As many as 13 sides will have ambitions of making it past the pool stage in France.
The hosts have meticulously plotted their way towards a tournament in which all of their prospective knockout games would take place at Stade de France, where Les Bleus were last beaten — in front of spectators, at least — in February 2019.
Galthié’s side can absorb those losses for the moment but they’ll require as much experience and power as possible if they are to steer their way through what will be a dangerous quarter-final, whichever way it shapes up. That has been evidenced in the universality of Andy Farrell and Mike Catt’s attack, with which Ireland can typically solve puzzles on the fly, but equally in Simon Easterby’s defence which ships fewer points per game on average than any of their fellow contenders.
This time around, Rassie Erasmus and Jacques Nienaber’s side will need to frontload some of their most intense work in the knowledge that a defeat to Scotland this Sunday would leave them on the brink of embarrassment, with Ireland to come. The consensus both among All Black fans and outside of their country is that the Kiwis’ pack is fractionally lightweight in comparison to the other three leading contenders and that a number of their key forwards are in athletic decline.
All logic would suggest that the Scots don’t quite have the cattle to earn the right to stretch South Africa at the edges this Sunday and that their World Cup fate will be decided in a meeting with Ireland in their final pool game. 6. Argentina SteveHaagSports / Steve Haag/INPHO SteveHaagSports / Steve Haag/INPHO / Steve Haag/INPHOMichael Cheika’s Pumas have achieved some landmark results during his short tenure, including the aforementioned first ever win on New Zealand soil.
Provided they make it that far, there are few better coaches than Cheika to steer them through what will be a soft knockout bracket. The only man ever to taste success as a head coach in both the European Cup and Super Rugby, Cheika followed his latter title with the Waratahs in 2014 by dragging an average Australian side to the World Cup final in England a year later.
Ultimately, Jones’ young Wallabies have virtually none of the required materials to win a World Cup; but do they have the raw ingredients to beat Wales and/or Fiji in their pool? England or Argentina in the last eight?8. Fiji It’s an unbelievably cruel twist — for the player, for his country, and even for the tournament — that Fiji will have to do without their game-changing out-half Caleb Muntz for the next couple of months.
9. Wales The Welsh take ninth over England on account of the fact that, if you squint your eyes and really concentrate, you might be able to make out the faint outline of hope for Warren Gatland’s men. The true nadir for England that day was that Fiji themselves played well below capacity; it was, after all, just a warm-up game for the visitors as well — and a performance strewn with errors, at that.
It’s cruel on Kieran Crowley’s men that they were landed in alongside the hosts and the All Blacks, because they would have a serious chance of reaching a quarter-final — and, at a stretch, even going beyond that — had they wound up on the weaker side of the draw.
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