- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
Bob Dwyer, coach of the 1991 Rugby World Cup champion Wallabies, Randwick doyen and all-round rugby guru, has put the boot into the ARU chief executive Bill Pulver over his un-benign neglect of Sydney club rugby. Right on!
At issue is the ARU’s 2016-2020 Strategic Plan.
Among the brainwaves of the plan is this: the ARU will no longer directly provide financial assistance to the clubs, large and small, that make up the foundation blocks of rugby in Australia.
In Tom Decent’s recent article in The Sydney Morning Herald, Dwyer claims Pulver told the NSWRU board some weeks ago: ‘I’m not making any money available for the Sydney clubs to piss it up against the wall.’
This was all in the context of some very robust debate.
Pulver’s argument was that the Sydney clubs had a tendency to spend their ARU grants on paying players handsomely for playing in the Shute Shield, despite the fact it was an “amateur level” club tournament.
The Strategic Plan calls for more money to be invested in “infiltrating” the public schools and the western suburbs of Sydney to increase male and female participation levels substantially.
More Rugby:
» Australia’s Super Rugby window is definitely open
» Western Force lease IP rights to ARU
» Super Rugby preview: Brumbies
Instead of giving money to the clubs, Pulver insists that it will go to the state unions who will “allocate the funds” as they want to.
Pulver admits, though, that the NSWRU specifically asked that the traditional and successful model of funding the clubs directly be maintained.
The Strategic Plan also calls for the end of one of the Sydney National Rugby Championship teams as part of a reform of the NRC project, an enhancement of VIVA7s, a rugby version of touch rugby (to break into the NRL’s alliance with Touch Football Australia) and the “explosive growth” in Sevens Rugby – both the male and female versions of the game.
The history behind the Strategic Plan needs some explaining.
In past decades, including the 1990s when the Wallabies won two World Cups, the ARU gave grants to clubs that sometimes were in excess of $100,000.
But two years ago, with the ARU virtually broke, Pulver asked the clubs throughout Australia to give up their grants (supposedly for a short time) and to reduce their season from 22 games to 18.
Some of the saved grant money was to be directed into the introduction of the NRC.
The rest went to the ARU to prop up its shaky balance sheet until the enhanced new five-year broadcast deal was signed and sealed, which it has been.
Pulver undertook to return to the former practice of giving ARU grants directly to the clubs when the broadcast largesse came in. His promise was to “fund the game properly” when the broadcast money came in.
He has reneged on this promise.
Now come in Bob Dwyer, from your long run!
“It is gross stupidity in all ways. By ignoring those people who not only do the job week in and week out, year in and year out, decade after decade, but come to his assistance, for their own detriment, I don’t know what a person is behind such an attitude.
“I don’t know whether this conclusion has been arrived at out of arrogance or ignorance, but sure as eggs, one or both these factors apply.”
And here is the killer conclusion: “I said to Bill: ‘We are not asking you to give us a grant. We’re asking you to give us a proportion of the money that we’ve helped you earn. It is not your money: some of it is our money’.
“We are the heart of Australian rugby. Without Sydney premier rugby, the game in Australia would not exist, full stop.”
There is a very powerful truth here. Sydney club rugby is the heartland of Australian rugby.
This means that whatever Pulver’s motives are, they are founded on a lack of understanding about the dynamics of Australian rugby.
The simple fact is that any ‘strategic vision’ for Australian rugby has to recognise that the future sustainability of the code lies in the success, on and off the field, of the Wallabies and the Super Rugby teams and competition.
Test rugby and Super Rugby make virtually all the money for the ARU. You would think that Pulver and the ARU would know this. Apparently they don’t. Or they don’t care and have other agendas outside the practice of rugby.
The NRC, sevens and women’s rugby will help with the participation rates but they are costly and create little if any revenue for the ARU.
The institutions that provide the foundations of all rugby in Australia – the Wallabies, Super Rugby, sevens and women’s rugby – are the clubs all over the country and the rugby-playing schools.
How the chief executive of the ARU does not understand this basic truth about Australian rugby baffles me.
Moreover, Pulver’s un-benign neglect of the clubs has been matched with a similar neglect of the Super Rugby clubs in Australia, one of the sources (in the past) of revenue for Australian rugby.
Pulver and Michael Hawker (former chairman of the ARU) were both ARU representatives with SANZAAR. They are, therefore, partners in the tournament’s crazy format for 2016.
Was there any consideration of three conferences of six teams?
The suggestion here is that the six South African teams are one conference, there would be an Australian conference with the five local sides plus the Sunwolves from Japan, and a New Zealand conference of the five local sides plus the Jaquares from Argentina.
Other Super Rugby questions come to mind.
Why did Pulver and Hawker allow a Super Rugby format that is so clearly against the playing interests of the Australian teams?
Remember, Super Rugby is one of only two major revenue sources for the ARU.
What are the details and terms of the ARU’s bail-out of the Western Force? There are suggestions in rugby circles that the bail-out terms would astonish rugby followers.
The more I think about these matters, though, the more it seems that we have to look beyond Pulver. The composition of the ARU board provides clues, perhaps, for the general cluelessness about club and Super Rugby from the ARU and its chief executive.
To begin with, there is no one on the ARU board who has an intimate knowledge of NSW club rugby. This is an astonishing ommission.
The ARU chairman is Cameron Clyne, a former group chief executive officer of NAB. Clyne played rugby in Victoria at a representive level.
There is board member Geoff Stooke, a businessman from Perth who was for 25 years the president of RugbyWA.
Three former Wallabies, John Eales, Dr Brett Robinson (a medical doctor and Oxford Ph.D) and Paul McLean have a Queensland background. McLean and Eales played (splendidly) for the Reds and Robinson captained the Brumbies.
In early February, Microsoft’s Australian managing director Pip Marlow was appointed to the ARU board. Born in New Zealand, Marlow has “a lifelong passion” for rugby.
Marlow joined Liz Broderick, Australia’s sex discrimination commissioner for eight years, and Ann Sherry, a former Westpac and Carnival Australia CEO, as a female troika on the board of the ARU.
Broderick made her comments after the highly successful Sydney Sevens where the Australian Women’s Sevens played three entertaining matches against the Ireland Sevens.
Marlow, who watched the tournament with Broderick and Sherry, also made the point that: “role modelling is an important part of creating culture and creating change. That’s why it’s amazing to have three women on a national sports board setting a new tone for this code.”
I think it is great to have three successful and articulate business women, a stalwart of rugby in Western Australia and three former Wallabies with a Queensland background on the board of the ARU.
Next time when a ARU board appointment is made, though, why not enhance this diversity?
Why not appoint someone from NSW who has a deep knowledge of the history, politics and practice of Australian rugby, someone like Dwyer, Simon Poidevin, Brett Papworth or, best of all, Rod Macqueen?
The point here is that playing to your strengths is always the best winning policy, in rugby and in rugby administration.