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Joined December 2023
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But what has actually changed to think this time will be any different? I agree with you that our story is better, not just the international competition, including the overseas club ‘retirement’ options (Giteau still going at 41), but also that no other code of football, apart from gridiron, supports a greater range of body types and fitnesses – it is the perfect sport for everyone to have a go.
But the problem is that we’ve spent at least 20 years trying to compete against the other codes. And we had a perfect platform for it: 1999 world champs, 2001 series win over the Lions, 2003 home runners up. But the administration still couldn’t take market share. In fact, they lost it, and continued to lose it. We’ve been in a downwards spiral for two decades, and the talk is always the same ‘grassroots development’, ‘support for juniors’, ‘compete with the other codes’.
And while I agree with the story of us being international sport, it does start to sound a bit tired, because it’s been told for so long and hasn’t made a difference. And, as history shows, that story hasn’t been enough to be able to compete with what are two of the best domestic sporting competitions in the world – the league and the aussie rules. I’m not saying the best, but they are very, very good.
After so much failure, it seems prudent for new administrators to take a different stance and accept a decade or so where taking market share from them is not a focus. Besides, if they actually make rugby interesting and competitive at the junior club and school level, run the competitions that you mentioned well (and we are competitive – I don’t think we need to win, just be competitive and play good footy), and actually give the public access to the sport, then we will grow naturally. And I think that is the big problem – growth has been expected, with all the private school arrogance of a stereotypical rugby administrator, without them really putting any effort in. Or maybe more accurately, the effort has gone in to behind the scenes cross-jurisdiction fighting.
Another big challenge we have, is that no matter how poorly the aussie rules or NRL teams are performing, an Aussie team always wins. The standard of these competitions could be of the 13Es, but because Aussies win all the games every weekend, there will still be big interest. When our teams win against NZ only as the exception, casual fans aren’t going to watch, which means you can’t turn them into die hard fans, and our market share won’t grow.
The final challenge is actually having five competitive teams. It spreads our players thin, combinations are less likely to get built at club/super level, there is less money for junior development or signing young players through a proper development program. I don’t like the idea of cutting back to 3 or 4 teams, but keeping what we’ve got is another example of how we think we can just keep bumbling along and something magical will happen. When even our best teams don’t win more than they lose, we aren’t going to get new people coming to watch our worst.
We keep doing the same thing and expecting different results. It’s hard to see why that will be any different this time.
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I agree that this reads as someone (Topine) with an axe to grind. I have no problem with the physical side of the ‘punishment’. I have good memories of coaches getting us to do extra work to make up for letting the team down – it was a powerful lesson. But those memories are of a coach who was both firm and fair, and I’d take the odds that most others with similar memories are also of a firm and fair coach. This trainer sounds anything but. His comments come across more as ‘I own you’ rather than actually being interested in teaching a lesson in discipline. There seems to be something to this, as other players are quoted as saying it was a humiliation rather than a lesson, or, regarding the training environment more generally, that it wasn’t very healthy.
The point of a punishment is that it ends whatever you’ve done wrong. You’ve made up for it. It seems the trainer didn’t respect that, and wanted to keep it running and doesn’t have the intelligence to realise that the way discipline is issued is far more powerful than the discipline itself.
Topine hasn’t respected this either, else he wouldn’t have brought the case, but the trainer has far greater responsibility in creating a cohesive team culture, and it seems he’s failed massively. Do you want people on your team who don’t turn up late because they are worried about how the trainer will treat them, or because they don’t want to let the team down? This incident is emphasises the former, and to me, that speaks volumes about what a significant contributor to the past decade’s performance is likely to be.
Topine vs Bulldogs an important case for NRL and players - wrestling punishment shouldn't be tolerated in a 'workplace'