Good rugby folk: pull your fingers out, help save the game

I love rugby. I love rugby so much that when people call rugby league “rugby” I prissily correct them, because to truly love rugby is to be an incurable pedant.

Rugby union is, to me, the prince of football codes. Such a wide range of skills involved, such a variety of types required for a successful team.

The combination of physicality, ball skills with both hand and foot, demanding technical requirements and athleticism provides a unique flavour.

League has its brutal impacts, Aussie rules its open running, football its subtle touch, but none brings the gamut of footballing elements together in one like union.

Of course, there is a problem which is closely allied to the virtues of the game. I think rugby is the best of all games when played well, but it’s hard to play well, and rugby is the little girl with the little curl of sport – when it’s bad, it’s horrid.

No other code devolves into such tedium when the participants decide not to give full expression to all the game can summon. In fact, some sports can become even more entertaining when played ineptly, but when rugby is played poorly it is all kicks and collapsing scrums and endless penalties and outside backs doing less running than the queues for the bar.

What this means, in this country anyway, is that rugby union has the devil of a job on its hands to try to regain the ground lost to its competitors. Diehard rugger buggers can bloviate all they like about the brainless repetition of crash and bash league, but the NRL grand final was watched by more than four million people, and even allowing for the timezone advantage it captured the public imagination a hell of a lot more than the Wallabies’ latest somnambulist fumble to defeat in exotic climes.

As for the AFL, it’s fairly secure in the knowledge that it can get more column inches from speculation on a trade in the off-season than the ARU can get for a blockbuster Test match. Rugby’s advantage over league and Aussie rules is always the internationalism of the game, but that doesn’t count for as much when the national team are not only losers, but boring ones.

What all this means is that rugby has fallen in public esteem. No sport should ever have to sink so low as to inspire nostalgia for Alan Jones, but the days of World Cup-winning Wallaby sides stopping the nation are long past, and it will take some good brainwork to remind Australians that here is a sport that can thrill and exhilarate like no other.

So many just don’t care any more. A big effort is required, and those who carry the safekeeping of rugby in their hands must make every post a winner.

So, for example, maybe Kurtley Beale’s continued insistence on being a dickhead isn’t the best way to reignite the country’s passion for the ruck and maul.

Not that Beale is a lone ranger, of course. Before him it was Quade Cooper, who seemingly thought to himself, “Yes I am blessed with gifts of hand and foot and footballing brain that have the ability to take the breath away, but what if instead I spent most of my time making everyone want to slap me?”

Or was that James O’Connor? So hard to tell, in the crowded pantheon of Wallaby jerks.

And I like Beale. And I like Cooper, and I like O’Connor. And I like every other Australian rugby player who has got into a fight with a teammate, or gotten drunk at 4am, or abused team staff, or banded together with fellow players to oust a coach who was getting ideas above his station and refusing to recognise what a true millionaire superstar he was.

But here’s the thing, and if any professional rugbyistas are reading this, I’d ask you to pay close attention: when league and AFL fans whip their defective personalities out and waggle them around in public, their sports shrug it off and carry on. That’s because they’re massively popular, get huge ratings, have big fat reservoirs of public goodwill and a plethora of better-behaved frontmen to wheel out onto the main stage in place of any idiot who ruins it for themselves.

You rugby guys, you don’t have this luxury. There are heaps of rugby union clubs in the country, but in Super Rugby there are only five, and even those desperately depend on the Wallabies to stoke the fires of public interest. There’s just a handful of superstars in Australian rugby, just a bare few who you could possibly say are likely to get punters through the turnstiles. The rugby drawcard is an endangered species.

And yet of those few, there seems to be an irresistible urge to destroy themselves, and bit by bit their sport, by acting out, whether that be drunkenly, violently, or just in general obnoxious wankery borne of an incurable superiority complex and an apparently unshakeable belief that the rest of the population is beneath them.

Rugby, I tell you, cannot afford this. This beautiful game which I love so much cannot withstand a man like Kurtley Beale putting his career in jeopardy every week. Every time a Wallaby is stood down for disciplinary reasons it weakens the team’s chances of success, and moreover, it weakens the team’s chances of being worth watching. And if the national team is not worth watching, I can promise you nobody is going to believe that any other team will be.

But it’s not just the off-field issues killing rugby as a major sport. It’s also the conduct on-field, where more and more the purpose of the game seems to be to grind away as slowly as possible until a penalty gives everyone the chance for a nice rest and three points.

And teams are in luck, as the average period of grinding required before the referee decides something or other has been done less than perfectly is ever-diminishing. The number of rugby Tests that resemble smartphone goal-kicking apps is on the increase.

I tell you, right now, the non-rugby world views rugby as a minor, dying sport. A dull game dominated by refereeing decisions the spectators don’t understand. A mystifying game where you can’t even see the ball half the time. A stultifying, archaic pursuit mostly clung to by arrogant snobs who look down on the majority and will never make positive changes to their sport because they’re too self-obsessed to notice anyone else’s opinions.

And more and more the non-rugby world seems to have a point.

Those of you who are still part of my rugby tribe – and I know there are still a few of us left – we can’t afford to carry on this way. We can’t blithely stumble into a future where rugby union is not only a niche curiosity in the sporting landscape, but deserves to be.

Please, I beg of you, those in a position to make a difference, do your best to do so.

Players, behave. Be upstanding citizens. Show respect to your teammates, your coaches, your officials and your public. And when you’re on the field, try to regain the joy that surely drew you to this game in first place. Play the game as you’d like to watch it being played, and when you’re off the field be the sort of person you’d like to meet.

And administrators, don’t be afraid of change. Look at the way the game is being played at the highest levels, and recognise it is not the way people want it to be played, and it is not the way that will help showcase the myriad strengths of rugby to the world.

Make those changes which are necessary to make rugby more than a game of competing penalty-earners. Slash the value of kicking. Up the value of running. Make a penalty goal less rewarding, while at the same time make giving away cynical penalties more lethal to a team’s prospects.

Instruct referees to have more of an eye to fairness and less of an eye to technical minutiae.

What I am saying, rugby folk everywhere, is for god’s sake pull your fingers out. We have the most marvellous game: it’s about time we acted like it.