I have an unloved opinion about rugby: I don’t enjoy individual awards. After all, it’s meant to be a team game, isn’t it? ‘We are family’; ‘We belong together’; ‘I felt so at home as soon as I joined the club’; ’We hope we’ve made the country proud’.
Then we have the problem in choosing whom to reward from a team of 15/23. Emily Scarratt gave a Player of the Match award to Marlie Packer, not Jess Breach who had scored six tries on debut. Scaz was joshed for that decision, but seasoned pundits nodded at her discernment.
Things grew infinitely trickier last weekend in Monaco when world awards had to be made. Should be be surprised when Black Ferns ruled the roost on the women’s side?
No, they won the World Cup.
Ah! So the final result is the deciding factor, is it? A win by three points against a team of 14.
As you looked through the nominations for the first time, did your eye alight on the eventual winners?
If so, well done.
Ruahei Demant was awarded the top pot. I suspect most fans would have placed Sophie de Goede there for her all-round excellence.
Stacey Fluhler (Photo: Hagen Hopkins – World Rugby/World Rugby via Getty Images)
The ‘Breakthrough’ award I found quite bizarre. The word is carefully chosen: not the ‘Young’ Player or the ‘Unheard-of’ Player (careful!). So it can be presented to a 30-year-old mega star from a different sport (Sevens), Ruby Tui. Even a Kiwi fan offered an astonished reply: ‘What about Stacey Fluhler?’
Well, there you have precisely the problem I pose. On what grounds do you decide the issue?
Even one of the easier decisions made, for ‘Try of the Tournament’, could go to only one player, the deserving Abby Dow. As a modest and intelligent performer she will know that it is rarely the try-scorer who deserves 100% credit. Where would she have been without Claudia Macdonald’s remarkable prelude? Or even earler, Abbie Ward’s turnover?
Is Rugby a team game or not?
If the award is a bottle of champers, the answer is easy: splash it over everyone or, better still, share it among your team-mates. But a pot can only finish up on one mantelpiece.
Still, Monaco enjoys the chance to stage a second world event after the magical Formula One weekend.
