The latter occurred on Saturday July 10 in the match between New Zealand and South Africa which opened the 2010 Tri-Nations competition, at the newly upgraded Eden Park stadium in Auckland.
New Zealand have now won two of the last three major international series, with Saturday's victory following an equally unexpected 24-0 triumph against Australia in Leeds in the final of the second Tri-Nations competition in 2005.
But Nigel Wood, the Rugby Football League's chief executive, says that whatever the result, plans are already in place to build on the success of Ireland and Scotland in the World Cup, with both set to join Wales and France in a qualifying tournament to play England, Australia and New Zealand in a Four-Nations competition in Europe next autumn.
The eight-nation competition has a schedule of 28 preliminary games, with finals listed for Sept. 29-31.
Or there was the Singer Cup in Sharjah in 1997, when a new-look England prevailed in a four-nation competition whose purity was later gravely doubted.
He expanded the World Cup finals from a 16-nation to 24-nation and then 32-nation competition, invited almost all the countries in the world to join Fifa, and offered them increased involvement in it.
The All Blacks have dominated the Tri-Nations competition since its inception in 1996, winning 10 of 16 championships.
While three of the 12 Scottish athletes in Wales have already achieved their targets, others are hoping to hit the mark at the tri-nation competition.
But they struggled in the games that followed, losing 3-0 to France in their final group fixture then having to settle for fourth place in the 12-nation competition.
Siegert played down the three-nation competition.
In an increasingly global labor market, it is similarly only global labor rules that can stop the nation-by-nation competition to attract investment dollars by offering-up workers on ever-more exploitive terms.
