WHAT A DIFFERENCE 80 minutes make. Or 77, to be more precise.
Something approaching a consensus had formed within rugby prior to Argentina’s Rugby World Cup Pool D opener with England that Los Pumas would have enough to see off opponents who found themselves at a historically low ebb.
After three minutes, England, playing absolutely stinking ball for months on end and ranked eighth in the world following their warm-up defeat to Fiji, were reduced to 14 men. That remained the case for the rest of the game when red smoke emerged from the bunker, Tom Curry’s head-on collision with Juan Cruz Mallia an uncomfortably perfect encapsulation of England’s penchant for kamikaze tactics.
If, at that point, somebody told you that England weren’t even the most committed self-saboteurs on the field in Marseille that day, and that Argentina would go on to lose 27-10 despite boasting a numerical advantage for the bones of the game, you would have assumed that you were about to watch one of the most unbelievable balls-ups in World Cup history.
And you would have assumed correctly, while still probably failing to grasp the sheer force of the boot that George Ford was about to deliver to the Pumas’ arse.
Rugby is only sport and sport should never be taken so seriously as to describe Argentina’s performance 13 days ago as disgraceful: they didn’t actively try to lose the game.
But Michael Cheika’s side will have felt ashamed at the extent to which they not only failed to win, but failed even to ever look like they might.
Certainly, the nature of the defeat will have bled a lot of belief from a squad whose tank is leaky in any case.
For every milestone victory of Cheika’s 18-month tenure — last summer’s first ever Pumas win on New Zealand soil the standout — there have been several backward steps: Argentina have won seven and lost 11 of their 18 games since March 2022 and only once have they won back-to-back games in that sequence.
The pre-tournament sense that they ‘might a semi-final in them’ hinged on England, Wales and Australia remaining a rabble on an already favourable side of the draw. Even allowing for those qualifications, and for Cheika’s flair for navigating knockout rugby, such a projection feels naive in retrospect.
It’s now more likely that Argentina will suffer their own personal ‘Ireland 2007′ than it is that they’ll reach the last four.
The blanks will be filled in this evening against Seilala Mapusua’s Samoa (4:45pm), a talented and well-drilled side looking to pull off their own ‘Argentina 1999′.
That year’s World Cup made for a sliding-doors moment between these two countries in a rugby context: Argentina had lost nine of their previous 10 World Cup fixtures, including their pool opener against Wales. A transformative 32-16 victory over Samoa at Llanelli’s Stradley Park (their first win in three meetings with the Pacific Islanders) and a subsequent shock win over Ireland in a play-off saw the Pumas reach their first ever quarter-final.
The more established Samoa fell to Scotland a stage earlier.
The legacy of that tournament is that Argentina have since been invited to pull up a seat at rugby’s big-boy table, earning third- and fourth-placed finishes at subsequent World Cups and infiltrating the Tri Nations in 2012.
The Pumas now play 11 or 12 tests per year, most of them against fellow Tier 1 sides.
By contrast, Samoa played only 12 matches between the 2019 World Cup and this one, half of them against their fellow Pacific Islanders Fiji and Tonga. Their World Cup warm-up against Ireland in Bayonne was their first encounter with a Tier 1 country since their defeat to the same opposition in the pool stage in Japan four years ago.
The infrastructural gap between the countries has widened by World Rugby’s design but, on the field and against the odds, Mapusua and his Samoa coaching staff have begun to close it by cultivating strong set-piece, discipline and defence — three of the areas of the game in which Argentina went off the rails against England.
Cheika’s Pumas remain strong favourites to overcome today’s opponents and to eventually progress from Pool D.
On paper, Samoa probably don’t yet boast sufficient game-breaking talent to complement their sound fundamentals — but neither do England and they beat Argentina by 17 points.
It’s a sickening reality that, even if Samoa manage to achieve their own ‘Argentina 1999′, they’ll find that all of the seats at the top table of the international game are already taken.
But there would be a great satisfaction in watching them take a bolt-cutter to World Rugby’s ring fence and upsetting the arbitrary order.
Argentina: Juan Cruz Mallia; Emiliano Boffelli, Matías Moroni, Santiago Chocobares, Mateo Carreras; Santiago Carreras, Gonzalo Bertranou; Thomas Gallo, Julian Montoya (captain), Eduardo Bello; Guido Petti Pagadizabal, Matias Alemanno; Pablo Matera, Marcos Kremer, Juan Martin Gonzalez
Replacements: Agustín Creevy, Mayco Vivas, Francisco Gómez Kodela, Pedro Rubiolo, Rodrigo Bruni, Tomas Cubelli, Nicolas Sanchez, Lucio Cinti
Samoa: Duncan Paia’aua; Nigel Ah-Wong, Ulupano Junior Seuteni, Tumua Manu, Ben Lam; Christian Leali’ifano, Jonathan Taumateine; James Lay, Seilala Lam, Paul Alo-Emile; Brian Alainu’u’ese, Chris Vui (captain); Theo McFarland, Fritz Lee, Steven Luatua
Replacements: Sama Malolo, Charlie Faumuina, Michael Alaalatoa, Taleni Junior Agaese Seu, Sa Jordan Taufua, Melani Matavao, Alai D’Angelo Leuila, Danny Toala
