A hell of a way to find out bad news

The Friday 5pm press conference is the oldest trick in the public relations book.

Fans of The West Wing might recall somewhat important admissions of error being “thrown out with the trash”, a reference to the last presser of the week, in which nothing of consequence is ever announced, and thus is largely ignored and left alone in media coverage. If you announce something, and no-one covers it, well you can’t do any more than that, right?

For the ARU, Friday afternoon’s announcement that they were “discontinuing” the Western Force’s Super Rugby participation agreement certainly fits the mould. Late Friday, as the TV news bulletins were locking down, and as the papers were rapidly approaching deadline.

They’d have known this when they issued the media opportunity.

But it was also borne somewhat out of necessity. We always knew that if the arbitration process found in their favour that the ARU wouldn’t – and couldn’t, really – wait until Monday morning to make the announcement. And though the arbitration finding hasn’t been published, nor do we know what time it was handed down, it is fair to assume that it, too, came reasonably late on Friday.

And so, came the Friday 5pm press conference that continues to reverberate around Australian rugby, and into the wider Super Rugby sphere.

But first, just allow me to back track here a little.

“Let’s go the weekend of the 12th and 13th of August. It’s the weekend after the Super Rugby Final, the weekend before the Bledisloe; it’s not like I’m going to have any major rugby news to cover,” was my side of a conversation back a while in the McKay household.

We were trying to work out the best time to take a short family break, and after a long and rocky Super Rugby season, I was quite looking forward to four or five days of doing not a whole lot before the international season and the NRC kicked off in earnest.

The twist in the plot came when we discovered soon after working out that airfares and four nights in Wellington taking in all the sights was basically the same price as four nights in the Sydney CBD taking in all the sights. So, passports were found, flights were booked, and a long weekend in New Zealand was enjoyed.

And we did have a great time, for the record. It was my second time in the Capital, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone. I can even point out the wonderful harbourside establishment where you’ll find great beer and a much-loved Roar regular.

Come Friday evening, however, the bombshell came. “Western Force gone,” a single text message read from back home, around 6.15pm New Zealand time. Twitter started telling me that an ARU presser was scheduled for forty-five minutes’ time, while the anger from Force fans (and players, for that matter) was already starting to flow.

(Photo by Will Russell/Getty Images)

However, despite being in a country where rugby is a religion, the much smaller New Zealand population and media landscape meant that this developing situation didn’t get much attention at all.

The TV news sport bulletins were locked in and rugby reports focussed on the All Blacks’ ‘game of three halves’ taking place up in Pukekohe; the only mention the Force decision could get was a short mention in throwing back to the news readers.

The next day, the weekend broadsheet edition of the New Zealand Herald ran a single column piece from Perth-based AAP journo, Justin Chadwick, and both the NZH and Stuff.co.nz websites ran updated versions of AAP articles throughout Saturday. It wasn’t until that evening’s TV bulletins that the story started receiving some local coverage.

This surprised me a bit, the relative lack of reporting. To be clear, I wasn’t expecting wall-to-wall coverage; but even if indirectly, this was a fairly significant development in a competition that New Zealand has a fairly significant grounding in. A strong Australian rugby is good for New Zealand rugby, and so I thought there would be something.

What it did do was confirm my long-held suspicions of New Zealand rugby fans – that as long as the All Blacks are winning, and their Super Rugby team is doing well at the same time the Blues are battling, then she’ll be right, mate. It was an interesting enough thought that it made me consider the opposite scenario, in which a Kiwi team had just been “discontinued”, and my strong suspicion is that we’d be a whole lot more aware as things played out.

So, as it was all unravelling back home, I was watching it all unfold over the ditch, 140 characters at a time.

It was a hell of a way to hear bad news, but it was obviously a long way removed from what the Western Force players, coaches, officials, and supporters were going through; something I won’t pretend to know how any of them – how any of you – felt then, or feel now several days on.

(Photo by Paul Kane/Getty Images)

What has been interesting to observe since Friday evening’s decision is how much more ‘The ARU cut the wrong team’ commentary there appears to be now. There really didn’t appear to be much thought offered along these lines when the intention was laid out, nor leading up to the decision on Friday; indeed, it was the ongoing commentary and reporting that the Force WOULD be the team chopped that fuelled the general feeling of this being a fete accompli.

Clearly the fight is not over, with the Force yesterday winning an injunction and the ARU agreeing not to move on any contracted players until the Force hear next week if they’ll have the right to appeal the arbitration decision. The players, led by Dane Haylett-Petty and Adam Coleman have vowed to hold tight and not jump ship until all legal avenues are exhausted, but I’d be stunned if their phones haven’t been ringing already.

So, the saga goes on. We might be closer to the end; we might not. And there’s the small matter of trying to beat those aforementioned Kiwis this weekend rapidly approaching, too.

In the end, it turns out, all I missed was just another weekend in Australian rugby.