The first State Championship schedule was announced on Monday.
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Tough to start. The All Blacks will be on the menu for the French
The meeting, the Blues’ first as part of a new tournament bringing together six teams from the Six Nations Tournament, four Southern Hemisphere Rugby Championship teams, Japan and Fiji, will be played a week after the Top 14 final at the Stade de France. With the risk for the French team to appear very weak, at least losing to the finalists or even the semifinalists.
On the same July 4, two other matches in this new “Championship of Nations” program, a kind of second World Cup, will pit Australia and Ireland on one side, South Africa and England on the other. The French team will then travel to Australia on July 11, before facing Japan on July 18.
The first three days of the competition, which will now take place every even-numbered year instead of the traditional summer and autumn tour, will be played in July, in the southern hemisphere. The next three matches will be played in November, this time in the northern hemisphere, said Six Nations Rugby, the organization managing the Tournament, one of the organizers of the new event. Fabien Galthié’s troops will then face Fiji, South Africa and Argentina respectively.
The 12 teams will then meet for six “finals”, played from 27 to 29 November, at Twickenham Stadium in London, culminating, on the third day, in a grand final between the two respective first-placed teams in each hemisphere. The first winner of the Championship of Nations will then be known, as well as the sacred hemisphere, taking into account the results of the six finals.
A promotion-relegation system, with play-offs, will be introduced from 2030 with the creation of a second world division, also consisting of 12 teams, World Rugby announced. Therefore, traditional summer and autumn tour matches between countries in the two hemispheres will only take place in the current format once every four years, in odd-numbered years apart from the World Cup. Or in 2029 next time.
