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Opinion
Rugby Australia chairman Hamish McLennan doesn’t care about the blowback he’s copping for some of his outlandish statements.
He should.
It’s clear he’s trying to be a media ringmaster with many of his comments to rankle the NRL but he’s running the risk of looking like a clown.
His latest pot shot was befitting of WWE’s long-running scripted stooge Vince McMahon more so than the chairman entrusted with the honour of being the figurehead of the national body governing rugby union in this country.
Rugby Australia chairman Hamish McLennan with Wallabies coach Eddie Jones. (Photo by Matt King/Getty Images)
If you didn’t see it, he took a few jabs in The Sun-Herald on the weekend about the pathetic nature of rugby league’s scrums.
“League scrums are so lame,” he opined. “League talks about toughness but I reckon an arm wrestle at the pub would be harder than their scrums.”
He then proposed a scrum contest between the best forwards from either code, claimed he’d throw in $100,000 of Rugby Australia’s dollars into the kitty for a possible live broadcast on Nine with the winner donating the money to charity.
Before adding: “If it’s a draw we’ll have a spelling competition to determine the winner.”
Rugby league fans stopped caring about scrums decades ago. The referees certainly did.
If the farces that are the 12-person midfield cuddle are replaced with a play-the-ball, it wouldn’t make much of a difference in the NRL landscape.
The main attraction for keeping scrums in the game is that they open up the field for the attacking team, which almost always wins the ball by the tried and true method of gently rolling the ball back to the lock, which is now where the hookers position themselves.
That sentence sums up how seriously rugby league treats scrums – the player on the field named for their ability to hook the ball back from the middle of a contested heaving mass is now the one who waits at the back because of their passing ability to distribute the ball out to the backs.
Anyway, McLennan quite clearly knows this pie-in-the-sky idea will never happen and the method to this madness is to continue his trend of being a disruptor, drawing eyeballs to rugby union as the sport tries to rebound after a decade where it has fallen well behind multiple rival sports, not just the NRL.
We see this all the time in all walks of life, from politics to shock jocks – if you’re the underdog, go for the jugular of your bigger rival to show you’re up for the fight and to eventually become top dog.
Sometimes it works, many times it doesn’t.
McLennan has done well since taking over an organisation that was a mess in 2020 in getting the sport heading back in the right direction.
He made the bold call to bring in a new coach at the start of a World Cup year in Eddie Jones who shares a similarly brash persona although more on the mischievous side which also brings attention to the code.
Jones believes McLennan has done more for the code than any other suit since John O’Neill although the bar is relatively low to clear on that front.
McLennan earned RA considerably more money last year during the Trans-Tasman stand-off with his Kiwi counterparts over the future make-up of Super Rugby Pacific and the TV rights that flow from the competition.
Whether his tenure will ultimately be remembered as successful or not depends on how RA sets itself up with respect to the financial windfalls of the British and Irish Lions tour in 2025 and the men’s and women’s World Cup tournaments of ‘27 and ‘29.
Rugby Australia chairman Hamish McLennan. (Photo by Tom Dulat/Getty Images for Rugby Australia)
In some ways he’s been given a rails run over the rest of this decade considering the Lions were always coming in that they tour Down Under every 12 years and the World Cups were awarded after World Rugby gave Rugby Australia to present its hosting plan without opening up the rights to bids from other nations.
Rugby fans would much prefer to see their sport set up for sustained success in this crucial period rather than seeing their chairman grandstanding for media attention.
His idea for a potential draft to spread out the talent in the Super Rugby Pacific competition is more in line with the kind of big-picture idea that a chairman should be exploring.
The next CEO of Rugby Australia, after the abrupt departure of Andy Marinos on Monday, should be tasked with day-to-day operational matters and also be the public face of the sport, particularly if it ends up being a high-profile ex-Wallaby like Phil Waugh.
McLennan’s frequent “paper talk/clickbait” routine can work but it can also be on the tawdry side.
Some will argue that rugby league has taken a similar path with its chairman, Peter V’landys, taking a similar tack in his repeated snide remarks about their biggest rival, the AFL.
That is true but it doesn’t mean it’s the right path to take. And since when did rugby union think following in the footsteps of their money-hungry long-lost family member was the way to go?
Joseph Suaalii . (Photo by Mark Kolbe/Getty Images)
Snaring young Roosters star Joseph Suaalii on a multimillion-dollar deal from 2025 was a cunning move by Rugby Australia’s head honchos – they not only signed a precocious talent but one who has pedigree in the sport.
Although he is only contracted for three years and he is not guaranteed to be a raging success on the field – Suaalii’s teammate Brandon Smith copped plenty of abuse for saying it’ll take more than that to bring down the All Blacks. The Kiwi hooker is not wrong.
And that’s the challenge now for Rugby Australia – building the Wallabies into an outfit that can realistically knock over the world’s best on a regular basis.
They need to be competitive annually, not just put up a strong run at the World Cup every four years.
As invigorating as an unlikely first Cup trophy since 1999 would be, its lustre will fade fast if rugby goes through another boom-bust cycle because they’ve overspent on NRL imports or they can’t replenish a golden generation.
That’s the challenge for Rugby Australia for everyone from the top down, not coming up with crackpot “look at me” ideas which are great for generating online clicks but do little to help the sport in the long run.