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The Wallabies are battered and bruised, coach Michael Cheika has been hung out to dry by many, Rugby Australia has no friends because it hasn’t earned respect, and the last rites are being read about a code that was once known as the game they play in heaven.
Pure turmoil, nightmare status.
The rot started years ago when club rugby was allowed to go professional when it should have remained amateur, having a job Monday to Friday, paying annual club subscriptions, training Tuesday and Thursday nights, playing Saturday, having a big Saturday night, recovering Sunday, and going back to work Monday.
That didn’t happen, every club went broke, and worst of all they lost their licensed clubs – the very hub of rugby club life.
Around the same time, there were heaps of secondary schools where rugby was the only winter sport – especially GPS and Associated Schools.
Now every one of them caters for AFL and soccer.
But the current crisis can be best explained over the last six weeks.
It kick-started when Rugby Australia signed Michael Hooper to a five-year contract worth $6 million when he wasn’t the best seven in the country, nor the best captain.
Yet Rugby Australia trumpeted him as the new face of rugby.
Didn’t they learn from Quade Cooper about the danger of long contracts?
He’s been playing club rugby in Brisbane on $650,000 a season because Reds coach Brad Thorn didn’t want him on his roster, as is his right.
And how much extra pressure did the Hooper signing put on Cheika to keep the Pooper experiment operating when a change was demanded?
(Photo by Phil Walter/Getty Images)
Fast forward to last week where Rugby Australia obviously rated the Pumas clash as a non-event by scheduling the international on the Gold Coast where only 16,019 turned up, and that figure looked liberal.
Cheika added to the downgrade status by persevering with some strange selection changes, and making a few new ones despite a win over the Boks the previous week, and added to confusion with an extraordinary uncharacteristic explanation.
Kurtley Beale’s switch to fly-half and Matt Toomua’s move to inside centre were stretched into a second week in a row, and when Israel Folau returned from an ankle injury Cheika retained his replacement Dane Haylett-Petty as fullback and punted Folau to the right wing.
Cheika only has three x-factor players – David Pocock, Beale and Folau.
Pocock took over the captaincy from an injured Hooper to play seven where he’s the best, but by taking Beale and Folau out of where they are most comfortable in proven positions to x-factor, Cheika publicly dared them to fire in unfamiliar positions.
Cheika’s dare to fire edict backfired badly – Beale had his worst game in ages, while Folau bombed a last-minute try for victory that will be talked about for as long as rugby is played.
(Photo by Matt King/Getty Images)
The original selections were hardly different, they were radical and not necessary.
Had Cheika selected Toomua as fly-half, and kept Beale and Folau in their normal positions with Haylett-Petty on the wing, I have no doubt the Wallabies would have comfortably beaten the Pumas instead of them winning 23-19, their first victory on Australian soil in 35 years.
Next up, the Wallabies will be away to the Boks and Pumas on a long road trip to complete the 2018 Rugby Championship where they are last on the ladder and likely to remain there for the first time.
And with Australia languishing in seventh place in the rugby world rankings, their worst position since the rankings began, rugby is in a right royal mess.
The Michael Cheika selections over the next two weeks will decide whether he has lost the plot or is a strategic genius.
Anything less than option two and the coach, with his staff, must be riding into the sunset with the current Rugby Australia board.