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Date June 2, 2015 - 6:17PM
Georgina Robinson
Chief Rugby Reporter
The Melbourne Rebels and Western Force would establish $500,000 a year live-in academies under a proposal to level the playing field across Australian rugby's five provinces.
With talk of a draft dead in the water, and in response to complaints the country's two newest franchises are raiding the nurseries of Queensland and NSW, the Australian Rugby Union is favouring an academy model to help boost the competitiveness of the Force and Rebels.
Funded by revenue from the upcoming five-year broadcast deal, which is expected to deliver the ARU a cash windfall of up to $40 million annually from next year, the programs would target potential future stars straight out of high school, plugging a gaping hole in the ARU's development pathway and giving the Force and Rebels the power to recruit and develop their own mini-nurseries.
The Force have been trialling a scaled-down version of the program for the past nine months with four players, three of whom are West Australians and one from Tonga via Auckland. One of the players, back rower Kane Koteka, made his Super Rugby debut this year.
Rugby WA chief executive Mark Sinderberry said he believed an academy model, with up to 15 players living and training together full time, was the best available solution to a natural inequity across the five Super Rugby franchises.
"Everyone recognises that within the current structure there's an inherent unfairness in the financial and talent distribution across the five provinces," Sinderberry said.
"This seems to be the best option to see ourselves and Victoria develop while being careful not to take away from the strength and depth in the traditional rugby heartland areas."
With both the Rebels and Force blessed with high quality training facilities already, the estimated price tag of $500,000 per year would cover the cost of housing the players, who might range in age between 17 and 21, and providing extra coaching resources.
Depth and its distribution has been a vexed and politically charged question in Australian rugby for some time. Several senior coaching and administrative figures have told Fairfax Media privately that they do not believe the country has the playing depth to sustain five Super Rugby teams.
Likewise, there is a view that if the country's best talent was distributed equally across the five provinces, no Australian team would have the potential to win a Super Rugby title.
But having committed to furnishing the SANZAR competition with five teams until at least 2020, the ARU faces the challenge of helping all five become competitive, which has been no easy feat over the past five years. Although the Rebels have marked milestone after milestone under current coach Tony McGahan this season and the Force notched their best ever season under Michael Foley last year, they recruit and perform against the odds.
"There's an aspiration across all of Australian rugby to have five strong Super Rugby franchises and in doing that we'll have the best chance of having a successful Wallabies team, but our current environment is such that a lot of the talent is concentrated in the Sydney and Brisbane traditional heartland areas," Sinderberry said.
Queensland and NSW are particularly sensitive to the "redistribution" principle, arguing it is grossly unfair that players who have come through their well-established systems are poached by the other franchises.
An entry-level draft has been proposed in the past and was on the table for discussion again this year, but Sinderberry revealed the provincial bosses could not reach agreement on how one would work.
"In the meantime, we're proposing a concentrated development program, getting players in at a younger age than we normally would do. We believe it will help us develop meaningful depth in our squads," he said.
http://www.smh.com.au/rugby-union/fo...02-ghenh6.html