would have 14 days in between games!

A simple solution would be to adjust the number of teams to a multiple of eight — so that we get quarter-finalists easily — which means either reducing the tournament to 16 teams (a retrograde step), or increasing it to 32 (a premature step).

Or, the organisers could also keep it to 20 teams but with five groups of four, instead of four groups of five.

But it then gets messy coming up with the eight quarter-finalists, as we would need to calculate the best three runners-up to go with the five group winners.

Best of all would be to keep the current format of four groups of five playing over three weeks, but give all the short turnarounds only to the strongest teams. That is, only the All Blacks, Springboks, Wallabies and Les Bleus should have to play two games in eight days, and not the likes of Japan, Uruguay and Romania.

After all, the big teams often pride themselves on having strength in depth, so this should not be an issue.

In fact, somehow unnoticed by most, Australia also had a short turnaround in the first week of this World Cup. They played Fiji on Thursday and then Uruguay on Sunday.

What did they do? They prepared two separate teams, and won both matches, without skipping a beat.

So let the minnows have the proper rest periods, and let the big guns have the tough schedules — they can all well handle it.

And besides, they get more TV time to themselves in the middle of the week. New Zealand versus Anyone would probably get more viewers than Tonga versus Namibia did last week, or Canada versus Romania did last night.

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