Two strings Lano

Keep the Western Force in Super Rugby as the 5th team

The entire ARU board resign their positions

I think those a pretty big strings (granted I don’t have roughly $70 Million to throw at such a deal)

Great TWAS, could you post a link from testimony given under oath to a Senate Inquiry or court of law that challenges that account.

I’m sure you rabid Rebels apologists have been chasing the witnesses that gave this testimony to get them done for their perjury.

Where does Sharpie live now?

How about Digby?
Struggling to remember who else in the initial Force squad actually came from Qld, but I’m pretty sure most of them returned east.

Tim North advised the ARU how they could get rid of the Force after the agreement between the ARU and RugbyWA mysteriously appeared upon the boardroom table in Melbourne with Him and Rob Clarke (then in RA employ) in the room.

According to their testimony in the Senate Inquiry (which is completed under oath) nobody knows how it got there.

So much for “no role in cutting the Force”

Baden Stephenson was appointed CEO after Rob Clarke, who was appointed CEO once the Victorian Government bailed out the Rebels in return for a succession of Wallabies Matches being scheduled at the MCG. Clearly he didn’t have any direct involvement.

I’m still pro a 5 team model, but the model needs to be financially sustainable (or at least not be a money incinerator like the Rebels have proven to be.

There needs to be an eye run over the salary caps, the general finances of all the clubs etc, but 5 teams = more opportunity for players to play in this country.

I’ve seen first hand the cost of losing a Super Rugby team in a jurisdiction and it damages pathways for YEARS

The Force have essentially had to build from zero again because of the lost promotion making it harder for clubs to entice juniors to play rugby. AFL has a super efficient marketing machine and kids will turn to other sports, rather than play a game with heroes 3000 Km away.

So, I believe keeping a Super Rugby team in Melbourne should be the first preference, however I do accept that the deal might not stack up and it simply might not be worth the amount of effort it takes to sustain it.

Absolutely not

GRR didn’t finish it’s first season as a start from nothing international rugby comp.

It was run by Minderoo, Forrest’s charitable foundation and wasn’t expected to be self sustaining for several years. There was, however a plan for it to transfer to Tatterang (Forrest’s venture capitalisation organisation) and be a self sustaining business.

The same moves were planned for the Force when they rejoined Super Rugby and the Force is now owned by Tatterang, so there is an expectation that the business will be self-sufficient.

Forrest is good at philanthropy but he’s also good at building businesses that can fund their own existence. It’s a real shame that he pulled out of the private equity float because his business acumen and ability to hire managers who know their shit is sorely needed at RA.

Perhaps he didn’t trust the managers that considered the Force a liability and the Rebels a benefit

Twiggy was also an interested party in the Private Equity float which failed recently.

I assume he pulled out because so little has changed

And what is the intended use of ARF funds TWAS?

I assume it’s to create hydrogen habitats for polar bears, because the way you talk about it it has nothing to do with rugby.

Ooooh, I can think of a party that didn’t agree

Exactly how is it a liability to have the grant money that they would have spent on the Force transferred directly into an account that is used to support community rugby?

Additionally to have the Force costs underwritten so there is no cost line on their balance sheet for them?

And the Force “liability” was a grand total of $800K over the 12 years of their existence.

Instead they committed to a Rebels organisation which AT THE TIME had been bailed out twice to the tune of 10s of Millions.

Are you sure you understand the meaning of the term liability?

They’d just bought the Force license for $800K, that established the market value.

so the blokes that refused $50 million dollars and a guarantee that the Force wouldn’t be a drain on their balance sheet were smart to pay $500k to keep a business that has historically bled money since the day of inception.

sounds like smart business to me…..

Let’s also not forget that to buy the Rebels, they would have also needed to assume the debt.

Making the Rebels at the going market rate of $1 about a $20 million dollar purchase right?

It wasn’t stringless Noodles, the one string was the resignation of the ARU board.

It was also refused because the $70 million that was pledged included a substantial donation to the ARF which the corrupt banking community that was running the ARU at the time couldn’t rort.

The fact that they couldn’t access the money he was offering for personal gain, nor could they continue to maintain their snouts in the trough was the reason they refused the offer.

I was sitting next to John Welborn at the senate hearing, and I’m convinced by conversations around me at that time that the actual amount Twiggy was prepared to offer was far in excess of the $50 million reported, but they didn’t get the chance to make the offer as Clyne realised his bluff was effectively called and gave the “too late” line.

I think it has a lot to do with the 20 min red card not being sufficient penalty for coaches and players to try their luck.

Yes if you get it wrong you’re rubbed out for the game and probably a couple of weeks, but if the red card was a whole game without replacement you’d see coaches care a little bit more about blokes tackling high.

Just gonna mention,

if they were serious about reducing the impact of head contact, they would have drawn a line on the jersey at a certain height, any contact above that line, deliberate or accidental is penalisable.

Unfortunately such an approach doesn’t provide a grey area where a clever lawyer can get somebody out of the muck.

I don’t see the issue, if the Brumbies make the final he’d line up in the final, if the Brumbies don’t make the final are you suggesting that he was just going to have a weekend on the couch to prepare for Wallabies camp?

Lots of Super Rugby players also play club rugby, admittedly those with a walk up start don’t play much, but that shouldn’t be the issue.

Should club games only be counted as eligible for players who aren’t regulars in the Starting Super rugby sides? Should Wallabies be excluded from serving their bans using Super Rugby games?

That simply opens a massive can of worms in my opinion and it would be better to accept that sometimes, a bloke who doesn’t spend much time on the field for his club side will use a club game to serve a ban, just like he might take 20 minutes to get some game fitness after recovering from an injury.

You just gave me the biggest brainwave.

If a penalty is awarded at the scrum, the team can choose to take another scrum or a tap (as is the current situation) or a lineout at the sideline closes to the position on the pitch to the scrum WITHOUT KICKING

i.e. If you have a scrum on the 22 and are awarded the lineout, you take it on the 22. Surely that would stop the unnecessary faffing around trying to win the chance to boot the ball 30m up the field without penalising the teams that maybe have dominance in the lineout but not the scrum. They’d still get the choice, not the territorial advantage.
Think that’d work?

If they called that mitigation it is a misapplication of the protocol, whether he lands on his back or his head relates most directly to the degree of danger, which determines the initial sanction, mitigation then reduces that sanction. It might be that the Referee applied the protocol correctly and the commentators used the wrong terminology, however it’s important that the application of the protocol is accurate, otherwise somebody is going to engage a very expensive lawyer to get somebody off on a technicality. (not saying that’s what the Tahs did for Bell but …)

I think the Judiciary are placing too much emphasis on mitigation, implying that it’s a much larger component of the calculation than World Rugby intend it to be. Now I don’t speak for World Rugby, but what I can determine is that there has been little to no adjustment to tackle technique by Australian players (I haven’t watched much NZ rugby so will refrain from commenting on whether they share the blame). If the revisions to the head contact protocol are indeed designed to change behaviour, I would think that World Rugby will be looking at these decisions and strengthening the protocol or throwing out the 20 minute red card. It will be interesting to see how law variations go as a result of this season Super Rugby because I see a challenge being clearly issued by the SANZAR judiciary, will World Rugby call their bluff?

Hang on, World Rugby has issued a protocol and publicised it on the Internet. I think they’ve been pretty clear. The protocol states
1 Was there foul play? (lifting tackle, past horizontal)
2 Was there head contact? (head to ground)
3 What was the degree of danger? direct/indirect high force etc (Landed head/shoulder fair to say the tackler was doing nothing to turn him out of it, you could argue the tackler went through with the tackle)
4 Were there mitigating factors? Since this was the bit mentioned in the ruling, you’d have to assume the answer to the first three was yes and it was a red until you consider mitigation.
Berry dismissed the impact of the other players in the tackle, likely concentrating on the fact that bell had hooked a single leg and lifted it, the classic tip tackle technique. He obviously thought that the technique was bad enough for the tackle to go wrong without the input of other players.

“And the judiciary still deemed it an illegal tackle, just not at the level of a red.” however now, the Referees will be considering every tackle in the light of this ruling, because there’s no point in issuing a red card only to have it reversed after the fact, it makes the referee look (being as polite as I can) less than competent and poorly supported by the union. I believe the judiciary should uphold the spirit of the laws as they are issued by World Rugby and I can’t see how this is the case currently with the wild variations between results.

More importantly it’s the umpteenth time this year that the judiciary has viewed a “mitigating factor” that the Referee has clearly considered in his decision and come up with a different result.
(this list isn’t exhaustive due to a crappy memory)
Banks vs Pulu, Ref considered Pulu’s deviation prior to the Banks head clash and dismisses it as a mitigating factor, the Judiciary disagree and Banks has his Red Card removed retrospectively
Tupou vs some ruck earlier this year Ref looks at it, decides it isn’t even a penalty and play continues, cited after the game with a red card offence which is later dismissed by the judiciary wasting everybody’s time
Bell vs Cane, Berry considered the impact of the other players in the tackle at the request of the TMO and issues a red, the judiciary call the impact of other players “significant” and remove the red card retrospectively.

I would think the only advice I could give to a Super Rugby ref would be to assess any other player’s impact in a contest to be much more significant than it looks at the time, which seems pretty odd considering that 2 out of three times this has occurred, a player has gotten away with an offence which would have been a red before the convoluted head contact protocol (Tupou shoulder first into a ruck from the side at speed) and (Bell, tip tackle landing on the head) Yet we see dozens of players every week cautioned, binned and sent off as a result of accidental head contact.

I think the judiciary are playing with Fire when you read some of the CTE commentary that’s going around, World Rugby will bin the trial of the 20 minute red card pretty bloody quickly if players and administrators can’t generate a change in tackle technique, then these sort of plays will truly “destroy the spectacle” of the game when a bloke gets sent off without replacement in the 5th minute all due to him not modifying his tackle technique.

I just thought, Paisami had a tip tackle card earlier in the year, how did that one get judged?

That one is easy, it wasn’t sudden or late, he took four steps in a straight line after Wright missed the tackle and before Banks hit him.

All I can say is Pulu must have faster feet than I gave him credit for, that “sudden change of direction” involved four steps on his part and you could argue was him bouncing off Wright’s attempted tackle.

Cards on the table, I’m a Force fan and probably looking at this through Force tinted glasses, but I can’t see anything wrong with the Ref’s interpretation and I think the Judiciary has only served to set the message boards alight with differing opinions. That’s the real cost here, no matter which side of the decision you stand, you feel as though you’re hard done by in a situation which involves yet another unclear and inconsistent decision making process.