You too can play on the national team...

...of Finland.

I was just thumbing through the IRB World Rankings, as I'm sure you all do from time to time, and bemoaning England's slide from their perch atop the World this time last year. I don't know about you, but I was shocked to see just how many countries even get a world ranking. Andorra, Niue Island, Vanuatu, Kazakhstan...they're all on there. Who lives in these places?

So then I started going to the individual pages for each nation to find out more. Andorra, as it turns out, only has 105 senior male players registered, so unless it happens to be a tax haven for former international rugby stars, I rekon any of us could move there, and stand a pretty good chance of playing rugby at an international level. Not only that, but you could be playing for a team that has a higher World Ranking than a bunch of other much larger, "developed" nations such as Austria, Norway, Isreal or Finland. If that doesn't work out, you can move to another European principality, Monaco, and run for captain.

Well, that got me thinking about the supposed rugby "powers", to see who's really punching their weight, based on their number of registered senior male players. At the top of the list is New Zealand, who show some 38,660 senior players. Not bad. Compare this to Australia's 58,081 players, and you start to get a sense of the level of rugby played by the Kiwi's as a nation. England, by comparison registers a collosal 167,000 senior male players, but only manages 3rd on the World Rankings.

The USA lists 22,490 players, but if the CIPP registration of our club is anything to go by, the number of actual players is probably double that. It might seem like a respectable number of players, for a team ranked 16th in the world, but compare that to the team ranked 15th, Uraguay, who show only 980 senior male players. The team directly below, at 17th, Portugal, list 942 players. Well, we've always known what scrappy little buggers the Portugese are!

So, what does all this prove? I dunno. Each nation probably has different registration policies, and classifies senior players differently. Perhaps more telling might be the length of time the game has been played in each nation. Portugal's rugby federation was established in 1926, and Uruguay's in 1951. The USA? 1975.

So, perhaps the moral of this rather dull story is this: while numbers may be nice, experience counts for a lot. So all you rookies give me an extra lap.