It is one of the hot-button topics of the World Cup: how do you make a draw that is fair to every team?
The answer, for a start, is you lock broadcasters out of the room, but that's never going to happen, so instead we get lopsided draws that almost invariably hinder the minnows more than the Tier One nations.
World Rugby have made no effort to hide that this is a tournament of the haves and have-nots. Analyse the draw and you will find that not one 'big' team, those considered genuine title chances, plays another contender off short rest.
The grave irony, of course, is the Tier One teams have the requisite depth to deal with quick turnarounds, but it the lower tier teams that by and large get lumbered with them.
As Japan coach Eddie Jones implied after his team collapsed to Scotland off short rest, the bottom-feeders should just be grateful to be there.
"I said I wasn't going to use that as an excuse and I won't... You need a six-day turnaround [to recover] but that's not the case [here].
You've got to accept it and suck it up."
However, when one of the contenders is effected by short rest, the issue gets more mainstream airplay.
"It's something we all need to be aware of because it's a pretty brutal game at the moment," Wales' coach Warren Gatland said prior to his team's meeting with Fiji off a short week. "It's important we consider and look after the welfare of our players as well.
"I'm not complaining about the short turnaround because we've known about that for a long time. We've had to prepare for that."
In a normal season, a six-day turnaround between tests would be considered tough, but that is not realistic at a World Cup where every day of the weekend, including Friday nights, has to be utlised, along with occasional midweek dates.
Also working in the organisers' favour is geography. The distances between the various venues in England and Wales are short, so no long-haul flights or crossing of time zones is required.
So, for the purposes of this exercise, we will consider five days and under as a short turnaround. The teams' short weeks are as follows:
P OOL A
Australia - 4 days between Fiji and Uruguay (won 65-3)
England - no short turnarounds
Wales - 5 days between England and Fiji (won 23-13)
Fiji - 5 days between England and Australia (lost 13-28)
Uruguay - 4 days between Fiji and England (Oct 10)
England, as hosts, get the plum draw in the Pool of Death, with no short turnarounds. They will get the tournament's weakest team, Uruguay, on a short turnaround on October 10. That could be a sporting slaughter.
Fiji has been handed the roughest draw. This is a good Fiji team who had the ability to upset one of the three Tier One nations, but facing Australia five days after meeting the hosts in the opener was never conducive to a fair fight. To compound matters, they then faced Wales on their home ground in Cardiff. It is close to a rigged draw as you can get.
No Tier One team faced another Tier One team on a short turnaround, though Wales faced arguably the strongest Tier Two nation on short rest.
POOL B
South Africa - no short turnarounds
Scotland - 4 days between Japan and USA (won 39-16)
Samoa - no short turnarounds
Japan - 4 days between South Africa and Scotland (lost 10-45)
USA - 4 days between South Africa and Japan (Oct 11)
South Africa and Samoa get the plum draws, no doubt Samoa's privileged status had something to do with them being royally shafted at the previous edition where they played both Wales (lost 10-17) and South Africa (lost 5-13) off short rest.
This time around it's Japan who got bladed by the schedulers, meeting Scotland just four days after playing another Tier One country, South Africa. Strangely, World Rugby boss Brett Gosper didn't think japan had it tough. By way of a strange sort of calculus, Gosper believed Japan's overall rest days was the highlight of the Pool B draw.
