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The unkindest cut of all

28th May, 2017
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The ARU has copped a lot of criticism. (AP Photo/Rick Rycroft)
Roar Guru
28th May, 2017
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1558 Reads

Just over ten weeks ago I penned an article in defence of the rugby club that I grew up supporting and to criticise the ARU’s strategy for the future of Super Rugby.

This was amid the first confirmed reports that the ARU had decided to dump an Australian Super Rugby franchise and continue with four teams henceforth.

Since then, the ARU have confirmed that the decision to axe a team will affect one of the Melbourne Rebels or the Western Force with the Brumbies being excluded from consideration.

I’ll admit, when I heard the Brumbies were safe I was relieved.

But that does not mean that I support the decision to go ahead and cut one of the other Australian Super Rugby teams.

Bill Pulver Cameron Clyne press conference

(AP Photo/Rick Rycroft)

And it certainly does not excuse the ARU for the dreadful way in which they have handled the issue; from the original leak of the story, to the dithering over whether to comment on the matter while rumours ran wild, to suddenly announcing that a decision could be made in two or three days before realising, whoops, actually, it turns out that giving a professional sports club and all their players and staff the axe is a bit more complicated than you’d think – who’d have thought?

The saga has been embarrassing. It seems to be becoming clearer every day that whenever it was that the ARU made up its mind to take this course of action to SANZAAR and lock it in for the future, none of the fine detail had been sorted through.

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They didn’t know which club they were going to sack. They didn’t have a timetable in place for informing the club and for arranging for the players of the unfortunate franchise to have time to make plans for their futures. They didn’t have a plan for making sure that those players had an incentive to stay in Australia.

Instead, things are being made up as they go along and where decisions aren’t being made circumstances are being allowed to get out of hand.

It’s really no surprise to read stories like these that make it evident that players at not one, but both of the clubs put under the pump of the ARU’s indecisiveness are making arrangements to ply their trades overseas.

These people are professionals. They have livelihoods to think about. It certainly doesn’t strike me as being unreasonable that they should put what’s best for their families over the Machiavellian interests of Australian rugby, especially when the ARU refuse to give them any certainty.

Nobody likes uncertainty. And what makes things worse is that it’s not unlikely that this could have flow on effects for the clubs that are ‘safe’. After all, if this is how the ARU goes about ‘strengthening’ rugby in this country, players across the country watching this trainwreck play out will have good reason to reconsider their futures in Australia.

For mine, the most exasperating thing about the whole fiasco is that it has never been clearly explained what the cut is supposed to achieve anyway.

Even if we imagine an alternate universe where the ARU had been decisive and on-the-ball from day one, it is hard to believe that all of the players affected would end up signing for the other Australian clubs – particularly with lucrative contract offers from abroad coming in.

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Would the other clubs be strengthened? Perhaps marginally. But given the abominable combined inter-conference results the Australian clubs have come out with this season, Blind Freddy could see that it wouldn’t be enough to make any difference.

A better argument could be made that the perennial underperformance of the two clubs was detracting from the prestige of Super Rugby, but this could not explain the refusal to also consider axing the Sunwolves.

Rahboni Warren-Vosayaco Sunwolves Super Rugby Union 2017

(AP Photo/Koji Sasahara)

It would also not explain why similar questions were not asked about, for instance, the Queensland Reds’ involvement in the competition in 2009 when they finished within a stone’s throw of the bottom of the ladder for the sixth year in a row.

Or how about the Lions, formally known as the Cats, who have finished as one of the three lowest placed teams in 15 out of their 20 previous years of participation in modern Super Rugby, and who won only 23 of 130 matches in the decade before they finally did get punted from the comp for one year in 2013 before being readmitted at the expense of the similarly dire Southern Kings?

The Lions and Reds aren’t on the chopping block this time around and I am not of the opinion that they should have been previously. As history shows, both clubs were able to turn their fortunes around and – at least in Queensland’s case – win their first title in the professional era. The Lions’ first title could conceivably come later this year.

But the point that needs to be made is if the prestige of Super Rugby has been diminished, it’s unfair to take it out on the newcomers when some of the longstanding teams have been similarly guilty of underperformance. Whichever of the two teams that gets axed will be well entitled to wonder what they did to deserve such shoddy treatment.

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So where does that leave us? A malaise hanging over the sport in this country, two clubs bleeding players to overseas, a national body that veers between the extremes of impulsive capriciousness and fretful prevarication, no real plan for how to bring credibility back to Australian rugby, and a few dozen players, coaches, and other professionals who will be uprooted and moved elsewhere come the end of the year – and not necessarily to other parts of Australia.

What a mess.

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