There’s never been a World Cup match quite like the one they played in Kamaishi this bright, blue, Wednesday afternoon, when it seemed as though every single one of the 35,000 people who live here was out onto the streets to welcome in the few thousand fans who had come to their little town.
The world’s media was here, too, drawn by the story of Kamaishi’s ongoing recovery from the devastating tsunami that obliterated the place in 2011. Even Crown Prince Akishino came. The game was fit for a king, too, the first upset of this World Cup.
Uruguay, a team with just 22 professional players, beat Fiji 30-27. It was Uruguay’s first World Cup win in 16 years, since they beat Georgia in 2003. Given that the only other match they’ve ever won in the World Cup was against Spain in 1999, it must rate as the greatest game they’ve ever played.
Fiji, on the other hand, were abysmal – tired, sloppy, and complacent. Five days after they started with a defeat to Australia in Sapporo, their World Cup is as good as over. In 1987, Fiji made it to the quarter-finals even though they’d lost two group games. France did it again in 2011. No one else ever has.
The Fiji coach, John McKee, mentioned how little time the team had to get ready for this game, but said he didn’t want to use it as an excuse. “It was certainly one of the things we talked about before the match,” McKee said, “we knew we were coming off the short turnaround and that Uruguay were going to be very focused on this first match. We tried to take the same mindset from Australia into this game.”
McKee had made 12 changes so this was, in the large part, a fresh team. The truth is that, as McKee said himself, “we made too many errors during the game and Uruguay capitalised on them, especially in the first half, and then we were chasing the game. which put us under a lot of pressure.”
Their coach saw this ambush coming, but that didn’t stop the Fiji team blundering into it. The Pacific islanders beat Uruguay 68-7 just last year, and are nine places above them in the world rankings. Uruguay’s coach, Esteban Meneses, explained that his team have spent the last four years working their socks off at their new high performance centre in Montevideo, preparing for this match and their next one, against Georgia.
Fiji, Meneses explained, “are two very different teams, one when they have the ball, another when they don’t.” Uruguay’s strategy was to “keep possession and play with our own rhythm.” Fiji were completely foxed, and Uruguay led by 24-12 at half-time.
Uruguay scored three tries in that time, and came within an inch of a fourth. This was after Fiji had taken the lead once, with one try off the back of a scrum penalty and an attacking line-out, and then again, with another. In between, Uruguay scored their first when Leone Nakawara spilled a wild offload, and nimble scrum-half Santiago Arata pounced. He wriggled, slipped, and squirmed through three tackles on his way to the try-line.
That made it 12-7, but given the try was a breakaway, against the run of play, there was nothing in it that suggested what was going to happen next. Juan Manuel Cat charged down a clearance by Fiji’s full-back Alivereti Veitokani, and their No 8, Manuel Diana, scored off the line-out that followed.
Then, while Semi Radradra and Veitokani were tussling about which of them was going to catch a high ball, Uruguay’s full back Gaston Mieres swept through and claimed it instead. The South Americans worked the ball across to the left, where Rodrigo Silva put Cat through to score with a spectacular offload.
Radrada almost gifted the underdogs a fourth with another loose pass to Veitokani, which Andres Vilaseca hacked downfield. The two of them raced each other to the ball as it bobbled over the line, but the replays showed Vilaseca had just knocked on as he dived for it.
At the beginning of the second half, Fiji were even worse. Tevita Ratuva blew a three-on-one overlap and Josh Matevesi missed a couple of goal kicks from schoolboy range, one of them a conversion after Api Ratuniyarawa bullied his way over for Fiji’s third. They finally began to improve when McKee started bringing on his replacements.
Uruguay never did get that fourth try, but it didn’t matter. Felipe Berchesi kicked two penalties, and that put them eight points up, even though Nikola Matawalu scored a fourth for Fiji. So, even when Matawala got a fifth in the very last minute, it wasn’t enough to win it.