And the winner is . . . all a bit too predictable when it comes to major finals

— -- So the Rugby World Cup has an ANZAC final, and it's not so frightfully surprising, is it? The only rum thing is that this piece of local business will take place at Twickenham, more than 10,000 miles from Sydney and more than 11,000 miles from Auckland.

It seems this Australia-New Zealand Tasman Sea local derby is a matter of global importance. This throws up a series of questions. Various people in rugby union need to take a hard look at some of them. Everyone with sporting blood in the veins should consider the rest.

We love sport because it's unpredictable. You don't know what happens next. But when you look at sport dispassionately -- which is something people hardly ever do, unless they're professional gamblers -- it's only fairly unpredictable.

This is the eighth time the Rugby World Cup has been contested, and so far only five nations -- five nations across the entire world -- have been in the finals. The competition has been played to a completion seven times, and only four nations have won it, a total that won't change this weekend.

The three big Southern Hemisphere teams have won the competition six times out of seven, and will make it seven times in eight on Saturday. The same teams have supplied 10 of the 16 places in the eight finals. South Africa, Australia and New Zealand have carved up the thing between them, with two wins apiece; England are the odd winner out.

That's rugby union for you: It's a game played by two states in Australia; it's the sport of choice for a minority race in South Africa; and the acknowledged world leader of the game, New Zealand, has a population smaller than London.

So the Rugby World Cup celebrates a relatively small world, and one that seems content to remain so, keeping the big prizes and the big money for the established teams while being decidedly ungenerous to the smaller nations who make up the numbers every four years. There's no interest at the top in a shift of power.

This asks hard questions of the English RFU -- the best-resourced union of all, and yet unable to get out of the group stage of a tournament they hosted. The other members of the Six Nations also need to ask themselves why, when the tournament was played in their hemisphere, not a single northern team got beyond the quarterfinals.

So far, so rugby. Now let's look further afield. Cricket is a bigger world than Rugby Union but not that much bigger. The past eight Cricket World Cups have given us six different finalists and four different winners. Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India have each won it once in that time, with Australia five.

But you'd expect the football World Cup to look rather different. Here is a genuinely global game with millions of participants in just about every country in the world. And it's different, but not that different.

In the past eight World Cups, we have only seven different nations taking part in the finals, and the victories have been shared among six of those nations. The sport is a bit less predictable, but not all that much. Brazil has won three times in the past eight, with one each for (how many can you guess?) Argentina, West Germany (also counted as Germany for the purposes of these calculations), France, Italy and Spain.

The great prize of the people's game tends to go to the aristocrats: to the sources of ancient power and inherited wealth -- at least wealth of tradition. No team outside Europe and South America has ever won -- so much for Pele's romantic assertion that an African team would win before the 20th century was out. Partly this is about depth of resources and the unconscious bias in favour of the big battalions that happens in all sports -- though it's more pronounced in sports with more subjective interpretations, like rugby union.

But it's also about a more mysterious process, one that you can't put your finger on. The fact is that winners win. Racing people have an expression: cheap horses know it. You could see that at the Rugby World Cup: England, for all their financial wealth, knew that at heart, when it came to performance, they were a cheap horse. New Zealand have the exact opposite attitude, and it was enough for them to destroy France, more or less with disdain, in the quarterfinals and to hold their nerve in their semifinal against South Africa.

Naturally, you find the same sort of system in the individual sports, though of necessity this operates over a shorter period of time. Individuals are inclined to grow old while Brazil and the All Blacks and the boys in the Baggy Green can go on forever.

The past eight Wimbledons have produced four male winners; Novak Djokovic leads with three, and the same four winners have provided 14 of the 16 places in the final. There have been four female winners in the same period; Serena Williams has four titles in that time. At the top, all sports have a tendency to a relatively stable hierarchy, with the top teams or individuals divvying up the big prizes among themselves and seldom letting an interloper come in.

Individuals grow old and retire, but teams never do. And while it's essential that sports do all they can to keep the playing field level and to deal with the underdog impartially -- a job all sports could do better -- it remains a fascinating truth that sports tends to have a winner's club, one that discards members with immense reluctance and guards the door against newcomers with fixed bayonets.

To them that hath, more shall be given. It takes a remarkable individual and a still more remarkable team to break that eternal sporting law. But it happens. So let's celebrate Sri Lanka in the Cricket World Cup of 1996, Spain at the football World Cup of 2010, and Fiji at the Rugby World Cup of 2019.

Well, maybe not that last one . . .