An open letter to the ARU

Blah blah blah blah... Could you miss the point any further?

LOVE IT...... Fire at will. RUPA are like the english generals in WW1 stay out of the action hidden far away drinking port and tut tuting over the performance of those pesky colonials. Send another lot in so what if we lose a few thousand? We are OK. If RUPA were serious they would agree to link payments to Television ratings and bums on seats, that is if the players really are the talent as they keep telling us!

Tony, There's got to be a good contest in Tokyo, both teams will have had a bit of a break & I doubt if your forwards will be so off again. If you look at the scorelines this year - 6points & 1 point were the previous difference which is more the norm for these two sides. I'd expect ABs by 5, the losers to complain about breakdown & scrum rulings with Robbie to still keep his job & O'Connor to have a much better game. Interesting point I've watched a couple of ANZC games the last few weeks & intelligent counter rucking appears to be the go i.e. the players are really watching for the good opportunities to drive in & when they do they go as a group. Kind've like the ABs did in 'that' game

MarkR, No keep sticking your head out. We all need a challenge.now and then. Given all the water under the bridge and the collective chest beating and hair pulling after the Sat game. \Wallabies v ABs in Japan. Will we see a contest with the stung Wallabies showing their Brisbane form or will the ABs go for the clean sweep and annihilate us ? By the way I was pretty peeved at the crappy Rugby league like intro to the game on Saturday with a fanged Wallaby crushing the ABs on Channel 7. Bloody parochial rubbish no doubt put together by a pimply faced drama school drop out. These days I turn the sound off so I can enjoy the game without the twaddle. I think Foxtel is even worse. SBS should bid for the coverage. Their cricket cycling and Soccer are world class. Over here I have to take the sports ears out because I can't drown out the Foxtel commentary team's dribble. No doubt a few wins and some great local club Rugby will settle down everyone's disappointment and restore a smille to the dial.

well written, couldn't agree more. Hopefully the Roar can send a collective message to the ARU and RUPA stating that Wallabies supporters have a had an absolute gutfull of 6 years ineptitude. If they don't do anything there wont be any Wallaby supporters.

Tony, I'll pull my head in now. I'm just struggling to see how the same team that played so well in Brisbane has copped all this abuse after being beaten by an AB team that had their collective heads on the block & either played out of their skins or stood a good chance of not making the NH tour. Don't worry about the last paragraph, I was trying to combine irony & cynicsm but forgot humour (like most of the posters on this thread).

MarkR Thanks for the parenting advice. You became a bit cryptic in the last paragraph. What di you really mean to say?

Tony, there's nothing to stop your 10 yr old being proud, in fact the biggest factor will be his Dads attitude so if you cut down on the vitriol about "pathetic scrabble for a few dollars" & teach him perspective he probably will stay proud of them & support them even when they had an off day at the office. You may find that most of the players are gutted about their TN results. You could also open your mind to the possibility that the players were supposed to play a game that was an earner for their bosses & therefore for them, it was proposed to be replaced by a game that would have still been an earner for their bosses in which case they are supposed to be paid. Now if the theory is that if a team doesn't meet it's aspirations they should play for free well you would've seen the entire AB team at the dole office in 2008. I thought kiwis were supposed to be overly harsh on their team..hang on...I've finally got the definition for 'UnAustralian' - it means refusing to kick a man when he's down

. I agree wholeheartedly with CraigB. Cut through all the bull, the whining about the short work life and lifetime poverty that professional athletes of any description face. I haven't seen any ex Wallabies down at Centrelink lately. The game we all love is more than a profession for us. The team we see as an embodiment of our national ethos and it is more than just a bunch of well fed blokes with good genes getting paid big bucks to knock down other big blokes. Read the bios when players tell of their call up to the team. For them at the start it like a religious experience... a special moment they will remember for ever, like the birth of your first child you never forget that feeling. So what happens that turns this passion (passion by the way comes from the Latin pasio: to suffer not the modern idea of romance) this desire to put everything on the line to wear the Gold Jersey with our emblem over their heart, into a pathetic scrabble for a few dollars. Somewhere in our system of running the business that is The Wallabies we have lost the flame of pride, the feeling of being part of a tradition. It sounds to me like the soulless forces of darkness that cynically exploit anyone they can are setting the agenda. I hope we can recover from this debacle. I would like my ten year old to once again take pride in his heroes in Gold. More importantly I'd like to see those young men who were once so proud to again recover their mojo and behave like real men. Men who don't give up and don't give in.

Thanks for the link JF. Head to the home page though and watch Quade Coopers try in the video section, its a cracker!

Good to see the ARU taking notice (or at least appear to be) of how most of us feel after the Wellington game. http://www.rugby.com.au/news/wallabies_2009/what_you_thought_-_wallabies_v_abs_wellington,134165.html/news/latest/section/21893

You do of course mean the Qantas Wallabies, or as my kiwi neighbour quipped - the Jet Star Wallabies.

LT80 - yep, perspective check is inorder. Next some twat will call them 'Unaustralian'. They got outplayed on the day & a couple of them had bad games, the ocre of an excellent team is still there. Who says they were going to beat the ABs anyway ? Yes, tehy'd just beaten SA but teh ABs had just lost 3 tests in a row to SA & were palying at home. How much more could they have been playing for outside a WC year ? & as for rolling over in the last 10 mins, um guys, don't most games have a couple fo tries scored in the last 10 as everyone gets tired & the cover defence starts to slip ? BTW, I've tried to find a definition for 'Unaustralian' as living in Melb & having lived in Perth & Brisbane I see so many factors that make up modern Australia, but the best I've some up with is that it means "I don't agree & want to take a fictional high moral gorund by making you look like you're against the country you're from". What a load of old twaddle.

It's sport, this is the type of passion it invoke's in some, and if you ask most sportspeople what it's like to represent your country, most will tell you it's a great honour and source of inspiration, and when you are in a national team you are representing the nation, that's the point. It appears you do have an opinion of what it is to be Australian, as "laconic streak not often given to cloying nationalistic sentimentality"......... a bit hypocritical, that does'nt really sound like me, do you know something I don't? "The players are simply the best players our country could provide, who were not up to the task, nothing more and nothing less" ............ again your opinion. Is your opinion more valuable than others, sport is important to Australians in general and this feeling and emotion is not the sole domain of Rugby supporters, speak to AFL fans or football fans for example. I'm sure everyone on this thread will get over it, meanwhile just like you we will express our OPINION.

LT80 its not so much about the fact that rugby is fourth in the football codes and has a smaller supporting base it is about giving 100% when on any sporting stage representing Australia. Lay down Sally example, although helped by media hype was an example of National 'hurt' when someone representing Australia on a world stage gives up, doesn't show up for a contest and it was embarrasing, disappointing. Yes we have a laid back approach but you can count probably on one hand when a side or person has displayed a defeatist attitude when wearing our national colours. Part of our Aussie heritage is giving everything a go and never giving up, ask a million Australians and you would probably get a 95% yes to that. One of the reasons Cathy Freemans victory at the Sydney Olympics was so stunning was that the pressure on her to perform was immense and for her to succeed with that weight of expectation of us the Aussie sporting fan and her own high personal standards you could think she had an oppurtunity or even the right to crack, she didn't and as an Australian I was so proud that she won and it had far more an affect than just that day it made a positive difference to a lot of people on different scales for a good time after and who can quantify the good it did for Aboriginal children who had a role model wearing their two flags. Now I don't expect rugby to have the same impact but it is, when on the international stage a part of us whether you are a league, AFL or football supporter. To the 98% of Australians that apperently didn't watch it, if the Wallabies had of won on Saturday and the 98% of non watchers had of heard I somehow think there would have been a smile on their faces and maybe a small feeling of happy national pride, what do you think?

This thread is without question one of the best I have seen on the Roar. Not for the suble insight or witty repartee so often seen amongst comments here, but for sheer comedic value. To wit: "They are not just playing rugby, they are representing the nation and what it stands for" Really? The whole nation? Well....perhaps all of us except those other 98% who couldn't be bothered watching! "They dishonour what it is to be Australian" Wow! Quite an achievement that! First they must have discerned exactly what it does mean to be Australian (gee, I wouldn't mind knowing too), then set about dishonouring said state of being all in the space of 80 minutes. And here I was thinking part of the Australian character was an independant nature and laconic streak not often given to cloying nationalistic sentimentality......Woops, looks like I was wrong there! Sorry to have a dig here, but really, COME ON! I know it hurts, it was a terrible loss. But it was still only a game of football. The players are simply the best players our country could provide, who were not up to the task, nothing more and nothing less.

CraigB Thanks for writing this letter. You wrote it better than I could express my sentiments on this issue.

WELL SAID! i wish the ARU had the balls to do it though. i would get up in the early morning even if it was to watch them get flogged so long as i knew they had some pride in the green and gold.

Didn't someone once pen a book about Rugby Union with the title 'For the love, not the money'? Perhaps the new version should be either 'For the love of Money' or 'For the Money, not the Love'.

play it wherever you want - for charity or otherwise - I have better things to do!