The terrible year for Australian rugby continues

 
Spiro Zavos Columnist

By , 22 Oct 2009 Spiro Zavos is a Roar Expert

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Australian rugby coach Robbie Deans watches his players warm-up before their game against the New Zealand All Blacks in Sydney, Australia, Saturday, July 26, 2008. AP Photo/Mark Baker

Australian rugby coach Robbie Deans watches his players warm-up before their game against the New Zealand All Blacks in Sydney, Australia, Saturday, July 26, 2008. AP Photo/Mark Baker

Around 3 o’clock on Wednesday afternoon, the ARU issued a press release headed: Super 15 decision heads to arbitration. The SANZAR executive committee, the release stated, “could not reach agreement.”  As a result, “no vote was taken” and the matter goes to arbitration where the decision will be binding.

What the bland wording of the release hides is the sheer bastardry of the South African Rugby Union in pushing for a Super 15 spot for a sixth South African team when it already has five teams, along with New Zealand.

The bastardry is compounded by the fact that the Southern Kings, the SARU option, is a mediocre team not even strong enough to do well in the Currie Cup, let alone in the Super 15 tournament.

The SARU option is all about South African politics and the promotion of a black side in a major rugby competition.

SARU can have the Southern Kings in the Super 15 tournament by eliminating one of the current sides, probably the Lions. But it prefers to try to compromise the viability and integrity of the Super 15 by pushing for a bid that has no merit from a playing point of view, in spectator interest, or a balanced tournament structure for local derbies home and away, or from television payment interests.

The nuns taught us to always exercise forgiveness.

But I hope that the ARU, after the arbitrator makes the inevitable decision in favour of the Melbourne bid, never forgives or forgets SARU’s behaviour in this matter.

There will come a time of reckoning for South African rugby when they need something very badly from the ARU. Let’s hope that the ARU screws SARU as ruthlessly as it has screwed the ARU over the fifth Australian franchise and, earlier in the year, over the extended Super 15 concept that comes into force in 2011.

There will be critics of the ARU who will blame it for this failure to complete the Melbourne bid. The fact is that nothing the ARU could have done would have stopped SARU from its determination to press forward with the Southern Kings bid.

It is also a fact, however, that the failure of SANZAR to endorse the Melbourne bid application represents yet another setback (although temporary, hopefully) for Australian rugby in what has been a terrible year for it.

Let me outline the ways it has been terrible.

There has been a massive falling off in ratings and crowds for the Wallabies and for the Australian Super 14 sides.

The rugby public has been disenchanted with the confusion over what laws games have been played under, with the ELVs for the Super 14 and club rugby (which had strong television support in Sydney) and the modified ELVs for the Tests.

The style of play of the Australian Super 14 sides, especially the NSW Waratahs with their ‘win ugly’ game (with only the second word in the phrase being carried out), and the Wallabies in the Tri-Nations, with the exception of a brilliant win against the Springboks at Brisbane, turned spectators and viewers off in their droves.

Even Robbie Deans was disgusted with the performance (or lack of performance) of the Wallabies in their third defeat this season by the All Blacks at Wellington. Deans accused his players of not respecting and honouring the jersey.

The Wallabies had a poor Tri-Nations series, winning only one Test out of six.

No Australian Super 14 side made the finals.

The vicious hostility of RUPA (the players’ trade union) poisoned the attempts of the ARU to get recalcitrant players to do their jobs, on and off the field.

The case of Lote Tuqiri was the trigger for some more RUPA nastiness towards the ARU, despite the fact that the player was not game enough to explain to the public why he was being booted out of rugby.

The coverage of the Tuqiri affair on Fox Sports’ The Rugby Show was biased against the ARU to such an extent that Wallabies were told they could not appear on the show at one point.

The television presentation of Super 14 and Test matches by Fox Sports suffered from an abysmal understanding of the laws by Phil Kearns and boosterism for the Queensland Reds and the Wallabies by Greg Martin that insulted the sensibilities of supporters of teams in the SANZAR countries that did not support Martin’s preferred sides.

The other football codes, especially rugby league, benefit greatly from a brilliant television coverage of their games.

The ARU’s own polling showed that the ‘brand health’ of rugby for the March-June quarter confirmed (hardly surprisingly) Australian rugby’s popularity was on the wane and that the public passion had gone out of the game.

Rugby was deemed ‘exclusive and hard to follow.’ Rugy league and AFL were deemed to be more tribal.

A week or so ago, Greg Growden had an interesting interview with John O’Neill in The Sydney Morning Herald about the sad state of the union in Australia.

O’Neill candidly admitted “the game is not where it should be and not where it has been.” Rugby, he said, has a “very loyal fan base but they are getting very impatient.”

He pointed out that the Wallabies have won only two Tri-Nations tournaments in 14 years; that they finished last this year; that they haven’t won the Bledisloe Cup since 2002; that, despite two Rugby World Cup victories, the Wallabies were somewhere between 5th and 8th in the 2007 RWC; and that only two Super Rugby titles have been won.

“It all revolves around success on the field. People can blame the laws of the game and all sorts of things but, at the end of the day, everyone is operating under the same laws. We can’t blame anyone but ourselves,” O’Neill told Growden.

O’Neill insisted, and it is hard to disagree with him, that a lot of the problems facing Australian rugby will be resolved when, and if, the Wallabies start winning the big Tests.

Robbie Deans has coached the Wallabies for 25 matches (23 Tests and two Barbarians matches) for 15 wins and 10 losses. Nine of the losses have been against the Springboks and the All Blacks, the two best teams in the world.

Under Deans the record against the All Blacks is 6 – 1 to them, and 3 – 3 against the Springboks.

“We’ve got to get ourselves back into the 75 – 80 per cent win-loss ratio,” O’Neill insists.

He also insists that successful sporting bodies are “hallmarked” by the administration, the coach and the captain being “on the same wavelength.”

We see here, I believe, the reason why George Smith and Stirling Mortlock lost their leadership positions in the Wallabies. Mortlock did not (initially) publicly support the ARU on the Tuqiri affair, even though he knew the full story.

A captain like John Eales, who worked splendidly with O’Neill and coach Rod Macqueen through an earlier depressing period to eventually win the 1999 RWC tournament, would certainly have supported the ARU over Tuqiri’s dismissal.

The Super Rugby franchises also need to pick up their game and start delivering strong winning results and attractive rugby to win back their supporters.

Rugby in Australia suffers from a lack of product to sustain a full season.

Deans has joined the clamour for some sort of equivalent of the Currie Cup and New Zealand provincial tournaments. Personally, I think some form of national club tournament in Australia after the local tournaments are completed might be the answer.

The top four Sydney sides, three from Brisbane, a Melbourne side, Canberra and a NSW Country side, and President side of the best of the other unions might provide the answer.

The expanded Super Rugby format in 2011 will provide more matches in Australia, with Test and Super Rugby going on from late February to October. This will make a difference to answering the ‘lack of product’ problem, provided Australia gets its fifth Super Rugby franchise, that franchise is run out of Melbourne by the Melbourne bidders, and that Australian teams perform well in the expanded tournament.

Which brings us back to the absolute necessity of a rational SANZAR arbitration decision.

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