There is an old Samoan saying, “only the snake looks at its killer”. The snake, according to the proverb, is the only animal that does not fight back when attacked but endures the injustice with patience. Which fits.
Early Thursday morning, Samoa were training on the pitch around the back of the Lensbury Hotel in Teddington. It was a sunny morning and they were scrambling through their drills, fielding steepling kicks and hammering down tackle bags. Talking to the press afterwards, none of the players grumbled or carped about the team’s lack of money or how little they were paid. It was not that they had been forbidden from speaking out, just that they were too busy laughing and joking and playing, enjoying the day, the game and each other’s company.
“I suppose you don’t get the treatment like other professional sides,” says Kieron Fonotia, who will start at outside-centre against England on Saturday. “But it is awesome to see how the boys adapt to not getting treated like a tier-one team. Nothing is a big deal around here. You get dealt the bad hands but no one complains. Everyone just gets on with their job.”
Fonotia has been with Samoa for only five months. He has a Samoan grandfather but could never play for them while he was with the Crusaders, because it would have made him an overseas player, and there are tight regulations about how many of those each of New Zealand’s Super Rugby teams are allowed. Which is just another little example of how the game stacks the odds against the Pacific Islands teams.
Fonotia joined up with Samoa when he moved to Wales to join the Ospreys last year. “It is a breath of fresh air coming here,” he says, talking about the Samoa team camp. “When it is time to train everyone switches on and the same when it finishes, everyone switches off. Over in the UK, I find it is always rugby, rugby, rugby. It is refreshing that everyone has a laugh together.”
Samoa do not look like a team in the thick of a financial crisis and, according to Fonotia, they do not act like one either. “We don’t go to our rooms or our team meetings and talk about it. Everyone deals with what they have got. That’s how we go about it around here.”
The players are busy enough thinking about the next tackle without worrying about the wider state of the game. They are desperate to play well against England, out of pride, yes, but also, blunt truth this, because they need to attract sponsors and this is their best opportunity. At the beginning of the month the Samoan Rugby Union ran a charity telethon to raise funds for this tour. It says it is bankrupt. World Rugby disagrees. World Rugby has provided Samoa with £1.5m in direct and indirect funding in 2017 and has helped cover the costs of the team’s training camp, flights, hotel accommodation, insurance, medical screening and coaching support staff for this tour.
There are plenty of ways to give yourself a headache playing rugby. Trying to adjudicate the dispute between World Rugby and the SRU is one of them. The short version of the story is that a lot of problems are caused by the fact the head of the SRU is Samoa’s prime minister, Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi.
Samoa’s coach, Titimaea Tafua, was very keen to stress how much the Samoan government does to support the sport during his press conference on Thursday. But then it was the prime minister who made Tafua the coach, despite the fact a World Rugby panel set up to review the applications reportedly ranked him last of the seven candidates. If World Rugby is taking a firm line with the SRU, it is because it is trying to push back against what appears to be political interference in the administration of the sport.
At the same time, the structural inequalities in World Rugby leave Samoa and the other major Pacific Islands teams, Fiji and Tonga, at a perpetual disadvantage. And plenty of those same people who criticise the SRU also question whether World Rugby, and the tier-one nations in particular, really do want to see the Pacific Islands teams improve.
Like Dan Leo, the former Samoan lock who now runs the Pacific Rugby Players Welfare, a not-for-profit organisation which supports players with Pacific Island heritage working in Europe. “You know the old saying: ‘If you give a man a fish he’ll eat for a day but if you teach him to fish he’ll eat for a lifetime,” Leo says. “I’m not convinced World Rugby really want us to learn how to fish.
“It makes me laugh when I see World Rugby boast about how they’ve given Samoa £1.5m,” Leo says. The money, he points out, has to support both the XVs and sevens teams. “Do you think England could run two elite rugby teams on just £1.5m a year?” he asks. Leo has set up a JustGiving page for the Samoan team, who will earn just £650 each in match fees this weekend, as opposed to the £22,000 a man England are on. But in the long run, Leo knows, “charity isn’t sustainable”. He is convinced rugby needs to change the way it shares match revenues. At the moment the home team keeps everything made from the matches they host.
The RFU’s decision to donate £75,000 to Samoa seems less impressive when you realise it is, at a high estimate, about 1% of the money it is going to make from playing them at Twickenham. At the same time, England have not played a Test in any of the Pacific Islands since 1991. World Rugby’s new calendar does includes an agreement that England will tour there after 2020. But when New Zealand played a Test in Apia in 2015, the SRU lost around £500,000 on the match. The SRU says the loss was because it had to pay so many expenses to bring its players back from overseas. Regardless, Leo argues World Rugby needs to install a team of independent administrators to take over the running of the sport in Samoa.
There are other, cheaper, changes the top nations could make to help out the Pacific Islands. They could tinker with the qualification regulations to allow players whose international careers have stalled to return and play for the country of their birth. They could clamp down on the clubs opening academies in the islands to siphon talented players off to Europe. They could try to bring in tighter regulations to control some of the more unscrupulous agents working in the area, who are busy selling pipe-dreams of lucrative contracts overseas. And they could restructure World Rugby itself, so the island nations have more influence. World Rugby’s own figures show there are more than 250,000 players in Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. But between them, they have only two votes on the World Rugby council. England, Scotland, Wales and the other tier-one nations have three votes each.
Beyond all that, World Rugby could push for the development of elite rugby within the islands, a pathway to the top of the sport that does not involve moving overseas. It could be a Super Rugby franchise, or even a new Pacific league. Both plans have been mooted and both plans would stymie the flow of cheap labour from the islands to the European leagues and cut down the number of star island players who end up qualifying for the tier-one teams.
In the meantime, Samoa, Fiji and Tonga will remain underdogs, just as they always have been. And if the players are willing to get on with the job despite their lot, it feels like the bigger, richer unions are very happy to keep them that way.
