The 29-10 loss knocked them out of contention ? and out of meaningful international rugby for the foreseeable future.

Over the last decade and more, the Germans had sought to establish themselves as a significant international team. They were bankrolled by the family who made their fortune from Capri-Sun soft drinks?? to the tune of some €20m.

There are 3,000 men playing the game in the country’s 120 rugby clubs but, of course, in the modern era of professional rugby, developing a national team requires sustained,?targeted investment.

And so it was that an?academy was established in Heidelberg and development was such that in 2017, Heidelberg RK qualified to compete in the European Challenge Cup.

Instead of being a marker of progress, this proved to be the beginning of the end.

The Capri-Sun backers had also bought Stade Francais in Paris and were now instructed by the authorities that they needed to get rid of one of?their teams. They got rid of Heidelberg.

This was compounded by the unravelling of relations at national federation level and has left the German national team desperately in need of new funding.

None has yet emerged. In the run up to the World Cup Qualifiers, the Germans had appointed Mike Ford ? who had previously been involved in coaching Ireland ? to be their national coach.

But defeat to Canada means that the professional?ambitions of Germany’s best players have been destroyed.

And, in the process, the most promising opportunities for international rugby to deepen the global reach of rugby has also suffered a significant blow.

The thing is that it would not have taken a whole lot for Germany to have become a dominant power in European rugby when the game spread across the continent in the late 19th century.

Indeed, it is a basic fact that rugby was played in Germany (and Holland, indeed), before ever it was played in France.

This European spread of rugby has been brilliantly chronicled by Tony Collins in his book, The Oval World: A Global History of Rugby.

Collins records how there was actually a rugby club at Heidelberg College in 1870. At the other end of the 1870s, there were clubs established such as DFV?Hannover and FC 1880?Frankfurt (itself the merger of several existing clubs).

These were the first football clubs of any sort established in Germany.

The story of rugby in Germany is that it was a game initially played only by a small elite, but it grew steadily and by the end of the 19th century, there were 19 clubs in the country and it was played in some schools.

Altogether, there was enough interest to form a?German Rugby Union in 1899 ? the Deutsche Rugby Verband.

The following year, an?annual north versus south match was established and then in 1909 a club championship was set up.

The model for growing rugby on the European continent was France.?Although rugby was slower to start in France than in Germany, it had a vital powerful champion in Baron Pierre de Coubertin ? the famed founder of the modern Olympics.

De Coubertin loved all things English ? and viewed their sports as fundamental to the success of the British Empire.

He toured the elite public schools of England and wrote that, when he stood in the chapel at Rugby School, he “dreamed that I saw before me the cornerstone of the British Empire”.

With de Coubertin as a cheerleader, the elite schools of France (the lycees) took on rugby as their game and by 1890 it was established as fundamental to the curriculum of many schools.

In the middle decades of the 20th century, despite the growth of soccer in the country, rugby also prospered in Germany.

Just as in France, the elite schools of the country were important to its growth and by 1927, Germany was fielding an international team.

Germany then acted as a founder member ? along with France and Italy ? of the Federation Internationale de Rugby Amateur in 1934.

France was the more?important country in that?association, but Germany were no mere makeweights.

Indeed, between 1927 and 1938, Germany played France every year. France usually won, and sometimes they won handsomely, but they did not always do so.

When the teams met in Frankfurt in 1928, Germany won by 17-16.

In the second half of the 1930s, the margins between the teams were always very small.

Two matches in 1938 seemed to confirm that Germany had truly arrived as a rugby power.

By then, the Germans were regularly beating every other country in Europe who played rugby ? notably Romania and Italy ? but France were the benchmark.

In the first match in?Berlin, France conceded an early penalty which was successfully kicked by the German full-back Georg Isenberg.

For the rest of the match, the French engaged in ever more frantic efforts to get a score of their own.

But time and again they were repelled by the Germans who ran out 3-0 winners.

Later that year, the two teams progressed to meet in the final of 1938 European Rugby Championship ? played between all the countries of Europe with the exception of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.

The final was played in Bucharest and the Germans were brilliant in the first half, leading on the strength of a try scored by their captain, Karl Loos.

?? Reaction: @DRVRugby look to their final game of #RWC2019 Repechage as captain, Michael Poppmeier discusses his sides loss to a strong @RugbyCanada side pic.twitter.com/OvlBdWM9tm

— Rugby World Cup (@rugbyworldcup) November 17, 2018

This time, however, they could not hold out against the French attackers and they lost by just three points.

The other great rivals of the Germans at this time were the Italians.

The Italians had themselves taken to the game when it was introduced in Genoa by English expatriates in the 1890s, while ships of the British Royal Navy Mediterranean Fleet also saw men go to shore to play rugby on Italian soil.

Germany played an international against the Italians in Stuttgart on May 5,1940.

This was a mere five days?before the German army?invaded France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

It is singular fact that the growth of rugby in the 1930s in both Germany and Italy was driven by fascism.

The Federazione Italiana Rugby was a tool, at least in part, of the efforts of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime to use sport to promote the nation and fascist ideology.

The fact that the Italians won the soccer world cups of 1934 and 1938 stunted the growth of rugby, but it continued to be viewed as a game that was ideal for Italian elite society.

In Germany, the support of fascism was even more central to the growth of rugby. One of Adolf Hitler’s most important lieutenants ? Albert Speer ? saw rugby as a vehicle to?promote the ambitions of the Nazis and promoted the game in the country.

By the outbreak of the Second World War, there were more than 50 clubs and almost 2,000 registered rugby players in Germany.

But if the ambitions of the Nazis helped build rugby, those same ambitions caused its destruction in Germany ? rugby in the country could not survive the war.

In the course of the war, 16 men who had won rugby caps for Germany were killed.

This is more than any other country involved in the war, even though Germany had been a test playing country only for 14 years.

It says much for the destruction of rugby in Germany that in 1946 a military team drawn from the New Zealand Army ? known as the Khaki All Blacks ? toured Britain, Ireland, France, and Germany.

But when they came to Germany, they played only two teams drawn from the British armed forces.

As Tony Collins wrote: ‘By now there was no native German rugby ? like culture and civilisation, itself, the game had been swept away by Hitler’s Gotterdammerung.’

It is true that there was a recovery of sorts in the 1950s and teams representing West Germany and East Germany were fielded in European matches.

But they could never again really threaten France ? or even Italy and Romania.

The momentum that had once driven the sport had been lost at a crucial time and in an appalling way.

And in sport, timing and momentum lost at a crucial time can never properly be?recovered.