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Rugby league will survive Israel Folau not coming back. If we ever have a nuclear war, after it is over the game will crawl out from underneath the rubble along with the cockroaches. But the disappointing thing is that he should be back, and that the game dropped the ball.
There is so much he-said, she-said flying around on the Folau story that it is hard to nail down exactly who is to blame when it comes to rugby league missing out on him.
All of the parties involved – Parramatta, Folau and his management, and the ARLC – must take a share of it, but, upon further examination, and after talking to insiders, my view is that the ARLC deserves the lion’s share.
The ARLC lacked the leadership to guarantee Folau returned to the game. The league should have made sure it happened, not by breaking the salary cap rules or anything like that, but by simply being sensible about the situation.
The evidence says salary cap auditor Ian Schubert hard-balled Parramatta for a while on a figure the club couldn’t digest, before reducing it to something the club was going to be able to accommodate. But by then it was too late.
Whether the league thought it was a given that Folau would come back to the game I don’t know – nobody would ever admit to being as foolish as that – but the fact is they left the door open by letting the process run on for too long, and in walked rugby union.
I understand the salary cap auditor has got to be independent, but when a situation arises in which a star like Folau is available to return to the game it becomes an issue in which the game’s upper-echelon of management needs to take charge.
If the salary cap figure for Folau could be reduced in the end, why couldn’t it be reduced sooner?
The ARLC recently, finally, appointed a new chief executive to replace David Gallop, but David Smith doesn’t start in the job until February 1. In the meantime, the interim chief executive, Shane Mattiske, wasn’t able to do enough to help get Folau over the line.
Smith may not have been able to do any better, I don’t know. Someone may have had to tell him who Folau was, since it is clear from the media conference announcing his appointment that the new league boss has only a limited knowledge of the identity of players at this stage.
But, if you don’t mind my dipping into the past, if we had management like John Quayle and Ken Arthurson this wouldn’t have been allowed to happen. Folau would have been signed to Parramatta long ago, and training for next season.
Remember, Folau announced he was quitting AFL on November 1, and it was November 30 when he told Parramatta officials he wouldn’t be going to the club. There was a full month in which the ARLC could have made something happen.
He could have been signed to Parramatta on a back-ended contract, on the proviso Parramatta worked to get their salary cap situation in order between then and the start of next season.
On top of that, it was revealed there had been initial contact between Folau’s management with Mattiske and ARLC chairman John Grant in September, well before he quit AFL. That’s an awful lot of time in which to do a deal.
Along with the new chief executive, the ARLC should appoint a chief operating officer with a genuine rugby league background who can deal with the day-to-day running of the game and immediately identify the most important matters for consideration.
That is something else the game is missing at the moment, apart from Folau. But at least the ARLC can still do something about that.
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