Rugby World Cup organisers will today catalogue the ticketing blunders which have blighted the tournament so far, writes Paul Rees. They are expected to pin the blame on the unions staging the event, in particular host nation Wales.

The Welsh Rugby Union has had chronic problems regarding World Cup tickets in the last couple of weeks which resulted in the suspension of its ticketing manager and his deputy last Monday pending an investigation into Wales's first two group matches against Argentina and Japan.

The WRU discovered shortly before last week's opener against Argentina that a block of tickets had not been sold and officials went into the streets to get rid of them for as little as £5. Earlier this week, the union was unable to account for 2,000 tickets for Saturday's international against Japan.

The problems have not been confined to Wales. Last Sunday's meeting between Tonga and New Zealand at Ashton Gate was reported to have been sold out weeks ago, but thousands of tickets suddenly became available. A similar snag afflicted England's group match against Italy on Saturday and all the tickets printed for one of the semi-finals at Twickenham had to be pulped because the wrong date had been written on them.

The unions have blamed the RWC for returning its unwanted allocation - it is entitled to half the tickets for every match - to unions too late for the tickets to be sold through their clubs, but the tournament's organisers maintain that the returns were made in two stages: in February and in June.

"The unions were told a long time ago that RWC would only be taking up an average 10 per cent of its allocation of tickets for the group matches and 20% for the play-offs," said an RWC spokesman last night. "The problems of the last couple of weeks are not of our making and we are extremely concerned about what will happen during the knock-out stages of the tournament.

"That is the time the bulk of the visitors overseas will be in Europe and there are a number of areas we will be addressing with the unions in the coming days which include the actual printing of the tickets because there have been a surprising number of problems concerning that."

RWC will also visit the Millennium Stadium, which will host a quarter-final, the third-place play-off and the final, to count the number of seats in the ground with clickers.