Contingency plans in place should Rugby World Cup in Japan be hit by extreme weather

World Rugby has made contingency planning for disruption to the fixture schedule at next year’s World Cup with a possible extension of the pool stages if the tournament were to be hit by the sort of extreme weather that has afflicted the area in recent weeks.

Tournament Director, Alan Gilpin, believes that planning for typhoon-vulnerable Japan makes next year’s tournament ‘the most challenging,’ it has staged with volatile weather conditions  ‘a real hot topic.’ The typhoons and earthquakes that have hit the region in recent weeks would almost certainly lead to re-location for teams.

Contingencies have already been drawn-up for the postponement of any matches that might be affected. The silver lining in the gloomy prognosis is that Japan is well-versed in coping with such situations with organisers pointing out that the country experiences 480 earthquakes a year. Nonetheless, World Rugby is taking the matter very seriously and has already devoted a lot of time to finding a solution.

“It is a complex piece (logistics) and this one has a heightened sense of realism to it,” said Gilpin. “With the weather events that have just taken place in Osaka, during the equivalent time next year Italy and the USA would just be arriving in team camps that would no longer be available in those conditions. There has also been an earthquake in Sapporo where matches are being played on the first weekend where teams like Australia and England would have been arriving there in that timeframe.

"So we are planning right through from what happens if a team hotel is lost, what happens if a training venue is lost, through to what happens if one or more match venues are lost. And where do you relocate matches to, how does that affect transport, planning, moving teams around? We are working through all those scenarios.

"Japan, though, does cope very well with adverse weather and other environmental issues that they have. Their venues and hotels are built to withstand incredibly adverse conditions, so in some respects they are less affected.”

The schedule for the 2011 Rugby World Cup in New Zealand had to be revised after one of its prime venues in Christchurch, where England were due to be based, was devastated by an earthquake seven months before the start of the tournament. Japan appears even more susceptible.

World Rugby is anticipating worse-case scenarios where there is disruption during the tournament itself. Whatever happens, there are no plans to look outside Japan itself to help stage matches given that there is considerable geographic distance between matches in the north and the south of the country.

There is also plenty of slack in the time-frame of the schedule, too, with a week-long gap between the pool stages and each subsequent knockout round of matches. World Rugby dismissed the notion that the final of the 2019 World Cup may have to be extended were there to be any congestion in fixtures.

“We don’t specifically look into that in our contingency planning,” said Gilpin. “If you look at types of events that have affected Japan and you think about the geographic scale - Sapporo in the north to Kumamoto in the south - it would be unprecedented for something to effect that nationwide spread. Kumamoto, Fukuoka and Oita are three relatively proximate venues that could be affected by one set of typhoons coming through the south, for example.

"But even then you’ve got nine other venues that would probably be unaffected by that. Re-location of matches really is the key. You’ve got a lot of non-match days that you can use. The more likely scenario is needing to compress that period that’s actually quite sparsely populated with games after the pool phase.

"There’s a week to the quarters then a week to the semis. If necessary we can have teams playing in four or five-day rest periods in that part of the tournament.”