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What exactly do we want the NRC to be?

31st August, 2017
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Melbourne Rising take on Queensland Country. (Photo Credit Sporotgraphy)
Expert
31st August, 2017
154
2891 Reads

The National Rugby Championship kicks off this weekend and I’m going to try really hard to care about it this year. Honestly.

I’ve followed the NRC since its inception and even paid to attend games, but I’ll flat out admit that not for one moment have I ever cared about who won. Because I never had a reason to.

Herein lies the problem.

I’m all for the NRC as a competition – the more rugby that gets played and televised the better. But a competition like the NRC is a lot like a diamond – there is not a great deal of substance in a diamond on a molecular level that makes it worth the monetary value associated with it. Put simply, diamonds are so highly valued only because we as a society value them so highly.

The crowd at Saturday’s Shute Shield grand final has been waved around like a trophy of its own by rugby die-hards as proof that rugby, at the grassroots level, remains alive and well.

But that crowd is built upon generations of tribalism associated with decades of club rivalry. Unfortunately that passion is rarely, if ever, transferable to other formats of the code. While more than 16,000 packed into North Sydney Oval on Saturday, last season’s grand final of the NRC – supposedly the next level of the game – was watched by two men and a dog in Tamworth.

But while that tribalism cannot be instantly transferred, it can be tapped in to.

The secret to increasing the value of the NRC in the public’s eyes may be to make each team representative of a community. While the NRC’s current KPI’s may relate more to player-development outcomes than grassroots engagement, why not try and have both?

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Football Federation Australia managed to pull it off when they established the A-League. Rugby can follow their lead, and learn from their mistakes.

(Photo: Josh Brightman Balanced Image Studio)

Let’s look at two examples from the A-League – one hit and one miss.

The competition had a complete air swing on the Gold Coast. They plonked a team there and said “This is your team. This is the name. These are the colours. They’ll play at this stadium.” It didn’t work. Shockingly, Gold Coast football fans didn’t feel any connection to the team, so they didn’t buy memberships or attend games. Two and a half years after the club was founded it was dissolved.

Contrast that with the Western Sydney Wanderers. When it was decided that Western Sydney would get a team, Football Federation Australia held fan forums in Sydney’s western suburbs and fans were polled on everything from what they’d like the team to be called, what colours they’d like the team to wear and what stadium they’d be most likely to attend to watch a game.

The most popular name suggestion was ‘Wanderers’. The two most popular kit colour choices were red and black. The most popular stadium choice was Parramatta.

So when the Western Sydney Wanderers were announced, wearing red and black and playing their home games at Parramatta Stadium, the people felt like they were, in some small part, ‘their’ team. In five years the Wanderers have gone from non-existent to a membership base of more than 20,000.

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While it is too late to start from scratch in that manner for the NRC teams, it does provide a blueprint for how to build that connection long term – if the NRC lasts that long which, without an increase in engagement, it may not.

At the moment, most club rugby supporters don’t have any form of emotional connection to the NRC, and sport is all about emotion. Take emotion out of the game and it’s just big blokes running around a paddock after a piece of inflated rubber.

The funny thing with emotion though is that it’s actually quite easy to acquire – it’s human nature to care about what we know about and are connected to. We just need to make people connected.

While it may be unrealistic at this time to insist that NRC teams be stocked with only players aligned with clubs and or zones in their respective regions, that may be the way forward. Then at the very least the NRC teams can lay claim to being representative of those regions and most importantly, give those rugby communities a genuine connection.

The NRC have tried to set the competition up that way, aligning the Sydney Rays with the four north Sydney clubs and associating the Greater Sydney Rams with most of the rest. But we still have the NSW Country Eagles supposedly representing Sydney University, Randwick and Eastern Suburbs.

It’s likely that supporters of Randwick will feel the same level of connection to the Country Eagles that rugby fans from the country feel towards the Galloping Greens from Coogee.

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And when you dig deeper to find that the Country Eagles squad is coached by and stacked full of players from the Warringah Rats – who are supposedly aligned to the Sydney Rays – the legitimacy of the pathway from club rugby to NRC takes a hit.

While demanding an ‘origin’ criteria for NRC selection, where players are only eligible to play for the NRC team that represents the area aligned to the club they currently play for (or have previously played for in the cases of NSW and QLD Country) may be unrealistic, it would give the competition a real boost of legitimacy.

Because until there is a legitimate reason to connect emotionally, the NRC will continue to be just a player development league, and on this season’s showing from Australian teams in Super Rugby, a poor development league at that.

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