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This article from Wayne Smith in today's Australian is 100% on point, in my opinion. Well said that man.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/spor...0b73b9554c8959
WAYNE SMITH
ARU needs to be overhauled after this Super Rugby fiasco
It was my long-time former editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell who told me once that my greatest asset as a journalist was that I saw both sides of every argument; and my greatest weakness as a journalist was that I saw both sides of every argument.
Fair call. We each go with what we’ve got. So it may take me some time to arrive at conclusions that other people reached almost instantaneously.
Certainly in the case of the Australian Rugby Union’s handling of the process to dump one of its five teams from Super Rugby, I tried not to be critical. It was a hellishly difficult decision, one that called for strong, decisive leadership.
But it has been mishandled right from the start, at virtually every level, and now the ARU is utterly lost — hemmed in by *potential or actual lawsuits at every turn.
Even the men most likely to be hurt by its decision, Western Force coach Dave Wessels and Melbourne Rebels coach Tony McGahan, are appealing for an end to the agony of uncertainty. The ARU must find answers, and quickly.
How this all ends, I haven’t a clue, not now, not after everything rugby has been put through. But one thing now is inescapably clear — the ARU needs to be overhauled from top to bottom.
It starts with management. If chief executive Bill Pulver and deputy chairman Brett Robinson went to the London meeting of SANZAAR with the decision already made to drop the Force, then at least it was a defensible decision, even if not one that I or a host of people would agree with. Seemingly they told SANZAAR that the Force were now owned by the ARU and could be wrapped up with a minimum of fuss.
But details are now starting to emerge that they neglected to tell their joint-venture partners that in purchasing the licence from the Force last August, they signed an agreement that guaranteed the West Australians there would be a Super Rugby presence in Perth through to the end of 2020. It may be that the ARU didn’t think that clause would be a problem. By reducing the competition from 18 teams to 15, it may have thought that this voided the agreement, but that’s one hell of an assumption to make. And it’s also one hell of an oversight not to at least alert SANZAAR of the potential problem.
Now, the caveat here is that pretty much everything that has been done has been done in secret, so this information is sketchy and might be entirely off the mark. What information there is has come forth only in whispers and has had to be pieced together. It may be that there was a perfectly rational explanation for every action the Australian delegates took, but who would know?
What can be said with certainty is that SANZAAR sources have told The Australian they were shocked to find that there was an agreement in place between the ARU and the Force that pretty much made the club *unsackable.
What’s more, the ARU board only became aware of this same clause some time later. So presumably it was making decisions while it was not in possession of the full facts. More on this later.
Then there was the process of evaluating which club would be culled.
Initially, there was no process. It has decided on the Force and all the energy of the ARU was directed towards finding a justification that supported that conclusion. It was only when the ARU began to realise that it was about to encounter considerable opposition along the way that the search was widened to include the Melbourne Rebels and the Brumbies.
Even this was wrong. NSW and Queensland should have been thrown into the mix as well. And while they are the two heartland states and pretty much indispensable to Australian rugby, they should have been required to justify their existence.
That case might have been more awkward than it seems. The Reds could have been wound up as insolvent as recently as November; the Waratahs, meanwhile, are battling to pull a crowd in Australia’s largest city.
Nor should ARU chief operating officer Rob Clarke have been part of the process of selecting which team was culled. He is a former chief executive of both the Brumbies and the Rebels, as intimately involved with both clubs as it is possible to be, and it is understandable that Force fans feel dismayed by his involvement.
Clarke may well have felt that having Force boss Mark Sinderberry reporting directly to him also gave him a strong attachment to the Perth club but that’s not how it has been perceived. And as Clarke himself has often said, perception is reality.
And, although he hasn’t been directly involved in this process, any review of the ARU needs to take in the performance of Ben Whitaker in the high performance manager’s role. In some circles, he is widely praised, in others, not so much. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating and over the four years Whitaker has been in that role the skill levels of Australian players have fallen significantly compared to New Zealand players, while the under-20 program has descended into obscurity for a nation that prides itself on ranking in the top three globally.
As for Pulver himself, he has said that he would resign tomorrow if it would serve the good of the game. There is no doubting he had the good of rugby at heart but how will it be possible for him to lead the game after this?
It is one thing for the ARU directors to feel let down by the performance of management but if they really understood rugby, how would it have been possible for them to be misled?
It is said that virtually every ARU board meeting is consumed by finances, or rather the lack thereof.
When the game is in trouble, there is no doubt that finances are critical. But there is more to rugby than dollars and cents and somehow this has been lost at the upper levels of the game.
A lot of lip service has been paid to doing more for grassroots and there is no doubt the arguments of Brett Papworth and the Shute Shield clubs would have received a timely boost from Rebels coach McGahan’s comment overnight — that there were six forwards in his match-day squad of 23 who were not even on Super Rugby contracts. They were ring-ins from clubland — yet still they managed a draw with the Sharks.
So clubland is relevant today and can return to those bygone days when it was more relevant still.
But the game needs more than that. It needs a renaissance of its morale and spirit and vigour.
How many of the nine ARU directors are equipped to provide that?
Proudly Western Australian; Proudly supporting Western Australian rugby
My grandmother could run the joint better than the ARU, and she has been dead for 28 years!
Time for a revolution!!!
ARU and plan is the same as America and intelligence!
May the FORCE be with you!
see also soccer journo Cockerill's article. Written from that slant but basically says Rugby's position is irretrievable now. He may be right.
http://www.smh.com.au/sport/soccer/f...15-gvlogn.html
Football Federation Australia can thrive where the Australian Rugby Union has failed
There are so many lessons to learn from the crisis in rugby, it's hard to know where to start. If David Gallop thinks he's under siege, he could ring Bill Pulver. But it's not the similarities which matter. It's the differences. Which is why the mindset of Football Federation Australia remains the key.
It's hard to avoid the perception that Muddied Oafs' deepest wounds have been self-inflicted. By worshipping on the altar of commercialism since the game turned professional, they've sacrificed their identity, their constituency, and ultimately their participation. More on that later.
Rugby is shrinking – by all measures – because it's disconnected from its base. That's the moral of the story for the FFA as it approaches an equally critical juncture. Buffeted by a perfect storm of constitutional demands for greater democracy and transparency, a mutiny by A-League owners, a thirst for expansion and a push for a national second division, the FFA has been circling the wagons rather than opening the door. Wrong.
Ignoring the clamour from the rank-and-file won't solve anything. Instead, embracing them will revitalise, and monetise, the game's greatest asset. It's size. That's how to make sure football doesn't repeat rugby's mistakes. Socialism versus capitalism? I'm backing people power to win in the end.
There's a credible view that the professional football codes in Australia have reached a tipping point. Rugby may well be the canary in the coalmine. Pay television, which over two decades has morphed sports into industries, faces a difficult future. The gravy train may be pulling into the station.
Trouble is, too many of those running these sports have become complacent, and narrow-minded. They've come to manage though the one-dimensional prism of broadcast revenue – a small screen version of a much bigger picture. It's become all about the commerce, and little else. The suits and the boots have never been so far apart.
For the NRL and the AFL, the honeymoon is not yet over because they're still getting over-the-odds from TV. For rugby, though, the balancing act has reached the precipice. And it's left itself with very little to fall back on.
Strangely enough, it's football – which has never been able to gorge on gigantic broadcast deals – which is best positioned to flourish in the emerging commercial landscape. Why? Because of the numbers. Not the ones on a Whitlam Square spreadsheet, but the ones where it really matters. At a park near you.
In the last six months, two major surveys have re-confirmed the game's status as a grassroots monolith. Not just in terms of the football codes, but in terms of all of Australia's major sporting pursuits.
At the end of last year, the federal government's Ausplay survey put club-based participation in football at 1,086,986, or an incredible 18.8 per cent of all participation in the country. For decades, participation numbers of all sports – including football – have been manipulated to suit an argument. This survey has a strong claim for independence, and impartiality. Which is why rival codes such as AFL (625,627) and rugby league (247,883) were unhappy. Rugby? It didn't even make the list.
A few months later came further proof of football's player power. Roy Morgan Research – based on the looser definition of "regular participation" – still had football as No.1, but it was the trend which raised eyebrows. Comparing the 15-year gap between 2001 (when a similar survey was last completed) and 2016, football's numbers have risen by a whopping 46 per cent. Just nine of 27 sports had increased participation, and only rowing (62 percent) has done better than football since 2001.
According to the survey, AFL has effectively flat-lined ( -1 per cent) during that period, while rugby league participation has dropped by 27 per cent. Rugby? It's collapsed by 63 per cent, down to just 55,000 players. Not surprisingly, the ARU described the survey as "fake news", but whichever way you cut it, here's a game in crisis. The price to pay for pulling out the roots.
So that's what the FFA needs to contemplate. The warning signs are clear. The sports of the future will have to look down, not up. People who love their sport need to be engaged, respected, and appreciated. It may not be as easy as pocketing a fat cheque from a broadcaster, but soon it will be the best way forward. For some, the only way.
Rugby either didn't see what was coming, or didn't want to. It's hard to see how rugby can recover from the damage done. The FFA's challenge is to make a quantum leap of faith, to look beyond the spreadsheet and see the horizon. It's an exciting one if it opens the door, and open its mind. Watch this space.
Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate
Interesting article.
I would actually say that rugby has a good chance of engaging the grass roots in the next five years.
Simply because if they don't start to engage the players in the suburban parks, rugby will cease to exist in Australia.
I'm assuming that the green jacket brigade are too arrogant to see that, and the game will die in the arse professionally, to be built up by an infinitesimal grass roots player base into a national body that actually cares about people outside of Sydney.
But by then, I'll be unlikely to care (if I'm still alive)
C'mon the![]()
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I've also considered his point re Pay TV. I can see the possibility of that well drying up as the NBN roll out continues and more people buy digital passes. I think the NRL might owe departed CEO Smith a big thankyou as that occurs. The AFL has to wait years for that revenue stream. Rugby and the A League OTOH are pretty much hitched to Foxtel aren't they?
"The main difference between playing League and Union is that now I get my hangovers on Monday instead of Sunday - Tom David
The A-League gets a small component of it's TV deal from FTA given there is one game per round live (take not ARU) on SBS, but yes the lions share of the cash for the A-League currently comes from Fox.
I can't see Foxtel being threatened too much unless Digital Passes are allowed on anything bigger than a Tablet. Telstra half own Foxtel so I'll assume there won't be too much pressure for a change there.
Last edited by jargan83; 24-04-17 at 15:10.
As far as I'm aware the NRL digital pass (and it's AFL equivalent) can only be viewed on a mobile device e.g. a Tablet or a Phone.
Edit: Laptop devices are also supported but apparently it can detect if you plug it into a TV.
http://www.nrl.com/News/WatchLIVENRL...7/Default.aspx9. Can I watch live video via the NRL.com Match Centre on my PC?
No, live streaming on the NRL.com Match Centre is restricted to supported laptop devices. Live video playout to any external device (eg: a PC monitor or TV via direct cable connection, Airplay or Airplay mirroring ) is not allowed
Anyone know where I can pick up a 50" tablet?
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