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A few weeks ago, Dane Haylett-Petty, the Western Force star player and first-time Wallaby in 2016, urinated in the hallway of the Southern Sun Bloemfontein Hotel. In another incident at the hotel, Pek Cowan, another Wallaby and Force veteran, drove the team bus without permission.
These incidents occurred after the Force lost an away match against the Cheetahs, 30-29.
A group of Force players went out drinking. They ended up breaking the team’s 1am curfew.
When they finally got back to the hotel, a friendly fight that grew nasty broke out between Dane Haylett-Petty and his brother, Ross.
Another Force new Wallaby, Adam Coleman, had an argument with prop Francois Van Wyk, which ended, apparently, with a hand-shake. Both these players broke the curfew rules.
It was after all these incidents that Cowan took over the team’s minibus and drove to a fast-food outlet in town.
Over the weekend, the Force lost their last home game for the season, to the Stormers, 22-3. The loss means the Force did not win a Super Rugby match in Perth in 2016.
The team is on the bottom of the weak Australian conference, on 13 points. Like the Southern Kings, the bottom team on the South Africa 2 conference (nine points), the Force have won only two matches.
The Force are also ahead of the Sunwolves, the new Super Rugby team that have won only one match and notched up just nine points.
The Sunwolves have great potential for growth, on and off the field. The same thing cannot be said about the Force. The Perth franchise has exhausted any potential for growth. It is a failed franchise. It needs to be transplanted to a region, the western suburbs of Sydney, where there is terrific potential for growth, on and off the field.
2016 has been an annus horribilis for the Force. The team is a non-starter on the field. Coach Michael Foley has been sacked. The relationship between Team Force and its administration has collapsed. The incidents in Bloemfontein, for example, were not relayed to CEO Mark Sinderberry by the team manager Adam Crane until the Wednesday after the weekend of shame.
All the hallmarks of a franchise out of control are apparent.
It is time to end the failed ten-year project of basing the Force in Perth.
The ARU must start putting in place a plan to move the Force to the western suburbs of Sydney, a shift that will enhance the team’s Western and Force credentials.
In early June, the ARU issued a media release with the slightly misleading headline: “ARU and Western Force seal alliance agreement”.
The release announced in its first sentence that an alliance agreement had been signed that enabled the “Western Force to continue as a Western Australian team.”
The next paragraph, though, gave the game away: “Under the agreement the ARU will integrate the professional Rugby program of the Western Force into the High Performance Unit of the ARU.”
Later on in the statement, this: “Under the alliance Western Force players and professional Rugby staff will become ARU employees… Current RugbyWA CEO, Mark Sinderberry, will remain in his position and will have dual reporting lines to the ARU and the RugbyWA board.”
The ARU owns the Western Force franchise. With this ownership comes the power to make decisions in the best interests of the Australian rugby community where the franchise is based.
We come now to the proposal suggested in March 2016 by the then out-going CEO of the Waratahs, Greg Harris, that the Force should be removed from Perth and installed as Sydney’s second Super Rugby team.
As well as being a CEO of the Waratahs, Harris was earlier a CEO of the Western Force.
There is no one in Australian rugby, and this explicitly embraces everyone involved with the ARU, who has the expertise about the rugby markets in Perth and Sydney as Greg Harris.
Harris made the point in his proposal to re-establish the Force as a western Sydney franchise that from “a strictly business sense, the ARU is better off cutting its losses than keeping faith with making Western Australia work – a region that cannot prosper in a saturated national sports market.”
Events of the past weekends, on and off the field, have entrenched the validity of this proposition.
Harris made the further point that “Not even the NRL has a national footprint. They tried Adelaide, they tried Perth, but couldn’t make it work, so what makes you think the ARU has the capacity to do it? It doesn’t.”
Bringing western Sydney into Super Rugby will bring real “local derbies” into the Australian Conference, Harris insists: “In [AFL] Brisbane and Sydney, you’ve got two teams because you need to have that rivalry established. In soccer, they [FFA] put two teams in [Sydney and Melbourne], so you’ve got a cross-town rivalry. The issue we’ve got here is that we don’t have that tribalism. Our closest competition is the Brumbies who are three and a half hours away.”
This makes obvious sense. Anyone with a knowledge of the history of Sydney and its rugby traditions will know that a Waratahs and Sydney-based Western Force playing out of Parramatta will create an instant, intense rivalry between the ‘Silvertails’ (Roy Masters’ description of the Manly and Eastern Suburbs rugby league clubs) and the battlers from the west.
There are many other advantages too.
For most weeks, there will be a Sydney Super Rugby game to watch at the ground and on television.
The ARU’s plan to try and democratise rugby by moving resources to the western suburbs of Sydney will be given an impetus from the shift. The pool of players throughout NSW, in western Sydney, the northern suburbs, and the country areas will be more easily absorbed into a Sydney side.
It is well-established that players from the heartland of Australian rugby, the Sydney grade and schools competitions, are reluctant to make the move across the continent to Western Australian.
I know that the chief executive of the ARU apologised for claiming that the heartland clubs were “pissing” away the ARU’s money, but here is a chance for him to show that his claims about protecting the heartland are heartfelt. Nothing could energise club and schools rugby in Sydney better than a second Sydney franchise.
The Sydney Morning Herald‘s Tom Decent, in his interview back in March with Greg Harris, asked whether it would be a good idea to have two Super Rugby franchises in Sydney. Harris’ answer, as direct as an arrow shot, brought the issue back on target:
“At the end of the day, the ARU chairman [Cameron Clyne] is a former banker.
“I wonder how many ATMs he’s got in Perth and I wonder how many he’s got in Sydney and Brisbane? Sydney and Brisbane are where your major stakeholders are. If you don’t protect them, then you’re going to lose them.”
These arguments about cross-town rivalry and the major stakeholders are irrefutable.
Cameron Clyne, as the chief executive of NAB, actually had a (painful) experience in trying to hang on to an asset that was so lacking viability that it dragged down the successful parts of his business.
When he retired from NAB, the Sydney Mornign Herald‘s Elizabeth Knight made this final assessment: “Unfortunately Clyne didn’t manage to dispose of the bank’s troubled British operations soon enough and can be criticised for underestimating the rot in that market, and the weight this anchor would place on NAB.”
Clyne needs to face up to the fact that the Western Force in Perth is, as far as the ARU is concerned, the equivalent of the UK banks were for NAB.
Sitting on the problem, Micawber-like, hoping for something to turn up, was not a solution for NAB. Nor is it a solution for the ARU.
I know that people inside the ARU regard me as an over-critical botherer. Well, there is a lot to be bothered about. And someone has to create a fuss in the hope of getting something done.
Only someone belonging to the Blinkers Anonymous club would deny that the challenges facing Australian rugby are massive.
The Wallabies are under-performing. The Super Rugby competition structure is a disaster for Australia. The skill levels of our players are poor. The coaching is generally abysmal. The ARU has no influence with World Rugby or even with SANZAAR.
There is a sense of lull in moving to a New Zealand management model. The heartland clubs, schools and subbies, whose numbers are down for the first time in years, are being abandoned.
And in the last week or so, the total, abject failure of the Western Force based in Perth project has been so exposed that WREXIT, a Western Australian rugby-exit, is critical for the continued viability of Australian rugby.