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NRC report card: The thumbs up-thumbs down review

3rd November, 2014
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Last year's NRC had plenty of attacking rugby. This season should be even better. (J.B-Photography)
Expert
3rd November, 2014
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2325 Reads

The National Rugby Championship has been run and won. Now, the nervous wait begins to see if the competition will return in 2015.

This time seven years ago, John O’Neill read the Australian Rugby Championship its last rights, after it shelled more than $4.5 million in its first year.

Anecdotally, I’ve heard that the NRC has essentially broken even in its first year, which is very encouraging news. As was Jamie Pandaram’s article in the News Ltd press on Sunday, that Foxtel and Fox Sports “network sources confirmed … that they will screen the third-tier tournament again next year.”

“Executives feel it needs time to develop before luring new viewers, while Australian rugby officials are desperate for its survival,” Pandaram wrote.

Obviously, the future of the NRC hinges wholly and solely on television broadcasts in some shape or form, and while I’ve no reason to doubt the sources of my ESPNscrum colleague, Greg Growden, this new revelation of some degree of about face within Foxtel is certainly good news.

Free-to-air TV of course remains a dream, but we also need to be realistic about these things. Even to put an NRC game on a digital multi-channel involves production costs, and a commercial network is just not going to outlay any amount of money to screen games live with no hope of a return.

Likewise with the ABC and SBS, in this age of funding reviews. The chances of them wearing production costs themselves are even lower than of the ARU paying them to broadcast games.

Regardless, with the NRC done, it’s time to reflect on the tournament. Roar regulars El Gamba and RobC have kicked proceedings off over the last few days with a wonderful two-part take on the comp, and while I will attempt to avoid it, some degree of overlap is inevitable.

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However, bear with me Roarers, because this is a long one – but it all needs to be said.

Marketing
This seems like an obvious place to start, but I’ll first say we have to give thumbs up to the nine NRC teams themselves. With very limited resources and in some cases, the very definition of shoestring budgets, have managed to build levels of awareness of themselves, and that games were being played.

Crowds weren’t massive, and though I have no idea what kind of benchmarks were used, a competition average of just over 2300 per game is not terrible, considering the bare-bones, almost guerrilla type of marketing that the clubs were forced into.

Social media engagement was decent across the board, though some better-resourced clubs obviously did this better than others. On that front, the Greater Sydney Rams finished the season ahead of the pack, with a part-time staff and thanks mostly to the very clever ‘#GetRammed’ hashtag.

Melbourne Rising, Perth Spirit, and the Queensland clubs following the Reds’ methods also achieved great success in the online space.

Thumbs down is also obvious, and it goes directly to the ARU marketeers. Aside from banner ads on The Roar and Green and Gold Rugby, I genuinely can’t recall any obvious tournament-wide marketing efforts from HQ. NRC ads on Fox Sports were built around their TV broadcasts, and thus would’ve been part of the contra deal done when the competition was created.

The extent of the competition-level marketing was the NRC website, which started out by linking to team announcements and match reports, but by the end was essentially just preview and review pieces. Social media activity was basically whatever the ARU communications people could muster in the five or ten spare minutes they found each day when not putting out spot fires.

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And we should remember that last point. It’s easy to say ‘The ARU did nothing for the NRC’ but the reality of it is that with all the other sagas and debacles happening within Australian rugby over the last few months, it’s a wonder the communications guys managed as much for the NRC as they did.

After the mid-competition departure of key people in strategic positions, I actually have a lot of empathy for the communications team, and the effort they put in almost in spite of the essentially rudderless situation they found themselves.

Additionally, too much cost and heavy lifting was left to the clubs. Leaving the video streaming concept in the laps of the clubs a week out from the competition start was ridiculous, particularly after all the ARU talk a month out from the start of providing “high level rugby in a very accessible way”.

Coverage
Not unlike the competition itself, the NRC coverage could best be described as being ‘off Broadway’. Media coverage was left to a broadcaster reaching a third of the population at most, and niche sporting websites like The Roar, Green and Gold Rugby, and Rugby News. And thumbs up to all of them for a sterling job.

Certainly, Fox Sports did their bit, even if they did largely limit themselves to the games they covered. The only NRC ads I ever saw were on various different Fox Sports channels, while they also had reasonable coverage through their website. Commentator Sean Maloney would’ve been the most passionate person about the NRC I’d came across, until I had the pleasure of meeting Josephine and Tony Sukkar of competition principal partner, Buildcorp, at Ballymore on Saturday night.

If there’s one thumbs down for Fox Sports, you’d have to think it was scheduling games for Thursday nights. It was one of those ideas that seemed good at the time, but by the end, the TV game often felt detached from the rest of the round. And I can’t help wonder if that affected ratings, too, though the choice of games would also have played a part.

Around the country, there were pockets of quality local reporting, with Brisbane-based Luke Pentony from the ABC a good example. In fact, I have to add here that the Queensland strategy of using the Reds coverage template was a brilliant strategic decision perfectly executed by Tom Kennedy for Brisbane City, and Brendan Hertel for Country.

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Around the nine teams, all of them became used to my regular phone calls, and over time a good rapport was built up. I never wanted to trump their team announcements, but remain grateful for the weekly selection tips and dots that they’d throw up for me to join.

All nine media reps did a great job, but along with the boys up in Queensland, I especially need to mention Pete Fairbairn down in Melbourne, Elise Goodin over in Perth, and the tireless Sam Ryan for NSW Country.

One thing I will give the ARU a thumbs up for was the decision to make available rights-free photographic images for use alongside our coverage. For every game, there was always a Dropbox folder with at least ten or a dozen high-quality images available for media outlets.

It’s a little thing, but when the main coverage is being left to websites with little or no capacity to pay for imagery, it was a godsend.

It would be easy to give a thumbs down to the mainstream media for their lack of coverage, but the reality is that save for the Round 9 ‘own try’, there really wasn’t much in the NRC that would make the evening news anyway.

With less than five minutes to fill, and an off-field rugby soap opera to report on, the NRC action didn’t stand a chance.

Editors and news producers have to provide the most newsworthy events each day, and if we’re honest, rugby in Australia this year has become a hard sell – the Waratahs’ title triumph aside.

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However, I will certainly point the thumbs down at the ARU for its uncanny ability to find new ways of cannibalising any possible chance of NRC coverage. The number of times in the last couple of weeks that NRC Finals promotional opportunities have been lost because of a poorly timed press release from HQ is ridiculous.

Instead of all the talk last Friday and Saturday being about the Final, the rugby news of note was that Kurtley Beale had been fined $3000 for the clothing breach that sparked the whole sorry tale. Why that announcement couldn’t have waited until yesterday, for example, I’ll never know.

Just on coverage, and while it’s not the reason I started looking into the NRC and following through like I did, I do sincerely appreciate all the comments and thankyou’s that have come my way. And I have to extend that out to teams, players, coaches, and even NRC sponsors, too; the recognition has been quite overwhelming, when really I’ve just been playing my part. I still can’t get over Buildcorp’s gesture to ensure I saw the Final in person on Saturday.

Support
We were told from the start that crowds didn’t need to be big, and that was certainly the case throughout the tournament.

By my records, the 7889 at Ballymore for the Final pushed the competition average out to more than 2300 people at every game, but if we remove the outlier – the 13700 into Suncorp before the Bledisloe curtain-raiser finished – then the figure drops back to just over 2000.

As I said on Saturday night, the Final crowd was obviously the biggest standalone attendance for the competition, but at the other end of the scale, two estimates of just 500 were also recorded. One of them was the first Semi-Final on the Central Coast, where after NSW Country didn’t want to publicise a disappointing number, I managed to get a degree of confirmation from the stadium that while the actual figure was more than 500, it was also well less than a thousand.

Brisbane City averaged more than 4800 at their four Ballymore games, but the Sydney Stars barely cracked 4000 in total for their four games at Leichardt Oval.

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Support for the NSW teams was disappointing, I have to say, and I can’t help wonder if it has to do with the complete detachment of the four NRC teams by the Waratahs. Again, anecdotally, it’s been suggested that NSW were the least supportive of the NRC concept, a position only strengthened when they won a Super Rugby title.

This would be massively disappointing if true, and while I have no reason to doubt my sources on this, I hope it’s not the case. Brisbane City has just highlighted the obvious benefit of using the NRC as an extension of Super Rugby strategy and operation.

Even just a simple division of the Waratahs’ member database and a few email reminders about who the ‘local’ NRC team is could have made a difference to the crowd numbers in NSW. And it wouldn’t have cost them any more than a few hours of analysis and email-drafting time.

Game development
This is the one topic I can keep relatively brief, because the benefits have been evident since the first night of the competition.

It’s a clear and obvious thumbs up for the technical improvements at set piece. The value of a stable and strong scrum was identified early, and quickly used as attacking weapon.

I really enjoyed sitting next to Scott Allen on Saturday night, and we both agreed as Brisbane prop Pettowa Paraka crossed for his first try that if the NRC achieves nothing else, it’s been entirely worth it just to see the technical improvement and proficiency in teams using the attacking lineout into driving maul.

The way teams learned how and when to commit to and withhold from the breakdown as the competition went on can only benefit Australian rugby down the track, as can the way some teams profited from the counter attack.

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Teams grew in confidence as they entered opposition territory, and their patience was often rewarded with eight points. Teams learned the value of the pick-and-drive as a way of keeping possession.

It’s a wonderful irony that while the points system tweaks did indeed bring with it a greater emphasis on attack – and the try scoring numbers and lack of penalty goal attempts speak for themselves – there’s arguably been greater improvements made at the breakdown and in forwards play.

The obvious thumbs down has to be defence, though. There’s no doubt some teams were better defensively than others, and indeed, Perth stormed to the Final on the back of their defensive pressure.

But too many teams leaked tries way too easily, and that’s part of the reason the competition averaged nine tries a game. Five of the nine teams finished with negative for-and-against records, and Melbourne averaged 47 points and almost seven tries per game, often highlighting the spectacularly large gap between Super Rugby quality and club players.

Indeed, that’s one of the major reasons for the creation of the NRC.

Overall: thumbs up
If you really wanted to pick holes in the NRC, you probably wouldn’t have to dig that deep.

At times, it did feel amateurish in its organisation and operation. There’s no question that it can be run better, or that marketing will be the number one item on the lessons learned review.

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But the actual rugby itself was really good to watch, and there was plenty of enjoyment to be found in the way teams embraced the law variations. All of the players, coaches, and even referees I spoke to over the course of the competition absolutely loved it.

However, there was more to it than that. There was a lot to love about going back to the smaller grounds, the rustic old venues that reminded us why we got into rugby in the first place.

Sitting on the hill in the sunshine enjoying simple rugby pleasures like steak sandwiches and cold beer in cans, and seeing the enjoyment on the faces of kids as they dived over the same tryline as the players did only ten minutes earlier. The return of the proper post-match function, too.

The way long-time supporters of rugby have been able to become first time sponsors of the game at a professional level is just as important for the game as new fans.

On the field, the NRC has given rise to new players, coaches, and referees. Behind the scenes, there’s new medical staff, new media managers, and indeed new people in the media covering games.

There’s been so many plusses from the NRC this season that to see it dropped now would be an even bigger travesty than when the ARC was canned seven years ago. My argument back then was that a continuation of the ARC should’ve been seen as an investment in the future of the game in this country, and I still believe that now.

The NRC is already on a better financial footing and is significantly closer to actually making money, but that shouldn’t be the reason why it needs to continue.

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The last eleven weeks have provided the business case for the NRC remaining. The next ten months should be spent making the crucial administrative and operational improvements.

And I’d love a seat at the review table, if you’re reading, Mr Pulver.

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