Last week, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced that the 80,000 seat stadium being built to host the opening and final match of the 2019 Rugby World Cup wouldn’t be finished in time for the tournament.
The original one billion dollar budget had blown out to over two billion, and all building work had been stopped and the design plans scrapped in favour of a cheaper stadium that will host the athletics programme at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
The National Stadium was central to Japan’s winning Rugby World Cup bid, and now an existing venue will need to host the final, likely to be the 72,000 seat International Stadium in Yokohama.
That venue will be one of twelve used to host Rugby World Cup matches in Japan with an average capacity of over 40 thousand seats, but like the monolithic Yokohama venue, half of them are stadiums designed to host athletics events and will therefore have a running track separating rugby fans from the action on the field.
Any football fan who has witnessed a game at an athletics venue will tell you much of the atmosphere is lost, as the front row of spectators is approximately 15 to 20 metres away from the touch line, while the distance to the goal line is even further, sometimes up to 35 metres.
While New Zealand’s ‘big two’ stadiums of Eden Park and Westpac Stadium are often much maligned for being multi-purpose venues with seating not ‘tight to the touch line’, they do generate a decent atmosphere when full, which is sadly not likely to be the case in Japan come 2019.
Tokyo hosted a round of the IRB World Sevens Series between 2012 and 2015, but the event failed to capture the public’s attention with pitiful crowds turning up, and now the stop-over has been pulled from the circuit.
And while there are 125,000 active rugby players in Japan, few matches are well attended by the paying public with many games in Japan’s top flight rugby competition played out in front of near empty stands.
So how can we assume that the Japanese will turn up in droves to watch the likes of Uruguay versus Namibia in their soulless athletic stadiums?
I have no doubt that most knockout matches in 2019 will be well attended, helped out by the legions of visiting fans, but it’s the pool games that I fear that will struggle to draw the crowds, something that wasn’t the case when the tournament was held here in 2011.
And when you factor in Japan’s huge stadiums into the mix, most of the 2019 Rugby World Cup could yet be played out in near empty, colossal vacuums, hardly a great advertisement for the pinnacle event of the sport.
3 News