One of the major players in the Wallabies revival at Rugby Australia Peter Horne had a major hand in the emergence of Georgia on the world stage
When the Georgian Black Lion take on the Czech Republic’s Bohemian Rugby Warriors, or the Brussels Devils mix it with the Romanian Wolves, not many of us take much notice in this part of the world.
Read the Official Wallabies-Georgia Test Program here!
It’s a long way away, and we’ve got our own problems anyway. But such contests are at the centre of an international drive that has made a team like Georgia a rising competitor in the international game.
The Black Lion of Georgia are the trendsetters in the Rugby Europe Super Cup, a competition of only four years standing in which professional franchises from Spain, Portugal, Israel and The Netherlands also compete.
It’s all part of a grand plan to broaden Rugby’s competitive base.
One character who does have an intimate knowledge of the Black Lion and the rest is Peter Horne, these days Director of High Performance for Australian Rugby.
For the last decade or so he worked as a World Rugby operative charged with making Georgia and similar fringe-dwellers of the international Rugby landscape capable of mixing it with the high-flyers of the game.
As Head of Competitions and High Performance at World Rugby, Horne had 28 countries on his radar as he travelled the world working on structures, competitions and player pathways.
They had to be professional, and geared to developing the sort of players who could compete on a high-level international stage. For emphasis, World Rugby decreed that no international team could compete at the Rugby World Cup unless they had a domestic professional base.
“Countries like Georgia and Fiji had supplied plenty of players to professional teams in Europe, but relying on those players getting professional experience and returning when needed for a Test match just doesn’t work,” Horne explained.
“We knew that if we wanted to make these teams strong we had to have a domestic professional base. World Rugby put a lot of money and time into it and it has made a difference.”
For countries like Georgia and Fiji, rapid strides have been made, but there are many others too who have shown enormous progress. The World Cup made that clear, when a team like Portugal did well, and Chile and Uruguay showed promise as well.
Fiji effectively knocked Australia out of the World Cup after all, and when Fiji and Georgia clashed in Batumi in Georgia a few weeks back, the contest was tight before Fiji skipped away 21-12.
For Horne, the Rugby World Cup in France last year was a good barometer of how the drive to lift Tier 2 nations is working, but it has been a long process. Systems are in place now to ensure that the fringe nations of the past have more exposure to the more established nations, which can only help them grow.
They don’t want any more World Cup blowouts like the 2003 match between Australia and Namibia, won 142-0 by the Wallabies.
“We had been at this a long while,” Horne observed. “Argentina put a team in the Currie Cup in South Africa, which grew into the Jaguares in Super Rugby, and the Sunwolves of Japan also exposed 128 players to Super Rugby. In both cases it made an enormous difference to their international competitiveness.’
Horne played a pivotal role in establishing the Fijian Drua in Super Rugby Pacific, and marvels at the professional levels they have so quickly found.
They had 18 Drua players in the Fiji team at the World Cup, and the grounding that is now available to domestic players in Fiji is having a marked effect on the Fiji national team.
To say nothing of what it has done for the popularity of Rugby in Fiji, where an audience of 500,000, out of a population of 900,000, tunes into their TV games.
The Black Lion of Georgia fits into a similar pattern in terms of player development. For Horne, it has not only been about making the better players more competitive, although that clearly is the major motivation.
In each of the professional entities he has had a hand in creating, there has been a concentration on pathways . . . on making sure players from a very young age are schooled in the ways of the elite game.
Apart from anything else, there is an element of protection involved, since proper training and injury prevention are part of the program.
When Georgia and the Wallabies lock horns in Sydney, Horne of course will be firmly in the Wallabies camp, where his job now as Director of High Performance is to help restore the sort of standard available to the Wallabies a few decades back, when they won two World Cups, and held the Bledisloe Cup for half a dozen years.
But he will probably allow himself a little satisfaction too, in seeing a team like Georgia rise in stature as it has.
The aim was to produce a Rugby world where the playing field is sufficiently level to allow one-time minnow their time in the sun. The game can only be better for it.
