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Since the announcement of the new National Rugby Championship, rugby posts on The Roar have been more like reading the Financial Times or Forbes magazine, with each group presenting different business proposition to stop the downward trend many supporters feel the game is locked in.
It’s no secret rugby supporters have their minds on money and money on their minds.
Much of this is due to both the precarious nature of rugby’s finances and major expectations on what a new comp will be and what it will do for the game.
There is major debate about how this comp will work, in particular between tradition and financial viability.
Some feel the NRC could risk destroying tradition and create ‘plastic franchises’, alienating any real grassroots community involvement.
Others don’t care as long as the model is financially viable; the benefits must be high and the costs low.
Neither group is wrong.
Many of Australia’s 15-a-side rugby clubs have some of the longest, proudest histories around. For example Brisbane’s GPS club was founded in 1887 and Sydney’s Uni Club 1863.
Many of these clubs live off the smell of an oily rag, are antiquated, family oriented, live off the passion of local volunteers and this breeds a unique culture but one that can clash with commercialisation.
It’s also a no-brainer rugby needs money and ‘tradition has to start somewhere’.
This ‘irresistible force meets an immovable object’ situation puts the NRC in a precarious situation of having to be the great saviour, as it has to be ‘all things to all men’.
People disagree on what teams should be involved, whether they should be privately run, whether the ‘big money’ clubs should be allowed in.
It has to be for development, it must have mass appeal.
Some have written it all off before it has even had a chance.
Meanwhile, cricket is going gangbusters.
Sports fans generally have short memories but prior to this year’s ashes and the BBL revolution, many people saw cricket as having many of the same problems and issues as rugby.
Cricket was looking a little haggard, riding a declining trend, with the national team in free-fall.
There was a real possibility of cricket falling down Australia’s perceived sporting pecking order.
Facing issues with how to revitalise interest in domestic competition, a national team on the nose and, as always, there were issues with Test cricket’s mass marketability versus its tradition.
Twenty 20 cricket in its pre-history was looked at with derision as ‘hit and giggle’ and many felt threatened the affect it could have on the fabric and structure of the beloved game.
Cricket in one super season has shown tradition and mass marketing commercialism can coexist as a strong one-two combination.
But as George Costanza would say, “you’ve gotta keep your worlds apart!”
Rugby parallels cricket quite remarkably.
15-a-side rugby, like Test cricket is built on strong, tradition, history and culture. You will find many articles written by purists of both these games speaking of them a la a symphony.
Games full of complexity and tactics that demand patience, savvy. They are full of ebb and flow, peak and valley; they are not always pretty, nor are they suited to the tiny attention span of the casual viewer.
Would Australians ever go for rugby sevens?
Rugby sevens is one of the fastest growing team sports on earth; it has seen a meteoric rise on a global scale, breaking into markets 15-a-side could only dream about.
It is a game where Kenya, Portugal and Spain could on their day beat New Zealand, England and Australia and it plays a large, lucrative World Series in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Scotland, England, Japan, Hong Kong, UAE and Las Vegas.
I took my family earlier this year to the Gold Coast Sevens finals and it was one of the best days of rugby – nay, entertainment – I had been too in a long time.
It was great bang for my buck, a lively carnival/party atmosphere. The crowd are part of the entertainment with things like ‘kiss cam’ and ‘dance cam’ and we laughed until breathless at the costumes and antics of drunken rugby fans.
The action on the field too was nail-biting; games were close, full of running rugby at its purist (running rugby in Australia, that won’t work).
The Australia versus South Africa semi-final saw Australia force a long, back-and-forth, nail-biting, extra-time contest before a classic come from behind clinching Aussie try.
The final, Australia versus New Zealand, had a pulsating atmosphere as the home boys went down valiantly.
Honestly, I thought if the ARU can’t sell this, well then it’s time to pull the plug, sell the farm and move to New Zealand.
For whatever reason, sevens seems to have been neglected in Australia and resources have been directed at trying to bash the game’s head against a 15-a-side brick wall.
But cricket has now kicked down the door and set a clear template. League too, embarrassingly, is beating rugby to the punch by jumping on the lucrative bandwagon with their nines tournament.
It’s time to face facts, to a large portion of the Australian public rugby 15-a-side is ‘yawnion’, dominated by piggies, complicated rucks, kicking, old boys and stuffy exclusive private school toffs and no matter how brilliant or eloquent your line of reasoning may be, you will never get through and convince people otherwise.
The beauty of T20 is it is unencumbered by tradition; it can throw off any prehistoric shackles. With no legacy to stick too, it is free to be innovative, given license to take itself less seriously and just simply entertain.
With rugby sevens you get pretty much the same thing. It can throw off the yawnion shackles with its short, quick, rapid-fire, eminently marketable action.
While five day Tests and T20 are starting to build a bit of integration and harmony, rugby sevens and 15-a-side seem to be going in severely divergent trajectories.
Once upon a time 15-a-side players such as Tim Horan, David Campese and Jonah Lomu mixed it up in seven-a-side with great success but now they say the games are too physically different for this to occur. That is crap.
If you were to scan through the extensive playing rosters of the Super Rugby you can’t tell me there are none fleet of foot and with the capacity to train and play sevens.
So as Bill Pulver puts down the balance sheet he has been puzzlingly staring at and accidentally clicks on to the BBL he most likely thinks:
“Damn I’m stressed about the new NRC and its success, how we are going to fund it into the future? I wish we had a popular smaller version of the game like this in which we could use as a cash cow in a similar fashion.
“I know! We just need lots of entertaining running rugby without costing us victory, the Wallabies to win the Bledisloe cup, the Waratahs to revitalise and win the Super Rugby, the Rebels to make the finals and gain support of disgruntled AFL supporters, the players to put the national jersey above earning three times their value and we need the ancient prophecies to come true.
“If none of that happens, we can play a hybrid game with a rugby team that no longer exists!”
(Small disclaimer: Pulver is actually a big believer in sevens).
Rugby sevens unleashes a whole raft of possibilities for the code.
Legitimate cross code games with a reduced possibility of well… death, reduced costs for playing rosters, private ownership franchises, attracting foreign interest, breaking eligibility issues, grabbing fair weather fans and pushing up the market value of rugby for free-to-air television.
Furthermore it could integrate some of the unknown sevens players with some of the Wallabies stars.
There has been a lot of talk about some the games big stars possibly being on the biggest stage of them all the huge 2015 Olympics, but sevens coaches have said they want a staunch commitment.
If there was a big, televised, Australian BBL-style sevens competition some of the big boys could legitimately test their mettle.
The beauty of this comp is, unlike the NRC which is near impossible to get right, a sevens BBL is hard to get wrong.
The ARU could test the water for the NRC teams, they could chuck in Super teams – it doesn’t really matter, as long as the money is there.
In BBL style, they could cry havoc and let slip the marketers of war.
Sevens has developed followings in non-rugby strongholds: Adelaide had a major taste for sevens during the World Series and Darwin apparently has “the richest rugby sevens tournament in the Southern Hemisphere” with the “Hottest sevens in the world”.
It’s not a huge stretch to see sevens attracting more youth interest due to parents being put off by the dangerous nature of 15-a-side rugby, growing interest with the fringes of both league and AFL fans and players alike.
The ARU needs to act before sevens become less an asset and more a divergent, serious rival.
The money gained from a domestic sevens could be pumped into grassroots rugby, the NRC and help Pulver to stop checking his horoscope and staring at the ARU balance sheet and praying to the gods of rugby for the planets to align.
I’m sure I must be missing something and others have written similar articles.
Are there contract issues? IRB issues? Crowded schedules? Lack of public interest? Damage to 15-a-side?
I am interested to hear Roarers’ opinions.
Join The Roar rugby editor Christy Doran, former Wallaby Matt Toomua and a cast of regular and special guests as they look at the biggest issues in the game on The Roar Rugby Podcast. If you’re looking for great odds on the next game check out Aussie bookmaker PlayUp. Chances are you’re about to lose. Set a deposit limit.