Does the name Nigel Melville ring a bell? If you like watching rugby and you’re over 40 it should, because Nigel Melville was once a bloody good scrum-half. He was also a pretty good England captain, and might have become a great one if it weren’t for the injuries which forced him to retire as a player in 1983. But he stayed involved, and like all good scrum-halves he dodged about a bit, and since 2006 he’s been the CEO of Rugby USA. In which capacity I fear he’s just thrown the game a hospital pass.

I say this because along with quite a few other ex-pat Aussies and Kiwis I was at Chicago’s Soldier Field last month to watch the American Eagles take on New Zealand. For the All-Blacks it was a convenient (and presumably lucrative) stopover on their way to the autumn international series on the other side of the ditch – a chance to shake off the jet-lag and resolve a few lingering selection issues before locking horns with England, Wales and Scotland. For Rugby USA, it was a rare chance to showcase one of the country’s fastest growing team sports. According to Wikipedia there are now more registered rugby players in the USA than there are in Wales and Scotland combined.

To be fair to Mr Melville, it must have looked like a no-brainer on paper; the chance to host the World Champions at one of the country’s most iconic venues – and with live coverage on NBC, no less. An unprecedented opportunity, in other words, to introduce the world’s biggest couch potato nation to the joys of a contact sport which is unencumbered by helmets, high-fives, and those endless, endless stoppages. (The average NFL game lasts three-and-a-quarter hours; the ball is in play for an exhausting 11 minutes.)

And hats off to Mr Melville’s marketing team. As home to the mighty Chicago Bears, Soldier Field is one of the country’s bigger stadiums, but twenty minutes before kick-off not one of its 80,000 seats was bumless. Twenty minutes before the final whistle, though, it was a depressingly different picture. If they’d announced an ebola outbreak at half time the place couldn’t have emptied faster.

If this took Mr Melville by surprise it means he hasn’t grasped one critical aspect of life in his adopted country, which is, put very simply, that many Americans never really grow up.

You can see this Peter-Panism in every walk of life here.

It’s why most yanks still don’t do irony. It’s why their universities offer PHD’s in Harry Potter studies. It’s why 47% of the adult population believes in ghosts. It’s why they prefer pool to snooker. It’s why audiences here whoop instead of clap. It’s why grown men consume more ice-cream than wine. It’s why the standard dress code of old-age pensioners is baseball caps and sneakers. It’s why Ronald Reagan, one of the nation’s most popular presidents, wasn’t ashamed to admit that the first thing he looked at in his newspaper every morning was the ‘comix’.

Reagan may not have known much about the rest of the world (in one speech to the United Nations he confused Austria with Australia) but the old ham always had his finger pretty firmly on the pulse of his countrymen. He knew that for a large proportion of Americans childhood isn’t a life stage, it’s a life choice.

I don’t know if Mr Melville has children of his own. But if he does he would know that if you want to get a kid interested in a sport – any sport – you have to ensure that his or her earliest efforts meet with at least a modicum of success. You don’t have to let them win. You just have to let them score enough tries, goals or points to make them want to come back and do it again tomorrow. The worst thing you can do is to make them feel like losers. To subject them, in other words, to the kind of brutal and humiliating drubbing that was inflicted on the American Eagles at Soldier Field last month (the final score was 77-6, since you ask).

I’m not talking about the players. I have no doubt that those 15 big boofy blokes derived some lasting benefit from being made to look like a bunch of girls. I’m sure they’re better men for having been comprehensively outrun, out-tackled, out-passed, out-kicked and out-witted for 80 bruising, humiliating minutes.

But I would be very surprised if many of the 80,000 people who witnessed this cruel mis-match underwent the kind of Damascene conversion experienced by the oil billionaire John Paul Getty after Mick Jagger took him to a cricket match: ‘I realized that baseball is to cricket what checkers is to chess’, Getty said afterwards, and then took out a subscription to Wisden. I suspect most of the crowd at Soldier Field reacted the same way the American friends who I took there reacted. As we shuffled out of the stadium nobody spoke, and in the pub later I found myself apologizing. They’re nice people, my friends, so they insisted they’d enjoyed every damn minute of it – and after a few more beers one of them even had a go at a haka. But if the Wallabies arrange a similar fixture the same time next year I’m pretty sure I’ll be going on my own. And to a much smaller stadium.

Rugby has come a long way in the last twenty years. As well as wiping out the class thing that used to alienate large swathes of the public, the money that’s poured into the sport since it went professional has transformed it at every level. Club competition in all the key rugby nations is now covered by the media in a way which would have been unthinkable when I was a lad, and according to Google, in terms of TV audiences, the Rugby World Cup is now the third or fourth biggest sporting event on the planet. Cracking the enormous US market is the last hurdle, and if Rugby USA’s bid to host the 2023 Rugby World Cup is successful, it could well happen. But in the meantime, if Mr Melville wants the American public to get behind that bid, he’d be well-advised to give them something to whoop about. In other words, he should consider exposing the national team to the kind of opposition which would allow their collective talents to shine a little more brightly. He wouldn’t have to cross an ocean to find it, either.

But hang on; do Mexicans even play rugby?