Wallaby disgrace! Money comes before the jersey

 
Spiro Zavos Columnist

By , 23 Sep 2009 Spiro Zavos is a Roar Expert

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The Australian Wallabies during the team training session in Brisbane, Friday, July 4, 2008. AAP Image/Dave Hunt

The Australian Wallabies during the team training session in Brisbane, Friday, July 4, 2008. AAP Image/Dave Hunt

At 6.45am on Tuesday, my phone rang. It was Geoff Mould and he was as mad as hell about the demand by some senior Wallabies for $2,500 to play a trial match before the overseas tour.

Mould is a rugby guru.

He coached and selected the 1978 Australian Schoolboys side which is, arguably, the best rugby side produced in Australia. He spotted the Ella brothers at Matraville High, and had a lot to do with their development as master players and thinkers about the game.

Now he was incensed.

“Sorry to ring you so early,” he told me. “I can’t believe it, this story in the Herald about the players refusing to play a trial match unless they are paid $2,500. This mob of poofters couldn’t beat their aunt fanny even if she was playing in a wheelchair. Just play the game, and those who refuse to play unless they are paid, can miss out on the tour!”

According to Tony Dempsey, the chief executive of the Rugby Union Players Association, the players trade union, they were happy to play for nothing: “If it was just an internal trial to select the touring team at North Sydney Oval, we wouldn’t expect to be paid.”

But what RUPA objected to, according to Dempsey, was playing a high profile match put on by the NSWRU as part of their season schedule. The Australian reported that the amount of money RUPA wanted for this high profile match was around $7,500.

This figure is much higher than the figure quoted by Greg Growden in the SMH, in his story of the episode.

He reported that RUPA was approached by some senior Wallabies about the match and the demand of $2,500 a player to play in it was made on the ARU by RUPA.

According to Growden, it was the ARU, not the NSWRU, that decided not to go ahead with the match. Growden also reported that the dispute had been simmering for some time before the ARU decided to pull the plug on the idea.

This version of the affair fits what I knew, or was being told, over the past month or so about the possibility of the game.

It may be that both versions are correct and that the NSWRU tried unsuccessfully to get its Wallabies-Australian Barbarians trial game up, and that the ARU also failed to get its Possibles-Probables trial up too.

It is clear that that if a rampant demand for money had not been made by RUPA, there would have been a trial match, probably under the auspices of the ARU, which has run similar matches many times in the past.

There is a back story to all of this.

When News Ltd made its offer to support a SANZAR Super Rugby tournament and a Tri-Nations tournament on Pay TV, Channel 9 (with the ruthless Kerry Packer in charge) tried to destroy the concept by creating a rebel rugby organisation.

The chief organisers among the players for the rebels were Sean Fitzpatrick, Francois Pienaar and Phil Kearns, the then captains of the All Blacks, the Springboks and the Wallabies.

The Australian part of this troika played hard ball to get its way, to the extent of banning John Eales from meetings between the players and dismissing Eales as ‘old jellyback’ for his refusal to sell out the Wallaby jersey to Packer.

When a settlement was made between the rebel players and the ARU, the union was really hammered in the agreement. John O’Neill came on board as CEO of the ARU after other executives found that they could run rugby in Australia when most of the money coming in went out to the players.

RUPA, which was bankrolled by the ARU,  has fought O’Neill persistently and viciously as he tried to get a more equitable dispersal of the News Ltd monies to promote and grow rugby in Australia.

This latest disgrace is part of the continuing battle, it seems to me, between RUPA and O’Neill, a battle in which, again in my opinion, RUPA has invariably been in the wrong.

The irony in all of this is that the Australian players this season have not justified the lavish payments being made to them.

There were no Australian Super 14 sides in the finals. And the Wallabies have had a poor year which ended in the All Blacks scoring their fifth largest victory since 1903 over them.

Not long after I took Mould’s phone call, I exchanged some pleasantries with a neighbour, Patrick, who lives across the street. “Weren’t the Wallabies terrible on Saturday,” he called out to me. “I can’t bear to watch them any more.”

When Patrick said that, the thought came to me that right now the Wallabies should be paying us money to watch them, not the other way around.

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