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So, it's the quarter finals of the European Cup over the Easter weekend as always. This year's results - what with CSKA Moscow beating Northampton at Franklin's Gardens, Leicester Tigers getting a very close scare out playing Burevestnik in Kiev, and Cardiff losing to Spartak Tblisi at home - got me thinking. What if Rugby never took off in the USSR?

OK, it got a bit of a helping hand when Brezhnev personally decided to wind up the Soviet Top League football with that awful riot at the Soviet Cup final in 1976 (topping off a year of rampant hooliganism), splitting up the Ukrainian sides from the Russian sides. By then, though rugby was the second most popular sport after Ice Hockey.

The boom that started after 1992, not just in Russia but in all the post-Soviet states really has put the cat amongst the pidgeons, leading to the new 1997 32 team Rugby World Cup.

I guess Cuba wouldn't be the growing force they are today. They were positively unlucky not to get to the Quarters of the world cup last year in Australia, losing to Argentina - only about the sixth time they've played since the end of the Junta in Argentina, oddly enough. To think it was the first ever penalty shootout in rugby, I distinctly remember Jonathan Pearce and Colin Jackson (he was so fast he could have been a sprinter!) thumbing through the rulebooks to see where the kicks were taken from, indeed, it was 40 metres out. Dayron Robles really was the breakout player of the tournament.

Remember that the Soviets were most keen on keeping South Africa out of the game, indeed offering significant money in the form of Lada sponsorship (and indeed free cars!) for the Lions teams to tour the USSR rather than SA. OK, there's a difference between going to Moscow and going to Joberg, and the competition wasn't as good as the Australians or Kiwis, but they certainly knew how to put a show on, and it wasn't South Africa.

Thank goodness the RFU saw sense and decided to allow teams to enter the European Cup in 1990, supposedly they came close to kicking out Saracens and Wasps for entering ...
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