South Africa win it easilly
South Africa progressed slowly through the knock-out stages to beat the 12th ranked team in the world, Fiji, the 6th ranked team in the world, Argentina and the 7th ranked team in the world, England.
It is a real pity that New Zealand (1st), Australia (2nd) and France (3rd) were all too weak to make the final.
The rankings I am using are the IRB pre tournament rankings.
In the third/fourth place play-off Argentina repeated the victory they had over the French in their pool to show the world it wasn’t a fluke. The Argentinians have surprised a lot of people this tournament and are one of a few teams that have shown real courage and determination. The only other teams I would single out for praise would be England and Tonga who both did much better than expected.
Other teams like Australia, Ireland, Wales and New Zealand go home with nothing but difficult questions.
The joke of the tournament has to be:
Q. What do you call the 7th and 8th place play off at the Rugby World Cup
A. The Bledisloe Cup
After a hugely successful run where he only nearly missed one flight for going to the wrong airport Phil finally missed one of the weekends because he thought “we were leaving on Friday night.”
We did manage to get this photo that was a dead ringer at Disneyland in Paris.
