Union prepares for tumultuous vote

[Burgs]

I don't know why or what it is but I just have an uneasy feeling about all of this...

Union prepares for tumultuous vote

By Jon Geddes
April 16, 2007

AUSTRALIA coach John Connolly maintains the Rugby World Cup is still within the Wallabies' reach later this year - despite New South Wales and Queensland sitting at the foot of the Super 14 table and Western Force conceding 117 points in its past two outings.

But those on-field struggles and the "don't worry, be happy" reaction at the national level seem typical of proceedings behind the scenes.

Australian Rugby Union chief executive Gary Flowers has constantly denied the game is in trouble in Australia, and his board of directors agreed last year when they handed him a full bonus, lifting his salary to $660,000.

Australian rugby, however, is facing a major fork on the road.

Super 14 crowds have slumped; sponsors have expressed reservations over the lack of leadership at the ARU; the financial viability of the third-tier national competition due to kick off this season is under question; and there are growing concerns about the impact of third-party endorsements on player salaries.

While Connolly's day of judgment is on hold until the Rugby World Cup in France in September and October, for ARU bosses it arrives on Thursday, when union's annual general meeting will be the most important in the game's recent history.

Current chairman Ron Graham is standing down, and the two men in line to replace him are NSW Rugby Union chairman Arvid Petersen, who will be inducted as a director the same day, and long-serving board member Peter McGrath.

If Petersen wins the vote, Flowers is almost certain to be removed as chief executive within days. Petersen has made no secret of his concerns over the lack of leadership at the ARU.

McGrath, however, represents the establishment; he is a core Flowers supporter.

The fact that the NSW and Queensland union boards, in seeking a new way forward for the game in Australia, believe Petersen is the man to bring a sense of unity represents another potential time bomb as McGrath, if he wins the chairmanship, will not have the backing of the two major states and the current bickering is likely to continue.

The voting numbers are believed to remain tight.

The Petersen camp at first thought he held at least a 5-3 majority, but speculation from other areas suggests the voting is now locked at 4-4.

Flowers - the ninth board member - says he will not vote in the election process.

The chairman usually has the deciding vote in a deadlocked ballot, but Graham will have resigned from the board. A director may then have to be appointed to preside over the meeting, but there will likely be a scrap over such an appointment if the directors is deemed to have the casting vote.

"They might have to adjourn and then reconvene to vote again," a leading ARU source said.

[Sagerian]

Thumbs.....















Arses.......

[Burgs]

Flowers a scapegoat for making choices that were needed

* OPINION
Wayne Smith, rugby union editor
* April 14, 2007

HISTORY may well judge Gary Flowers a whole lot more charitably than his cantankerous contemporaries.
Certainly he is getting few kind reviews at the moment, which is to be expected. Australian rugby is in one of the deepest holes in its history, with the on-field woes of the Waratahs and Reds contaminating every part of the game.

Even by the notoriously toxic standards of Australian rugby politics this is a poisonous environment, and it's all too predictable that those proclaiming their desire to clean out the system should go about it by sucking out the venom and spitting it in Flowers' face.

Where is the justice in that? Flowers inherited a system that was basically dysfunctional, one cemented into place at the dawn of professional rugby in 1995, when deals were done with unseemly haste to keep the game out of the claws of World Rugby Corp.

Elite players were handed an obscenely large piece of the pie, to the detriment of grassroots rugby, the draft was banned because players insisted on being sole masters of their own destinies, and third-party agreements -- the bane of the modern game -- sprang up like mushrooms after a thunderstorm.

Those and other contentious issues have continued to fester over the past decade, and the only way they could have been corrected by Flowers was if goodwill existed on all sides.

Yet goodwill has been conspicuously missing in rugby since long before he arrived on the scene in the middle of the Andrew Johns saga, when relations between the ARU and NSW hit rock bottom over the ARU's decision not to chase Johns because of fears his body wouldn't hold together.

How curious now that Flowers should be coming under fire from all quarters for not being a head-kicker. Usually such criticism directly contrasts him with his larger-than-life predecessor, John O'Neill, who rightly resents the inference that he was some sort of jackbooted bully.

Yet when the ARU decided it no longer required O'Neill's services after the 2003 World Cup, the reason it gave him was that "another style of leadership" was needed. So the ARU, admittedly a different body to the one that will be ushered in at next Thursday's AGM, went out and hired a chief executive who was the very antithesis of O'Neill.

Where O'Neill at times could be strong-willed, Flowers is flexible. Where O'Neill was in the limelight, Flowers shuns it. Where O'Neill set a course and followed it come what may, Flowers negotiates and seeks consensus. Each has his own personal style but, little more than three years ago, the ARU decided it had had enough of the uncompromising O'Neill approach and wanted to try Flowers power instead.

Now Flowers is being pilloried because he is not more like O'Neill. How curious, too, that some of those most vehemently accusing Flowers of being too weak and wishy-washy fell out with him over brave stands he took for the good of the game. If Flowers is so meek, how was it he often found himself in the thick of ferocious scraps?

Flowers did not want to sack Eddie Jones as Wallabies coach at the end of 2005, even as the Test losses mounted. He agonised over the decision for weeks, though subjected to relentless pressure from the media. In the end, he decided Jones had to go and was strong enough to make that call.

Since then, he has been accused of weakness for not pulling Jones into line as the combative Reds coach took regular aim at the ARU's headquarters.

Yet Jones is a Queensland Rugby Union employee, or "contracted consultant", so if he oversteps the mark, shouldn't it be the QRU's job to rein him in? And if Flowers had moved against him, how would Queensland have responded to federal interference?

If there is one issue that has made enemies for Flowers, it's the Australian Rugby Championship that will kick off in August. For as long as rugby stalwarts can remember there has been wistful talk of having a competition akin to New Zealand's National Provincial Championship and South Africa's Currie Cup. And it would still be talk had not Flowers, recognising that the introduction of a fourth Super 14 team had exposed a desperate need for a semi-professional competition to improve Australia's player depth, rammed through the ARC.

Typically, he settled on a compromise, pooling club teams in Sydney and Brisbane to create hybrid outfits. The way Flowers envisaged it, that was the fairest way to share the pain but it made implacable enemies of teams such as Randwick and Sydney University, who believed they were entitled to go it alone. No doubt they could have, but at what cost to every other Sydney club?

Flowers dug in and refused to be intimidated, even venturing into the lions' den this week to attend a function of Sydney Uni's Rugby Foundation to celebrate the club's 100th Wallaby, stoically sitting through speech after speech condemning his stand.

Now the point of attack has been switched, with his critics bemoaning the fact the new competition will cost the ARU as much as $8million a year to underwrite. Quite possibly it will, but have those same critics considered how much the Pura Cup costs Cricket Australia each year and where Australian cricket would be without it?

Everything comes at a cost. And that includes pushing Flowers out the door. At this moment, with Australian rugby deep in the recession it had to have -- and would have had four years ago had Stirling Mortlock not intercepted Carlos Spencer's pass in the World Cup semi-final -- qualities such as tolerance and fairness and a preparedness to compromise are viewed as signs of weakness.

How long, one wonders, before they come to be seen as evidence of real strength?

[Darren]

deep in the recession it had to have

hehe... nice

[frontrow]

Good balanced argument there, gives a different view of Flowers, one i have a fair amount of respect for now...

[travelling_gerry]

From my known history O'Neill was not a well liked fellow within Rugby community