A few weeks ago, Dane Haylett-Petty, the Western Force star player and first-time Wallaby in 2016, urinated in the hallway of the Southern Sun Bloemfontein Hotel. In another incident at the hotel, Pek Cowan, another Wallaby and Force veteran, drove the team bus without permission.
These incidents occurred after the Force lost an away match against the Cheetahs, 30-29.
A group of Force players went out drinking. They ended up breaking the team’s 1am curfew.
When they finally got back to the hotel, a friendly fight that grew nasty broke out between Dane Haylett-Petty and his brother, Ross.
Another Force new Wallaby, Adam Coleman, had an argument with prop Francois Van Wyk, which ended, apparently, with a hand-shake. Both these players broke the curfew rules.
It was after all these incidents that Cowan took over the team’s minibus and drove to a fast-food outlet in town.
Over the weekend, the Force lost their last home game for the season, to the Stormers, 22-3. The loss means the Force did not win a Super Rugby match in Perth in 2016.
The team is on the bottom of the weak Australian conference, on 13 points. Like the Southern Kings, the bottom team on the South Africa 2 conference (nine points), the Force have won only two matches.
The Force are also ahead of the Sunwolves, the new Super Rugby team that have won only one match and notched up just nine points.
The Sunwolves have great potential for growth, on and off the field. The same thing cannot be said about the Force. The Perth franchise has exhausted any potential for growth. It is a failed franchise. It needs to be transplanted to a region, the western suburbs of Sydney, where there is terrific potential for growth, on and off the field.
2016 has been an annus horribilis for the Force. The team is a non-starter on the field. Coach Michael Foley has been sacked. The relationship between Team Force and its administration has collapsed. The incidents in Bloemfontein, for example, were not relayed to CEO Mark Sinderberry by the team manager Adam Crane until the Wednesday after the weekend of shame.
All the hallmarks of a franchise out of control are apparent.
It is time to end the failed ten-year project of basing the Force in Perth.
The ARU must start putting in place a plan to move the Force to the western suburbs of Sydney, a shift that will enhance the team’s Western and Force credentials.
In early June, the ARU issued a media release with the slightly misleading headline: “ARU and Western Force seal alliance agreement”.
The release announced in its first sentence that an alliance agreement had been signed that enabled the “Western Force to continue as a Western Australian team.”
The next paragraph, though, gave the game away: “Under the agreement the ARU will integrate the professional Rugby program of the Western Force into the High Performance Unit of the ARU.”
Later on in the statement, this: “Under the alliance Western Force players and professional Rugby staff will become ARU employees… Current RugbyWA CEO, Mark Sinderberry, will remain in his position and will have dual reporting lines to the ARU and the RugbyWA board.”
The ARU owns the Western Force franchise. With this ownership comes the power to make decisions in the best interests of the Australian rugby community where the franchise is based.
We come now to the proposal suggested in March 2016 by the then out-going CEO of the Waratahs, Greg Harris, that the Force should be removed from Perth and installed as Sydney’s second Super Rugby team.
As well as being a CEO of the Waratahs, Harris was earlier a CEO of the Western Force.
There is no one in Australian rugby, and this explicitly embraces everyone involved with the ARU, who has the expertise about the rugby markets in Perth and Sydney as Greg Harris.
Harris made the point in his proposal to re-establish the Force as a western Sydney franchise that from “a strictly business sense, the ARU is better off cutting its losses than keeping faith with making Western Australia work – a region that cannot prosper in a saturated national sports market.”
Events of the past weekends, on and off the field, have entrenched the validity of this proposition.
Harris made the further point that “Not even the NRL has a national footprint. They tried Adelaide, they tried Perth, but couldn’t make it work, so what makes you think the ARU has the capacity to do it? It doesn’t.”
Bringing western Sydney into Super Rugby will bring real “local derbies” into the Australian Conference, Harris insists: “In [AFL] Brisbane and Sydney, you’ve got two teams because you need to have that rivalry established. In soccer, they [FFA] put two teams in [Sydney and Melbourne], so you’ve got a cross-town rivalry. The issue we’ve got here is that we don’t have that tribalism. Our closest competition is the Brumbies who are three and a half hours away.”
This makes obvious sense. Anyone with a knowledge of the history of Sydney and its rugby traditions will know that a Waratahs and Sydney-based Western Force playing out of Parramatta will create an instant, intense rivalry between the ‘Silvertails’ (Roy Masters’ description of the Manly and Eastern Suburbs rugby league clubs) and the battlers from the west.
There are many other advantages too.
For most weeks, there will be a Sydney Super Rugby game to watch at the ground and on television.
The ARU’s plan to try and democratise rugby by moving resources to the western suburbs of Sydney will be given an impetus from the shift. The pool of players throughout NSW, in western Sydney, the northern suburbs, and the country areas will be more easily absorbed into a Sydney side.
It is well-established that players from the heartland of Australian rugby, the Sydney grade and schools competitions, are reluctant to make the move across the continent to Western Australian.
I know that the chief executive of the ARU apologised for claiming that the heartland clubs were “pissing” away the ARU’s money, but here is a chance for him to show that his claims about protecting the heartland are heartfelt. Nothing could energise club and schools rugby in Sydney better than a second Sydney franchise.
The Sydney Morning Herald‘s Tom Decent, in his interview back in March with Greg Harris, asked whether it would be a good idea to have two Super Rugby franchises in Sydney. Harris’ answer, as direct as an arrow shot, brought the issue back on target:
“At the end of the day, the ARU chairman [Cameron Clyne] is a former banker.
“I wonder how many ATMs he’s got in Perth and I wonder how many he’s got in Sydney and Brisbane? Sydney and Brisbane are where your major stakeholders are. If you don’t protect them, then you’re going to lose them.”
These arguments about cross-town rivalry and the major stakeholders are irrefutable.
Cameron Clyne, as the chief executive of NAB, actually had a (painful) experience in trying to hang on to an asset that was so lacking viability that it dragged down the successful parts of his business.
When he retired from NAB, the Sydney Mornign Herald‘s Elizabeth Knight made this final assessment: “Unfortunately Clyne didn’t manage to dispose of the bank’s troubled British operations soon enough and can be criticised for underestimating the rot in that market, and the weight this anchor would place on NAB.”
Clyne needs to face up to the fact that the Western Force in Perth is, as far as the ARU is concerned, the equivalent of the UK banks were for NAB.
Sitting on the problem, Micawber-like, hoping for something to turn up, was not a solution for NAB. Nor is it a solution for the ARU.
I know that people inside the ARU regard me as an over-critical botherer. Well, there is a lot to be bothered about. And someone has to create a fuss in the hope of getting something done.
Only someone belonging to the Blinkers Anonymous club would deny that the challenges facing Australian rugby are massive.
The Wallabies are under-performing. The Super Rugby competition structure is a disaster for Australia. The skill levels of our players are poor. The coaching is generally abysmal. The ARU has no influence with World Rugby or even with SANZAAR.
There is a sense of lull in moving to a New Zealand management model. The heartland clubs, schools and subbies, whose numbers are down for the first time in years, are being abandoned.
And in the last week or so, the total, abject failure of the Western Force based in Perth project has been so exposed that WREXIT, a Western Australian rugby-exit, is critical for the continued viability of Australian rugby.
Rocko
Roar Guru
gold
Kelven
Guest
Don't worry, Spiro got Bored and decided to spice things up with a joke. If Western Sydney was a real option then the NSWRU would have actually made an effort to promote rugby there over the last 30 years. The problem with Spiro is that he still thinks Australian rugby has been well managed for the 20 years that he should have been writing critical articles about his mates!!!!!
Kelven
Guest
Sorry brother but that shows a lack of understanding of western Sydney -. It isn't Union territory but is is very much soccer territory which is why the Wanderers have done well. You need to put teams into parts of the country where there is some rugby organisation to go with it. Which there would be in NSWRU had done its job over the last 20 years!!!!!
Kelven
Guest
He's right "dude". The NSWRU are responsible for Western Sydney and they have left it abandoned for 30 years. Don't think that now suddenly you are going to transplant a team there and it will be successful. You are dreaming!! The reason the Wanderers are successful is they have a heartland. Rugby needs more than just a transplanted team it needs the NSWRU to actually make an effort to grow the game there over the next 20 years. Having said that , if you want to transplant a team, the best one would be Rebels as they don't have a growing patronage of the game compared to WA. How many Rebels players are local? Force will have about 30% next year. Even so. NSWRU can put in some work for 20 years and then we can talk about moving teams round!!!!!
AussieIrish
Guest
Sorry, don’t believe this proposal shows much forethought for the future. It is my understanding that Rugby is making significant inroads in Perth and the game is starting to mildly impact on AFL. When you compare this situation to Sydney, where there is contraction of Rugby and where there has been massive contraction of Rugby in Western Sydney. Look at the AFL pouring huge funds into the Giants with only minimal success with growth of junior club. At the same time Soccer has exploded and League has expanded further. Why on earth do you think that placing a mediocre franchise in Sydney’s west will increase interest in Rugby. All this will do is sacrifice the growth in Perth, weaken the Waratahs and further drive Rugby into a more unstable financial situation. The ARU and Super Rugby do not have the funds to promote the game. Look at the Giants. The amount of money being thrown in the region, by the AFL, could fund junior Rugby Australia wide and the return is in the words of several prominent AFL officials “disappointing”. People in Western Sydney are mainly interested in Soccer and League and only a miracle will change that. Please keep growing the game in Perth. Be patient and allow Western Australia to develop. Don’t waste scarce financial resources in a region that will become a bottomless money pit.
Laurie of Queanbeyan
Guest
I can't work out how he comes to the conclusion that moving a team from Perth to Western Sydney would solve any of the problems he describes. - Parramatta/Wern Sydney is not RU heartland. it's solid rugby league or football (soccer) territory. I wonder what size crowds they get at local Parramatta/Penrith/Eastwood club games and whether they would transfer over to a Super Rugby team? Sydney RU might divide North-South in terms of cross-town rivalry, not East-West, so I think Parramatta is a no-go - Brumbies hold a lot of support in country NSW and I do not expect that would change even if Sydney got a 2nd team (I support the Brumbies rather than the Waratahs, & I certainly don't intend to change) - WA is a growing RU area----and I'm sure the Super Rugby team helps. To take it away could well destroy a lot of the local interest, and probably cause a number of local teams to fold - we don't want to lose a franchise---that'd simply hand over more money to NZ & SAfrica with more home games. It'd also mean borderline top line players would see a lot less game time (eg.: would Haylett-Petty have got a Wallaby jersey if he'd been on the Brumbies or Waratahs reserve bench throughout the season). A better approach would be to fix the rules around player eligibility, player behaviour, Wallaby qualifying, etc., not simply dump a team on a whim. Give Rebels & Force more $, or more slots for imported players, or some such advantage to help them develop. Another problem is how to convert all the disinterested spectators ---- free-to-air TV would be a start.
Stephen Smith
Guest
To further support Spiro's argument just look at the success of the establishment of the Western Sydney Wanderers in the A-League and the resulting derbies with Sydney FC which has very quickly become one of the most important sporting events in the Sydney sporting calendar.
KTinHK
Roar Pro
You're kidding dude.
KTinHK
Roar Pro
Hear! Hear! I agree totally, Spiro. And I have been arguing this for many years... The team should never have been put in WA in the first place. The success of WSW and the Giants proves that the team should have been placed in Western Sydney from the outset, one of the best football breeding grounds in the world. We are already way behind the other codes in recognising this. There is not a moment to waste: it must occur before the start of next season. The cogs need to start turning now if it is going to happen.
Dave
Guest
The Australian Rugby Union stacks two teams with wallaby and all they can manage is 39 points The Western Force is a real attempt to grow the game, and it is working. Local rugby has improved and the Western Force is start to produce local players, junior player numbers are up. Move to Western Sydney, grow up
7 will run on this week
I have great respect for Spiro but I must say that this article is poorly considered for several reasons; 1. Look today at the win by the Melbourne Rebels over the Reds A momentous occasion for the Rebels because they have today won a record 7 games in a season. Never before has that happened. Good for them, however it is the worst best season of any team in the Australian conference. Even the Western Force have done better, winning 9 games in 2014. 2. The Western Force were set up by the ARU without any forethought. Compare the way they were set up to to the Rebels. Recruitment allowances in the form of foreign players were heavily modified in order to guarantee that the ARU mistakes when they set up the Force weren't replicated with the Rebels. 3. A large portion of the Western Force problems can be slated back to the WA Rugby Board for sure. The way they sacked John Mitchell, a well respected International coach (in his time the 3rd most successful coach of the All Blacks in their history - a little remembered fact!) who attracted good players to the club, was at best idiotic. And then to replace him with Richard Graham...well we all know what he did to the Force and then to the Reds. A couple of seasons with an atrocious coach is hard to recover from. 4. And yet the signs are there for the Force. They are now playing an decent brand of rugby. Yes they have only won 2 games but they have been in every game they played this year except for two. No team travels to Perth without knowing they will be in a hard game. The biggest problem has been depth and injuries. At various times this season they have had only 24 players in the entire squad that were fit to be considered for selection. A tough ask for any modern team, especially one with the Forces travel schedule (a conversation for another time).. 5. The Force will for the first time in their history, field 7 home grown players in their team this weekend. That is a real sign that the ARU's strategy of broadening the base of Super Rugby experienced players in Australia is working. It is a slow and painful road to grow rugby in Australia after years of ARU incompetence but in this they have it right. To relocate the Force to Western Sydney would be the easy, yet the wrong decision for the long term future of rugby in this country.
Goldenaxe
Roar Rookie
Spiro, I go the the match every week when the Force are playing in Perth with my wife and some mates. Why are you so hell bent on taking that away from us? It is a great evening out. Good people, few beers, some munchies. We would like to win more but we don't but some day we will. It doesn't mean we still don't love it. Leave us alone please. You would be better off pushing some productive solutions like a fairer redistribution of players around the country, a raiding of the Sprinkgbok U20's and Schoolboys or the continued growth of Perth born and bred players into Super Rugby.
Goldenaxe
Roar Rookie
Spiro,
clipper
Guest
that's part of the problem - league and Soccer take care of those sectors, so Rugby would be left to fight with the AFL for what's left and the AFL is finding it pretty hard going out there.
AndyS
Guest
Quite agree, stereotypes are stupid and lazy excuses for things that people don't really want to think about because they don't like the reality...
ForceFan
Guest
Just a realist. I used the Waratahs as just one example (but also the most telling). It would be a very long article to include the support for the other franchises.
Rory
Guest
I'd like to see that. Pick the whole lot up and move it to the east coast. Perth is such a beautiful place. We could probably put it between Newcastle and Taree.
Rory
Guest
I'm a fan and I come from Western Sydney working class. Have a look at people like TPN and KB, and most of the islanders playing rugby. Rugby league has let me down by changing the rules so arbitrarily and often that the game is butt-ugly boring and not a shadow of what it was when I was growing up. Hence I found a new passion - rugby, wallabies and waratahs. We are not all posh upper class people. I don't know if we want or need the battlers tag anyway. This is reverse elitism at its worst. You think you are better because you are not what you imagine elite is, thereby becoming a member of the elite.
Rory
Guest
You sound more like a Waratah hater than a Force fan.