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Rugby Union needs a Gladiator to save the day

Roar Guru
7th October, 2014
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No, not that Random Souths Guy. (AAP Image/Action Photographics, Robb Cox)
Roar Guru
7th October, 2014
28
1083 Reads

Watching the NRL grand final at a friend’s place, the game seemed to scream at me, “Are you not entertained?”

From big Sam Burgess playing on with a broken jaw, to Ray Warren going off like a raw prawn, the Big Dance was brilliant.

I’ll save you all the other quotes from Russell Crowe movies that are analogous to sport, as I’m sure you’ve read them all in News Limited papers for the last three days.

But what the game showed was that rugby union needs a Gladiator. A Frank Lowy or a Russel Crowe (please not a Nathan Tinkler). A man, or woman, who doesn’t see the game as a profit-making exercise, not a toy, but a passion.

In 2000, when they were kicked out of the NRL by News Limited, 80,000 Souths fans marched into central Sydney demanding they be reinstated into the competition. At the head of that movement were people like Andrew Denton and Crowe.

Crowe eventually went on to buy the Rabbitohs, and what a moment in their history that has proven to be. Crowe actually invested in the team, upgrading training facilities, meeting the players, treating their WAGS to a corporate box.

He has sunk millions into the Rabbitohs and will forever be a legend for taking a club on the verge of the death and turning them into a powerhouse.

In 2003, when Soccer Australia went broke, in stepped Frank Lowy, the billionaire owner of Westfield. Lowy saved football and in the ten years following turned it into a brewing storm on the Australian sporting horizon.

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He appointed gun sporting executive John O’Neill, rebranded Soccer Australia to the current FFA, and established a national competition. He started a brand new national competition, and ditched the ethnic branding of the old NSL, along with Soccer Australia’s bitter politics.

So where, and who, is rugby’s Robin Hood? Surely given the game’s elitist heritage, there is a wealthy, passionate friend of the game who wishes to see it grow?

Yet passion and rugby are often seen to be mutually exclusive terms, in Australia anyway.

The last time I wrote a column for The Roar, prior to the Super Rugby final, I claimed that the Crusaders were chokers. The response from Crusaders fans was stunning – my head was on a stick. A friend of mine later explained to me that choking was the act of losing when you expected to win – not losing in away finals as the Crusaders have done – so I retract my claim.

But you would never find rugby fans in Australia putting anyone’s head on a stick. They’d be far more likely to quietly mutter in an adjacent room, or not be there at all.

Yet there should have been plenty of people to suffer the aforementioned fate – the IRB, for systematically allowing technical rules to permeate the game in the 2000s, for example. And Channel Nine for putting Rugby World Cup matches on delay in 2011.

Yet at times, rugby fans are far too rational – “Oh, I suppose they did that because it didn’t rate quite well enough,” would be the response of many fans. I can’t imagine NRL fans reacting the same way.

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One can only hope that rugby fans discover the same vocal passion under a mighty leader like Frank Lowy or Russell Crowe – one who reinvigorates the game as a powerhouse on and off the field.

Bill Pulver is doing all he can as ARU CEO, but one suspects he may need the help of a Gladiator.

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