Warning to Rugby Australia: The Waratahs and Wallabies will be mediocre without Israel Folau

Case 1: A star rugby player expresses the traditional Christian view on hell and gay people, admittedly in a blunt and uncompromising manner.

His tweet provokes, in the words of the Sydney Morning Herald’s respected sports writer Malcolm Knox, “a complex community debate about free speech, tolerance, evangelism and the responsibilities of role models.”

Officials at Rugby Australia and the NSW Waratahs, along with a couple of influential sponsors, claim that the player is guilty of disrespecting diversity. There are suggestions of contract retaliation if he repeats his views.

The player affirms that he has no regrets and no grudges against those who have attacked him, saying “it’s nothing to do personally with anyone, teammates or anyone that is involved in the game.”

However, a former Wallaby Nic White and a former All Black Brad Weber, in the name of diversity, say that they are disgusted at having to share the same code as Case 1.

These comments are applauded by rugby authorities and most of the rugby media.

(Photo by Mark Nolan/Getty Images)

Case 2: A senior Waratahs and Wallaby player who is often promoted in the media as the gregarious face of the rugby game gets drunk on his buck’s night.

At a function in Sydney’s upmarket Woollahra Hotel and dressed in a cow’s suit he urinates over the bar. He is carted away in disgrace. He is so intoxicated he has very little recollection of the incident.

Case 2 then announces that he takes his responsibilities as a senior player in the Waratahs very seriously. He says “I’m a goose” and that he wants to “make sure that everyone knows how sorry I am.”

He is fined $4000, suspended from his leadership role with the Waratahs and cleared to play five days after the incident against the Auckland Blues, a must-win match for the Waratahs.

Andrew Webster, the star sports writer for the Herald, notes: “Look, we’re not condoning this sort of behaviour but … it happens.”

This passive and, let’s be honest, condoning attitude to the grotty cow’s suit incident is opposite to the strong condemnation promoted by Webster on the tweet made by Case 1.

Nic White and Brad Weber do not comment on the Case 2 incident.

This silence creates the presumption that they find the tweet of Case 1 far more unacceptable than behaviour of Case 2.

Now here are some key questions.

Would we be interested in what Israel Folau (Case 1) or Nic Phipps (Case 2) say or do if they were not professional rugby players?

If the answer to this question is no (as it is reasonable to assume), then who out of Folau and Phipps has actually behaved in a way that threatens his ability to play competently as a professional rugby player?

Bear in mind, that a day or so before the incident in the hotel bar, Nick Phipps had been a member of the Waratahs squad that was defeated in Sydney, 29–0, by the touring South African side the Lions.

This was the first nil-loss by the Waratahs in Super Rugby.

(AAP Image/Craig Golding)

You would have thought that a senior member of the Waratahs and other senior members with him, including the Waratahs captain Michael Hooper (but not Israel Folau), would have had more respect for their club than to allow Phipps’ drunken cow’s suit incident to even happen.

Is this the sort of behaviour that should be condoned when the Waratahs faced, five days later, the Auckland Blues, a match that Mark Ella reported in his Saturday column in the Australian, “is a game the Waratahs must win, for their own sake and for the sake of Australian rugby?”

Going into the Waratahs-Blues match at Manly’s Brookvale Oval (a great initiative by the Waratahs franchise, incidentally), the New Zealand Super Rugby teams had won 37 successive matches against their Australian opponents.

This dire run of losses prompted the New Zealand Herald’s Gregor Paul to predict that Australian rugby has set its “course for oblivion … and is no use to New Zealand any more if the Waratahs can’t put away the Blues …”

That is nonsense, of course. But there was something more important in Paul’s rant that Rugby Australia needs to absorb when he made this accusation: “Rugby in Australia has set course for oblivion and intends to be in a thousand pieces by the time it arrives.”

There are any number of points that can be made that give credence to this harsh judgment. And central to these points is the observation that the rugby authorities in Australia appear to have forgotten their primary mission, which should be to promote the rugby game in Australia.

Why is Rugby Australia’s board stacked with people whose expertise has nothing to do with understanding the rugby game?

Why was the CEO appointed with no experience, other than watching, with the rugby game?

Why does the Rugby Australia board and the CEO allow the head of the Rugby Australia national coaching panel, Rod Kafer, to go on Sky Sports and then bag the players his coaching systems are supposed to be improving?

Why is Andrew Forrest, the billionaire mining magnate, being kept at arm’s length by Rugby Australia? Why isn’t he being embraced? Has he been offered a place on the board?

(Photo by Daniel Carson/Getty Images)

And putting this question into context is the observation that it was remarkable and indeed wonderful to see Andrew Forrest rush on to the field to check on the injured Force player, Peter Grant, as he was being pushed into the dressing room on a stretcher during the Force-Fiji Warriors match in Perth on Friday night.

The first World Series Rugby contest drew a crowd (with freebies to rugby-playing kids) of 18,000. The promotion of the series made the Super Rugby productions look mediocre by comparison.

Yet you get the impression that Forrest is being treated by Rugby Australia as an enemy rather than as a potential saviour.

During the Waratahs–Blues match it became obvious that Israel Folau is the only world-class player the Waratahs have.

I would rate Bernard Foley, Kurtley Beale and Michael Hooper as very good Super Rugby players (at times) and the rest of the Waratahs squad as sliding up and down between good and average professional rugby players.

Foley, Beale and Hooper all did good things during the match against the Blues, with Hooper’s blazing, runaway try a highlight. But in crucial times in the match, they did not deliver.

There were many occasions, including during the last desperate minutes of the match, when phase after phase was punched out by the Waratahs and the knockout punch not delivered.

Playmakers of high quality would have converted a couple of these sequences of pressure on the Blues try-line into points.

The last sequence of plays involved 19 phases and ended with Beale kicking across to Folau. Not even Folau’s supreme athleticism could result in pushing the ball back into the field of play. The kick was the wrong play, “the lowest percentage play the Waratahs could have played,” according to Greg Martin.

After the match, both coach Daryl Gibson and Beale, the kicker, suggested that the Waratahs believed that a penalty had been ruled in their favour which, in turn, gave Beale a licence to take a punt on the cross kick.

Whatever, it was the wrong play at the wrong time. The play exposed the bankruptcy of ideas the Waratahs have in their playbook to score from close range.

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This gets us back to Israel Folau.

At the beginning of the game, the Blues tested him a lot with high balls. They gave away this tactic when it became clear that, like with Ben Smith, he is a dominating force when leaping for the ball.

Folau also snared two kick-offs and with catching and then his running was instrumental in turning one of these kick-offs into a Waratahs try.

Every time Folau got the ball he made metres and created chances for the Waratahs.

All this leads to the inevitable conclusion. The Waratahs are a mediocre team without Israel Folau.