World Cup plans

If Muhammed won't go to the mountain and all that, so the International Rugby Board came to Melbourne this week and held what was assuredly their biggest ever press conference in the Grand Hotel.

Some of the plans were outlined for the 2003 World Cup to be co-hosted by Australia and New Zealand, and the full cost of Ireland's failure to reach the 1999 World Cup quarter-finals came more into focus. As expected, it was confirmed that the eight quarter-finalists from the last World Cup will qualify automatically for the 2003 event, giving Ireland and Italy the additional burden of four qualifying matches between July and December 2002.

Ireland and Italy will be seeded apart in two pools of three, the remaining two places to be filled by the four countries who emerge from pre-qualifying stages in Europe. The front-runners here are likely to be Georgia.

With the top two from each three-team pool to qualify and the third to go into a repechage round Ireland (and Italy for that matter) should have little difficulty qualifying for the finals, but it's then that the real cost of losing to Argentina in Lens will be felt.

This time around the organisers are inclined more toward four pools of five, and so Ireland would most likely be a third seed in a group behind say, one of the four semi-finals in '99 (Australia, France, New Zealand and South Africa) and one of the beaten quarter-finalists (England, Scotland, Wales and Argentina).