Canada’s path to Rugby World Cup qualification is officially a whole lot clearer.

World Rugby rejected the appeals by the Romanian and Spanish rugby federations over their disqualification from the qualification process for next year’s tournament in Japan.

A World Rugby panel had previously ruled that both countries’ national teams should have points deducted because they had both fielded ineligible players in a number of games during the qualification process.

That penalty dumped them to the bottom of the European qualification table from the top; had the results been left to stand, Romania was off to the 2019 tournament automatically, while Spain was on a path that offered a pair of further chances to qualify through playoffs, including one that features Canada.

Instead, Russia, which had finished behind Romania and Spain, was handed the automatic spot, while a very poor Germany, which had finished behind the other three, as well as Belgium, which was also penalized points for ineligible players, was put on the playoff path. (In March, Germany lost 69-15 to Belgium.)

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Spain had also asked for a replay of a controversial loss to low-ranked Belgium, a match that had featured a Romanian referee. The result had meant Spain finished second, not first. But World Rugby turned that down too, though they did criticize Rugby Europe for assigning a referee whose national interest made for a conflict of interest.

World Rugby also said that given that they weren’t overturning the points from the deduction, there was no point in replaying the game.

In all this World Rugby’s appeals panel acknowledged that steps need to be taken in future to make sure that off-field problems don’t end up overturning on-field results.

“The Independent Appeal Committee also reinforced the Independent Disputes Committee’s statement that the case demonstrates that unions, acting in good faith, can make mistakes and that World Rugby should take steps to avoid a repeat of these circumstances,” World Rugby said in announcing the results of the appeals.

Bizarrely, World Rugby doesn’t maintain a centralized database of players who play at the international level. This leaves national unions to determine the eligibility of their players and in the cases of Romania and Spain they were partly let down by answers supplied by other unions. In Romania’s case, it was because the Tongan union neglected to tell them that a player had appeared for the national sevens team; in Spain’s case, there was a lack of clarity from the French about whether two players were covered by a national-selection loophole.

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Even so, there were other ways to determine the eligibility of the players in question and that’s where World Rugby’s ruling came to land.

Germany is now slated to play a playoff game against Portugal on June 16. The winner will play a qualification series against Samoa at the end of the month. The winner of that series — basically everyone expects it to be Samoa — will head to the Rugby World Cup.

The loser will land in a tournament for a final RWC spot next fall that includes Canada. The Canadians will assuredly be the favourites there, even with their bad form of the last few years. The other sides in the tournament will be plucky, but simply won’t have the quality of players that Canada still has to draw on.

They still have to play the games, of course.

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