Amid claims in the Putting Rugby First report that the IRB has created a ghetto in world rugby, it is hard not to disagree when you look at the current scenario.

It is a situation all of their own making, and it began with the award of the 2011 World Cup to New Zealand, which seems to be returning to bite the IRB on the backside.

The land of the long white cloud was the surprise winner of the vote in a head to head with Japan’s bid, which had seemed a far more logical choice for a sport in desperate need of expansion into new parts of the globe.

But the fact that the tournament went to New Zealand has practically hamstrung the IRB in its choice for the 2015 and 2019 tournaments.

Having seen the 2007 event in France (and Wales and Scotland) make a net surplus of over £122 million, the 2011 version is expected to make far less.

So worried were the NZRFU about their rugby public’s lack of enthusiasm for attending matches between the likes of Georgia and Namibia that they initially wanted to downscale the tournament to 16 teams for fear of cameras panning around deserted stadiums.

Thanks to the much-improved performances by the likes of Tonga, Fiji and the Georgians in France that idea was quickly binned. What sort of message would that have sent to the world about a sport looking to reach out beyond its traditional powerbase?

But despite the retention of a 20-team competition, New Zealand 2011 promises to be a damp squib in a financial sense as fans pay little attention to much other than the top few sides, obsessed as they surely will be with ending 24 years of dashed ambition.

The upshot is that, to make up for the paltry sum made from 2011, the IRB has been forced to slap huge prices tags on the hosting rights for the next two competitions and will have to award one if not both of them to countries able to make them huge sums of money.

2015 will cost £100 million and will almost certainly have to be hosted in England and Wales - who will be one of only very few candidates able to fork out that sort of money, and able to generate the kind of profits the IRB is looking for.

2019, you would then hope, could go to a developing nation. But by that point, having been passed over for both 2011 and 2015, who could blame the Japanese if they have picked up their ball and gone home?

That would leave the Italians, who tick the box as a developing rugby nation, but who, as the second European host in two consecutive tournaments, would probably be looked upon less favourably than a bid from the Southern Hemisphere, meaning the 2015 even would most likely end up in South Africa.

There is a solution to all of this, and that is to strip the 2011 tournament from New Zealand, a country that has already admitted its public has little appetite for seeing a truly global event and hand it to Japan, thus taking the game to a country with a genuine enthusiasm for seeing the sport grow there and proving to the rest of the sporting world that the days of cronyism and shameful horse trading at the IRB ballot box are at an end.

Only then could the IRB justifiably deny that world rugby is in any sort of ghetto.