- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
For all the bagging John O’Neill copped in his two stints as the ARU boss, he did a remarkable job when there were so many territorial egos wanting to belittle him.
They got the better of him in the early 2000s, the reason why he turned to soccer as it was known then, and made a great fist of that job as well.
But the two areas where I have my beef with O’Neill was with club rugby in Sydney.
In 1996 when rugby went professional, O’Neill stood back and watched the club scene destroy itself by allowing them to pay players.
That was a monumental mistake. As the years wore on the folly saw every club in dire financial straits, and many lost their club premises where club spirit was fostered.
In short, it was a bloody mess.
I brokered the problem with O’Neill as early as 1998, and he agreed it should never have been allowed to happen.
It got worse. Many of the ‘subbies’ clubs started paying their players, with even worse disasters.
Where were so-called sponsors ever going to get any mileage from club rugby, far worse with subbies. All that money could only be classed as donations, even though the sponsors were on club jumpers.
Who was ever going to see them, apart from the few hundred at the game, or the one game a week on the ABC that the ARU paid for.
The message was loud and clear very early in the piece: keep club rugby amateur, make them pay subscriptions to play, train Tuesday and Thursday nights, play Saturday, have a huge Saturday night, and recover Sunday.
Only when a player reached Super Rugby recognition should be be paid.
O’Neill should have nipped all that in the bud in 1996. He didn’t.
Big mistake one.
When he returned to rugby where he should never have left, I had another chat with him around 2007.
Again he agreed the practice of paying players at club level, and especially below, had to stop.
But by then the clubs were pinned to the financial wall, but it was never too late to right the wrongs had O’Neill acted with haste and took no prisoners.
For the second time he didn’t make a move after promising me faithfully he would end the stupidity.
This week, some six years later, the current ARU boss Bill Pulver has decided to right the wrongs.
Clubs which pay players in future are likely to have any grants from the ARU cut.
Now the ARU is talking sense, but more importantly it is doing something positive about it.
The governing body can’t have the feeder system financially crippled, or the Super franchises are going to suffer.
Besides, club rugby deserves to be better treated. I long for the day when club rugby means something again, and not just buried in the sports details pages of any newspaper.
Bill Pulver is on the right track. The trick now is for the ARU to get cracking and relieve the heart attack treasurers of the pain inflicted by the massive mistake of 17 years ago.
The ARU has a long history of fence-sitting.
There have been many meetings over the years when the same agenda has just been photo-copied from the previous meeting. Nothing had been decided.
Not this one Bill Pulver, this is vital grass-roots rugby dying.
Make it live, and quickly.