US road to 2031 Rugby World Cup starts with Pacific Nations challenge

The Pacific Nations Cup, in which the US men kick-off against Canada in Los Angeles on Saturday, is designed to improve playing standards among tier-two rugby nations. Next year’s PNC will decide qualification for the 2027 World Cup in Australia but this year the US coach, Scott Lawrence, is also planning still further ahead, for 2031 and the first Rugby World Cup on US soil.

“The way to build the 2031 World Cup team is to begin exposure now,” Lawrence says, from the Olympic training centre in Chula Vista, California, where the women who won sevens bronze in Paris, Ilona Maher and all, made their own preparations.

That – and a list of absentees due to injury and European club contracts – helps explain the presence in Lawrence’s squad of five uncapped players, among them the fly-half Rand Santos, a Cal Berkeley junior and one of two backs still at college, the other Dom Besag, a St Mary’s center who has two caps already.

Lawrence says 2031 “probably won’t be my World Cup to coach, but it’s mine to contribute to and so the only way to get Test experience is to get them Test experiences. Those two guys have earned it. Dom was always going to be in and after seeing Rand up close in Scotland [in the World Trophy last month, as the US finished second], we thought getting more American playmakers coming through at No9 and No10 is critical, so we brought him in.”

With the Irish-born Luke Carty, Santos is one of only two fly-halves on the traveling roster for games against Canada or Japan and playoffs where Fiji, Tonga and Samoa are possible opponents.

Missing senior Eagles include AJ MacGinty, fly-half for Bristol in England, and David Ainu’u, tighthead prop for Toulouse in France. Lawrence says such uninjured absentees could have been picked but have been left with their clubs, the better to be released next year with a World Cup spot on the line.

Other players to watch include Pono Davis, an uncapped tighthead for the Houston Sabercats in Major League Rugby, and Cory Daniel, a flanker for Old Glory DC who has played three Tests. Both are members of a much-discussed, oft-misunderstood species: the crossover athlete.

Davis, from Hawaii, came to rugby from football, where he played defensive tackle for Southern Methodist University. Daniel, from Maryland, was a high school all-American wrestler and competed nationally out of the University of North Carolina. Both came to rugby via Glendale, Colorado, AKA RugbyTown USA, an operation dedicated to unearthing crossover talent.

To those who perennially wonder what the US may do if it converts even a fraction of its college football talent to rugby, Davis, 6ft 2in and 275lbs with a shock of black hair, will cut a particularly striking figure.

Lawrence says the US coaches “have had our eye on him for probably about three years and eventually he got to the point through hard work where he was starting at Houston, at tighthead, and that investment of Glendale is starting to come to fruition. We just have to know that it takes four or five years to come through. So that’s some of the stuff I’m doing now: looking at bets for the next World Cup cycle.”

Less known outside the US than football, wrestling is equally stacked with talent.

“Wrestlers are fantastic,” Lawrence says. “They translate really well, particularly front- and back-row players. The amount of work you need to put in, the dark places you need to go to, to be a lead wrestler in our country, it really translates well. These guys are just superb specimens of conditioning. They don’t have a problem with the volume of work. They understand leverage at the breakdown and things like that. They suit rugby really well.”

Accordingly, Lawrence has been taking his squad to some “dark places” in training, fitting “three games of workload” into one week, if without collisions.

The Eagles have played twice this summer and lost twice: to Romania in Chicago and Scotland in Washington DC. They will be favorites to beat Canada – not that Lawrence will say so, pointing to the strong Canadian contingent on the MLR-champion New England Free Jacks – before facing a tough test in Japan. After that would come a semi-final, most likely against Fiji, another tall but educational task.

Fiji and Japan have qualified for Australia 2027, via results in France last year. The US missed that tournament after traumatic experiences against Chile and Portugal but the path to the next World Cup is smoother. Four more teams will qualify, with three places available via the PNC. In 2025, in all likelihood, beating Canada will be enough for a place Down Under in 2027.

With 2031 in mind, World Rugby is backing Anthem Rugby Carolina, a Charlotte-based MLR team predominantly employing Americans. Announced shortly before the 2024 season, Anthem struggled, losing all 16 games. But like World Rugby chief executive Alan Gilpin and MLR chief executive Nic Benson, Lawrence sees promising signs.

“The objectives I set for Anthem this year were to produce 10 Americans that could start for the Anthem next year and one new player I didn’t know about already, developed into the Eagles pool.”

The traveling PNC squad includes Jake Turnbull, an Anthem prop born in Australia to an American mother. Among non-traveling reserves is Lucas Gramlick, a 6ft 8in, 290lb lock from California who played football and wrestled at school then switched to rugby in Glendale.

As Lawrence supervises a squad containing two South African-born scrum-halves and an Irish-born fly-half backed up by a college kid, he notes the need for more American-raised experience in key positions.

“If we want fly-halves and centers and nines that are getting game time, then we have to put them into the Anthem, and so that’s what we’ve done. We went and got as many backline players and young emerging players as we could and got them playing together.”

World Rugby investment in domestic teams has worked for Fiji and Japan, and for Georgia, Portugal and other rising teams. In the US, the Anthem project applies a spin to a perennial question: should MLR focus on producing US talent or should teams operating on thin commercial margins deploy foreigners to chase success?

“We’ve got to keep our eye on the ball,” Lawrence says. “The purpose is to produce Test players. Not all those players will always be in the Anthem. There’s a salary cap and when a guy becomes international, I want him to make a really good living. Some of Anthem is going to be development, almost catch and release, like, ‘Hey, let’s get you to a point where we’ve developed you enough, go somewhere else and be a starter.’ And that’s OK. That’s part of the process.”

• USA v Canada will broadcast in the US on Peacock and in the UK on RugbyPassTV, Saturday 31 August, 9pm ET/2am BST

• This piece was amended on 30 August 2024 – it initially said, in error, that Cory Daniel was uncapped.