RWC 2015: Pacific Islands' plight leaves an unsavoury taste, but World Cup offers glimmer of hope

It is the players’ laughter in the new rugby union film Pacific Warriors which makes your heart soar. The joyous, booming memories they relate of how Tonga, Fiji and Samoa have delivered some of the most beautiful moments in the World Cup against very improbable odds. The film is up there among the very best attempts to commit sport to screen. I defy you to watch it and not know, like me, that you’ll be looking out in the next five weeks for one of these sides – pinpricks on a map, yet home to the greatest wilderness on earth.

The film’s stories include the Samoans pitching up in Manchester for the 2007 World Cup and training in public parks. Only when he saw them2 playing on TV did the guy who raked the leaves for the council realise their significance. The same players would sneak out under the pretence of a trip to the cinema, to pay yet another trip to KFC. They reckon that Manchester outlet sold around 50kg of chicken to those boys. Sport can be stuffy, serious and buttoned up but it lives and breathes among the Polynesians. “The one thing I always wanted of theirs I couldn’t get was the smile. You know… the fact they were laughing while they played,” says Jonny Wilkinson, articulating so effectively what makes them such giants.

They laughed because they knew they could play like Gods and always had done. That Tonga team of Nili Latu and Viliami Vaki who were a ball’s bounce away from beating the South Africa side which had just eviscerated England eight years ago. The Samoans, led by piano mover Peter Fatialofa, who as Western Samoa beat the Welsh in 1991, sending the joke down the Valleys that if this was just half the island, imagine how it would be if they faced the whole of it.

They have flourished on this world stage because, by a combination of genetic inheritance, love of their lands and, in many, the sheer conviction that God leads them on, that place in the Pacific is the planet’s finest manufacturer of rugby players. Brian Lima and Apollo Perelini redefined tackling in the 1990s. Michael Jones did the same for the role of open-side flanker. The story of Jonah Lomu’s role in wing evolution hardly needs re-telling.

And because the sport’s giants want a piece of that production line, there has been an exodus – the big nations laying claim on them and denuding these lands of a precious natural asset. A fifth of the players at the last World Cup were either born or descended from the three islands. This time around, the percentage is slightly higher. And good luck to the players. They have needed the money, even though they found a casual racism awaited them, too. “Fob” was one word used for them in New Zealand. “It means ‘suit and no shoes; someone who can’t read English,” says one who remembers it well. They were many compensations, though. “You got rugby boots and the team all wore the same jerseys,” says the same player.

But there is a challenge which reaches to the heart of the sport’s desire to provide a spectacle, as we prepare for a tournament which will most probably be dominated by the same self-selecting few. It is what can be done to enable these fiercely proud islands to keep up, and keep in touch with the best?

Rugby’s world governing body has worked hard to improve the nations’ sometimes shambolic governance which left the Samoans almost reduced to strike action this year at Twickenham. How can the three ever compete, though, if the sport’s rich nations refuse to undertake the tours there which would bring the crowds and the broadcasting deals? Only Scotland, among the established nations, had visited Samoa in the past decade until the All Blacks’ turned up for the first time in July – finally giving something back to a source of such riches.

And when these nations do play the best, how can they compete if their brethren are ineligible because they happen to have represented an elite nation a few times? Put it another way: Why shouldn’t Semesa Rokoduguni play for Fiji, when he will almost certainly not add to his solitary England cap?

The issue will be aired this week by Jaimie Fuller, the Australian chairman of the Skins compression sportswear firm, who has become a strong campaigner for better governance in sport. Fuller argues that the wealthy elite must either be given an incentive to tour the Pacific Islands or be forced to go, by the World Rugby governing body, which hands the three nations one seat between them on its board while all the rest have one each. (That chauvinistic voting iniquity needs sorting, too.) “If we don’t do anything to help these nations generate money, their rugby culture will dry up and disappear from the world game,” Fuller says. If a special case is made for them, other small World Cup nations like Japan and Argentina will inevitably demand the same. “But they’re not the same,” Fuller argues. “What the Pacific Islands have delivered is unique and needs protecting.”

A breakthrough will not be easy. These nations are used to that. But it is necessary. To understand why, just watch Nili Latu tell the film-makers about playing for Tonga – “I feel small before games, but in that jersey I feel like one of the biggest guys on the field” – and make his team your team in the weeks which lie ahead.

It comes to something when the comparative irrelevance of a defeat at Goodison Park is needed to trigger an allusion to the desperate and destitute who are fleeing war zones in their thousands, but at least Jose Mourinho made the connection. “I think the refugees are under big pressure. Under big pressure,” he said on Saturday night.

How fine it would have been for a moment of euphoria to have triggered that kind of recognition in the ultimate multi-national sport. For Wayne Rooney to have told us, perhaps, he was dedicating his 50th England goal to the father of Aylan al-Kurdi, the boy washed up on a Turkish beach whose death has triggered barely a flicker of response from our billion pound game. Or for the Football Association, perhaps, to have pledged 10 per cent of last week’s gate receipts to refugees’ causes. There was nothing. The press conferences, the sponsor events and the PR alerts stunts – the high and mighty football industry – carry on regardless, noisy and signifying nothing.