The Wrap: What Australian rugby can learn from the Big Bash League

It’s hardly controversial to say that Australian rugby faces a challenging 2017.

Some things are likely to get worse before they get better. Super Rugby enters another year locked into a conference system that many people either don’t understand or don’t care for, which will continue to weigh down discussion of good things happening on the field.

For the glass-half-empty crowd, the list of everything that needs fixing in Australian rugby is longer than a John Farnham farewell tour. In reality, however, what Australian rugby needs can be distilled down to three things.

Money
Enough so there’s no need to rely so heavily on SANZAAR and South African Pay TV dollars to sustain the local game and to help keep the best players at home

On-field success
14 years without the Bledisloe Cup negatively impacts the psyche of fans and is an obstacle to attracting new

Management
Administrators to better engage members, players and supporters of clubs, and (most importantly) for all participants to respect the governance of the game. As in politics, in rugby, disunity is death

Like most things in life, money doesn’t guarantee happiness, but it stands to reason that most of Australian rugby’s pressure points would be soothed, or even eliminated, by an injection of cash.

And it is here where cricket’s Big Bash League (BBL) provides a valuable pointer.

For years, cricket has fumbled along towards an uncertain future. The domestic game relegated to invisibility, Test cricket failing to maintain primacy and myriad turn-offs including slow over rates, betting scandals, arguments about technology, empire building by entitled nations and saturation from too much meaningless one-day cricket.

Only a fool would claim that cricket has shed itself of all of its problems, but conversely, it’s plain to see how Cricket Australia (CA) has at least been able to generate money, and lots of it, in a very short time period. In doing so, they turned the prognosis for the future of cricket from questionable to ‘rude health’.

Figuring out exactly how to convert tens of thousands of boys and girls wearing chicken buckets over their heads while pretending to tonk sixes like Chris Lynn into the Test cricket players and fans of the future can be left for another day. That’ll be long after an exhausted CA has finished counting all of its cash.

The key premise, and an important lesson for rugby, is not to look for one solution to solve every problem or to worry about potential negatives like whether T20 is actually real cricket or sevens rugby is real rugby. These subtleties simply don’t matter.

There is still space for cricket lovers who prefer the ebb and flow of Test cricket to wash over them with ABC Radio for company or, heaven forbid, just silence.

We’re not, to use the modern vernacular, the demographic.

But 71,000 excited people jumping around at the MCG to the theme from the Addams Family and ‘dabbing’ on the command of the ground announcer, who will, by the time their heads hit the pillow, have forgotten the result of the match but happily spent their (or their parent’s) money? That’s a demographic that the ARU should be desperate to tap into.

To do that, rugby people – administrators and supporters – first need to set aside what they already know and understand about what rugby is and how it should be promoted. In the same way that T20 ‘isn’t really cricket’, the type of rugby that can capture the same audience and potentially generate much-needed revenue for the ARU doesn’t need to be rugby as we know it.

The BBL demonstrates how modern fans engage with sport. Attending my first BBL match, I asked a lady sitting next to me, how, in a new form of cricket that sprung up out of nowhere, with two Melbourne teams to choose from, she chose which one to follow? Her reply was that she liked ‘KP’ so it was the Stars for her.

As it happened, ‘KP’ made a superb outfield catch – the only noteworthy cricket moment of the whole match – but inevitably couldn’t resist leading with his ego, coming out in the press afterwards lecturing his teammates about the value of teamwork. Priceless.

Kevin Pietersen is just one of numerous contradictions in the BBL. The game is young, brash and exciting, yet most of the ‘big name’ players are well past their prime. Where there is a gap in play or no prospect of a tense, exciting finish? No matter, the ground announcer simply fills every space reminding the masses what a great time they are all having and everyone laps it up.

My neighbour also volunteered that, unlike the AFL, where her husband and kids would be insufferably grumpy for the whole weekend after a Richmond Tigers defeat, she loved how if the Stars lost, they could still pile into the car afterwards and drive home happy.

And why not? If it’s good enough for team captains to chat away light-heartedly to TV hosts in the middle of the action and demonstrably not feel hurt when they lose, clearly the match outcome is secondary. Fans just want to be entertained, on and off the ground.

Conventional thinking is that sport needs decades of tribal rivalry to work. For rugby, read Queensland versus NSW. The Bledisloe Cup.

But the BBL has shown how fans can compartmentalise and derive different benefits from different iterations of the sport – provided each is packaged appropriately for the right audience.

What rugby has is a form of the game, sevens, that is to the traditional game what T20 is to traditional cricket. It is ripe for being taken aside by hipster-bearded marketing genii, sliced and diced, and repackaged in a form that speaks to this T20 generation.

Last year in these pages I introduced ‘Rugby Sevens Smash‘, a vehicle for a domestic sevens competition, unashamedly modelled on the BBL. For anyone who cares to read through it, the detail is important; in this form or any other modified version, the structure and logistics ultimately must make sense. But at the same time, the detail also isn’t so important.

Where Australian rugby is concerned, it is awareness of the opportunity, enthusiasm, entrepreneurial spirit, and the bravery to seize that opportunity that really counts.

In August this year, the ARU will launch a women’s sevens university competition that will serve as a pathway for players into the national team, the Pearls. In the context of traditional rugby thinking, and with respect to the ARU’s limited finances, it’s a worthy addition.

But it also misses the moment. Who will watch it and in what medium? If the pompous, prattish Pietersen can capture the Australian public’s imagination, imagine what the delightful Charlotte Caslick could do if promoted properly? Along with a sprinkling of dynamic, skilful Fijian men? The very same athletes who thrilled the viewing public in Rio?

In retrospect, the ‘Rugby Sevens Smash’ proposal too hastily assumes that free-to-air television coverage would be difficult to obtain. Ten Network Executive for the Big Bash, David Barham, has already admitted that Ten expects to pay much more in the next rights round than the current $100m over five years. Reports estimate that the BBL could be worth as much as $50-60m per season.

By that measure, the ARU is sitting on a potential gold mine. By all means develop sevens players through a university-based nursery, but don’t leave it there, or even consider it part of the same conversation.

The path to financial salvation for the ARU is through free-to-air television. Super Rugby, the NRC and club rugby, for various reasons, have little or no FTA value, but a cleverly designed and packaged sevens league surely provides the type of content that FTA networks will pay for at little risk too for the ARU. Do the selling up front, and if there are no takers then it doesn’t run and there’s nothing lost.

Of course, there are challenges, and the returns do not accrue immediately. Writing for ESPN, Daniel Brettig outlines the fascinating story behind Cricket Australia’s flirtation with a private ownership model, before settling on the existing T20 structure. Now in season six, it is only this year that the league has become fully self-sustainable, although the blue sky from this point onwards appears limitless.

It would be fiscally irresponsible for the ARU to bet the house on a yet-to-be-proven concept – it is money they simply don’t have to risk. Yet with the right partners, and a solid financial and marketing plan in place, the greater risk may well be the opportunity cost of doing nothing.

In the coming weeks, there will be great excitement generated by the Sydney leg of the World Rugby Sevens league and the Brisbane Tens. The ARU will benefit from the gate in Sydney; like last year, a strong turnout is expected. But its involvement in Brisbane is only to sanction the tournament, which is owned by DUCO Events.

That’s simply not a financial return commensurate with the level of interest or the potential. As February transitions into Super Rugby, these events will likely become nothing more than a classic sugar hit; fun at the time but lacking any long-term nutritional benefit.

With a Lions tour payday not scheduled until 2025 and no possibility of a home World Cup on the horizon until at least 2027, the ARU needs to force the play in the short term.

Baby steps forward are being made with the NRC and the university sevens competition. But what some regard as progress others view as not much more than the conservative deckchair-shuffling typical of rugby administrations.

With the BBL, Cricket Australia has shown rugby a way forward; a way for the ARU to generate revenue sufficient to reclaim control of its own destiny. It has the product and the template. Does it have the courage?