Over the last 50 years, the southern hemisphere sides - New Zealand and South Africa- have been dominant on the world rugby stage. It is in fact; only since the 1980's and 1990's that Australia has started to become a feared team. Before this time, Australia was not taken seriously in any sport across the world. Since Australia had a poor Olympics in the early 1970's, the Australian Government decided to build the Australian Institute of Sport, which has all the top coaches teaching and coaching all the top athlete's from the age of 14 onwards. Australia are now World Champions in almost every sport and are Olympic champions.

However, the northern hemisphere sides still struggle on the world stage. In the last week, England have defeated the All Blacks second team 31-28. New Zealand decided to leave basically their whole pack at home and strung many changes in the back line, despite this England still struggled to defeat them. This is worrying because England are meant to be the Northern Hemispheres strongest team. So why does the northern hemisphere sides still struggle when they have such good players? Many experts have suggested that

In addition, like the southern hemisphere, English clubs have now got academy leagues in place. Each academy earns at least 250,000 pound a year. Welsh and Scottish teams have now got academies and the Welsh academies play one game a month against other welsh academies.

Finally, France started off very poor at first losing every game by a big score much like the Italians today. France have dramatically improved due to them reaching the 1999 Rugby World Cup Final defeating New Zealand very convincingly in the semi-final and narrowly losing to Australia in the final. Recently, the French have beaten South Africa at home.

England are known as one of the historical leading nations for inventing the game and their recent success over the last 10 years.

The top three historical teams are New Zealand, South Africa, Wales and England. These three teams have all produced flair and exciting rugby over the years.

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Approximate Word count = 4403
Approximate Pages = 18 (250 words per page double spaced)