Spoken like a true croweater Darren.
It's worth noting that when Football Australia (soccer) left Oceania and joined Asia, we went from strength to strength. Also that the term Oceania really only exists is because blokes like Edmund Barton did not want us to be grouped in with the Chinese etc. There's part of one of his parliamentary speeches at the exit of the Chinese heritage museum in Bendigo. Pretty shocking stuff.
..and thanks to Exile for the shit load of typing and explaining.
cheers auss...
fabricarti diem punc
They really only want to separate from Victoria - and anything to do with Sam Newman.Originally Posted by fulvio sammut
"The main difference between playing League and Union is that now I get my hangovers on Monday instead of Sunday - Tom David
Alan Jones has got himself a column in the Australian to start hammering the RA
What rugby has done in the past isn’t working, we need to change the game
Rugby Australia Chief Executive Officer Raelene Castle.
Rugby Australia Chief Executive Officer Raelene Castle.
ALAN JONES
The Australian12:00AM March 2, 2018
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I have met Rugby Australia CEO Raelene Castle on one occasion. We discussed rugby, where it’s been, where it is and where it might be trying to go.
But Castle will need the wisdom of Solomon to be able to turn a sinking ship around.
There’s only one place to start when you’re trying to rebuild a business and that’s right at the top.
The difficulty she faces is being hamstrung by a completely* *dysfunctional board who have spent, over the years, endless amounts of money and have nothing to show for it.
Witness, for example, Round 1 of Super Rugby and the thrashing handed out to Queensland by Melbourne.
A new Queensland coach presumably thought he could re*invent the game.
Will Genia wanted to stay, but apparently wasn’t wanted.
Quade Cooper simply wasn’t wanted.
I’d love to know the criteria for rejecting both players.
Genia was the man of the match playing for Melbourne and Quade Cooper is on a king’s *ransom, paid for by Australian and Queensland rugby, and has been shunted to grade rugby.
Castle should take the bit *between her teeth and recommend the restructuring of the Rugby Australia board.
As part of the dysfunctionality of the administration, there’s been a vacancy on the board since last August. And since then, Liz *Broderick has resigned.
So far, no replacements.
Yet the board may make appointments to fill casual vacancies. Why haven’t they?
But you’d need a greater divinity than that which is available to mere mortals to work your way through the convoluted process of appointments to the board.
Try this:
• Six directors appointed by members by a two-thirds majority following nominations from the nominations committee
• Two directors appointed by an ordinary resolution of the directors following nomination from the nominations committee
I see. This is really a nice little club. The nominations committee comprises the chairman of the board, one person elected by ordinary resolution of the board and two people elected by a two-thirds majority of voting members.
How the hell can any layman penetrate this fortress?
What is immediately needed on the board is rugby expertise that’s prepared to recognise the mess the game is in and will do something about it.
One of the great weaknesses of Australian rugby, certainly at provincial level, is coaching.
There’s no one with any coaching success that I know of that’s *responsible for appointing coaches.
I can assure you I’m not looking for a job; I’m stating a principle.
Castle should seek an immediate abandonment of these ludicrously complicated processes and hand-pick two people to fill casual vacancies.
Now!
A bloke like Ian Narev comes to mind from the Commonwealth Bank. He loves his rugby and knows his rugby. He knows the big end of town. He can knock on people’s doors.
And someone like Brett Papworth, a former brilliant Wallaby who equally understands the nuts and bolts of the game, knows the problems and has the courage to devise solutions.
Then, of course, there’s the critical issue of what happens on the paddock.
I watched the rugby at the weekend. What we saw was a *reproduction of what we saw last year. Different personnel, but same product.
There’s no point in changing the horse if you don’t change the jockey.
If we’re to match strides with the best in the game, then we have to change the way we play the game. What we’ve done in the past is merely perpetuate failure.
The reason the public aren’t coming through the turnstiles is because what they see inside the ground is boring them rigid.
We have gifted players who are spectators. They rarely see the football. The pick and drive approach towards rugby has had its day. The game needs to be opened up.
Players want to play with the football, but they’re so overly structured that they rarely get the chance to do with their talent what they’d like to do.
We’re not short of players, but we’re certainly short of strategies which allow them full expression of their skills.
We seem to talk endlessly about budgets and playing rosters, but rarely do we talk about how the game can be played to secure results this year that proved elusive last year.
There’s a golden rule in life — if you do this year what you did last year, you will get last year’s results.
Rugby has so far changed nothing.
God help us if we’re heading for a repeat of 2017.
Alan Jones is a former coach of the Wallabies and hosts The Alan Jones Breakfast Show on 2GB. He will write rugby columns for The Australian throughout the season
'I may be a Senator but I am not stupid'
https://omny.fm/shows/the-alan-jones-breakfast-show/cameron-clyne
Link to Senate Report http://www.aph.gov.au/senate_ca
https://www.change.org/p/rugby-australia-petition-for-cameron-clyne-to-resign-as-chairman-of-the-rugby-australia-board
Another banker and a Sydneysider with an agenda that stretches as far as, well, Sydney. That isn’t going to do anything to restore confidence on this side of the country, Alan. It’s a no from me.
Proudly Western Australian; Proudly supporting Western Australian rugby
One of the very few things I disagree with him on. Narev is worse than de Clyne. Hopefully the pair of them will be up in front of the Royal Commission.
Was going to post this but don't have a subscription
Hi Alan, good to see you have a column to stick the boot in to the RA. You forgot to mention one thing Cameron Clyne has to go. There is a petition out there calling for his resignation here https://www.change.org/p/rugby-australia-petition-for-cameron-clyne-to-resign-as-chairman-of-the-rugby-australia-board
He couldn't tell a straight story on your show, to the Senate Inquiry and when questioned about the meeting with Andrew Forrest in Adelaide.
You hit the nail on the head when you mentioned on your show about the 100 plus employees at the RA HQ which didn't include players, contractors and match officials. What do they all do? Each state union has insufficient game development officers to try and get kids in to the sport.
This is while the RA has an overinflated head count, spends money on reviews (13 of them), goes on junkets, wastes money on rebranding, sold the Rebels to a man who didn't have enough finances and then you have the consulting fees.
For the two seats on the board, using Alan's criteria:
An ex-player (with over 600 games under his belt and the OAM), and experience of rugby administration (Geoff Stooke, if he fancies another go).
A highly successful businessman who's going to know the big end of town, loves his rugby, and has previously pledged personal financial support (Twiggy).
Or do you think the RA might baulk at appointing them to the board?
Last edited by Sheikh; 02-03-18 at 11:34.
Don't tell me the sky's the limit when there are footprints on the moon
So, with Wayne Smith & now Alan Jones feeding The Australian, that has to be a good thing to help even up the ledger a bit & keep the pressure on - good stuff!
It's no coincidence that Enemy starts with an 'E' - secession's looking good!
Just quickly
What Royal Commission?
and
Did you know there are 5 Petitions calling for Clyne or All of the Rugby Board to resign?
Exile
Sydney
"Pain heels. Chicks dig scars and Glory lasts forever." Shane Falco
Banking.
"The main difference between playing League and Union is that now I get my hangovers on Monday instead of Sunday - Tom David
(W)
C'mon the
No points for that GIGS - no brainer.
That Kiwi joker from Commbank might be better at money laundering than the current Rats Arse mob though....oh; hang on.
As you were
"The main difference between playing League and Union is that now I get my hangovers on Monday instead of Sunday - Tom David
ASIC have just released that it has taken action against RIO Tinto AND its former CEO and CFO for deceptive and misleading conduct.
Lets hope RA and Clyne and Pulver are taking notice and taking ASIC very seriously. Deceptive and Misleading conduct? Do we think the then ARU engaged in a little bit of that?
Just a little bit? From reading Alan Jones and Wayne Smith's articles this weekend the RA is facing scrutiny they haven't seen yet since they used Castle's appointment to buy time.
'I may be a Senator but I am not stupid'
https://omny.fm/shows/the-alan-jones-breakfast-show/cameron-clyne
Link to Senate Report http://www.aph.gov.au/senate_ca
https://www.change.org/p/rugby-australia-petition-for-cameron-clyne-to-resign-as-chairman-of-the-rugby-australia-board
Wayne smith article in th oz now
There is this person I know, who I may or may not be married to, who refuses to take a dark view of life, who continually sees the good in others, who sees no purpose whatever in negativity. Gee, I hate that.
Journalists can’t really operate in a world like that. They live in the “real” world and, to cope, they grow a hard outer shell of cynicism. That’s probably the place my column last Saturday was coming from.
If there was one problem Australian rugby should have handled with absolute transparency and openness, it was the crisis that led to the axing of a Super Rugby side last year. And yet, in the space of mere months, the idea of closing down one of the five franchises went from being an impossibility — “can’t shrink your way to greatness” — to a possibility, to a probability, to a reality.
Everything flowed with a neat, sequential logic but at no stage along the way did the then Australian Rugby Union publicly pull back and say “Whoa, I don’t like where this is heading.”
I’ve often raised the argument that this was a whole-of-game problem and so a whole-of-game solution should have been found. I confess, I don’t know precisely how this could have worked and I’m sure that admission will come back to haunt me.
But a good starting point would have been to tell the Western Force upfront that if they handed over their licence to the ARU, there was a fair and reasonable chance that this would lead to their demise.
The West Australians, it must be said, made it worse for themselves. They now admit they painted their financial situation a little worse than it actually was, just to get ARU support, so in a sense they only have themselves to blame for what then befell them. But clearly had they known they were signing their own death warrant, they wouldn’t have signed. Simple as that. So, assuming they had that knowledge, assuming they were forearmed … then what?
That is the $64,000 question. RA/ARU would argue it had explored every possibility to find more money, yet it did so from a standpoint of not having flagged the full extent of the financial crisis in its previous annual report. Compounding the confusion, it so dramatically reversed its public position on how many Super Rugby teams Australia could sustain, such that it makes St Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus look like a slow burn.
How was Australian rugby supposed to respond to this dire emergency? Yes, the ARU had warned many times that times were tough, but in a way it was like the boy who cried wolf. It had issued so many stark warnings before and yet on each occasion it had still bailed teams out of financial trouble. It even did it with the Force.
That person I know who always looks on the bright side would argue the ARU was doing the best it could swallowing the proverbial shit sandwich, that it was putting on a brave face while trying to cope with an emergency that quickly engulfed it.
But the cynical journalist would argue that by not alerting the rugby community that this crisis was unlike anything it had dealt with before in terms of size or significance, it failed to enlist its greatest ally of all — the genuine love some people have for the game. If there is criticism to be made of the ARU, it’s that it did not take the Australian rugby public — not just the various states and franchises, which had their own issues of survival clouding their view, but the broader rugby community — into its confidence and ask for their support. Whole-of-game means whole-of-game ...
Yet, as I repeatedly advise those people who write such painful letters about the loss of the team they love — their postcodes almost invariably beginning with “6” — no good will come of reliving the past.
However much it hurts, it’s time to move on. The game has to revive its fortunes to the point where it can revive the Force. Simple as that. Complicated as that.
No good will come of fanning the flames of hatred and mistrust. If I have been guilty of that, if I have slighted people’s contribution to the game, I sincerely apologise. What happened last year was, I believe, the most regrettable episode in the history of Australian rugby. But it would be churlish to argue that Rugby Australia and its board put rugby and themselves through such grief without the greater good of the game in mind. Vilifying those people who made that decision is, frankly, unfair.
It’s unlikely the people of Western Australia will ever get behind the Melbourne Rebels, even though they know so many familiar faces in that side. Indeed, that’s what they find the most painful. In the Force side of last year there were the rough makings of a Super Rugby title-winner. That’s how high Dave Wessels was aiming. And now all that has been dashed.
The mere sight of a Matt Philip or an Adam Coleman in a Rebels jersey, the mere glimpse of Wessels in a Rebels tie, is so confronting to many West Australians, that they simply turn off the television and vow never to watch rugby again. Who can blame them?
There is, however, an alternative. Help out at the local Perth rugby club, bring on the Jermaine Ainsleys and Dane Haylett-Pettys of the future. At some point — in the near future, God willing — they will be needed when the West rises again. And as that person I know would argue, it’s circle-of-life stuff.
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