I’m certainly no Collingwood supporter, but Eddie is right. The A.F.L. would be a shadow of its present self if the Docklands Stadium dome was never built, and it would be nearly impossible to go back to the old suburban grounds (unless everyone built a 50,000 capacity all-seated ground!).

Macquarie Point Stadium will attract major events that Tasmania would otherwise never have hosted — not only sports, but large concerts as well. Nobody will be saying “it’s too wet, it’s too cold, nobody will show up at this time of year,” etc. Tassie cricket will surely benefit from this too.

There’s an elephant in the room that rarely gets covered in the press.

It was the NZRFU that killed off both tribalism and any hope of a fair draft system, not the ARU (or the SARU) — and thus nearly all of the blame for the agonising death of Super Rugby can be laid at the door of the Parnell Saatchi Building, not the Moore Park UTS campus.

Very real NPC rivalries were replaced by bizarre Frankenstein entities that lacked even a geographical location in their name. “The Chiefs”? (You mean the Kansas City Chiefs?) “The Blues”? (Carlton? Chelsea?) This crazy decision has resulted in the NPC and Super Rugby both teetering on the edge of collapse — just as the opponents of the “European Super League” had warned of for decades.

No such problem exists in Super Rugby AU. Queensland vs. NSW is the #1 sporting rivalry in the country, second only to Australia vs. England. Before the AFL killed off the National Carnival, the regular WA vs. VIC clashes had been equally monumental, over many decades. And I’m sure Canberrans are much happier barracking for the Brumbies or the Raiders, rather than being forced into supporting some Western Sydney club.

Do the Southern States (and the two territories) sense that the utterly broken format of Super Rugby threatens to completely sink rugby union outside of the “big two” states? (The Brumbies can’t feel terribly secure, surely.)

Could they somehow convince QLD. that a new, truly national, top tier competition, with a full draft system/transfer market/loan market/salary cap, is the only way that private equity can ride into town and save the day?

Or perhaps more to the point: Why would the Sydney old boys’ network be able to convince the Queenslanders that saving the Shute Shield is somehow more important than preventing pro rugby union from being swallowed whole by the N.R.L? 2 votes alone is no dice, but 2+3 = the 5 votes required for a veto. However, 3+8 = an 11 vote landslide, no?

Adding the Jaguares and the spare Super Rugby Unlocked teams in a second conference would be the sweetener for the P.E. investors. That would dramatically increase the potential audience (i.e. two more T.V. deals), and those teams would probably benefit from the draft system (unlike the N.Z. teams).

At this stage I tend to agree. And we already had the template for this: Global Rapid Rugby, formerly World Series Rugby.

I wonder how much capital the private equity funds would put up, if they were asked. The New Zealanders need a new competition as much as the A.R.U. do, and there are the Jaguares and the demoted teams from Super Rugby Unlocked who want somewhere to play as well.

The expansion of the academy system into Lara is interesting. That must be the first academy in country Victoria. (The one in Melton probably no longer counts, since that shire is now a city council, and is barely distinguishable from the nearest Melbourne suburbs.)

Lara will one day become a virtual suburb of Geelong, along with the other small settlements in rural Corio shire. The ranks of Geelong rugby have seen a surprisingly high level of growth over the past ten years, and not only within the long-time G.P.S. team at Geelong Grammar. The Geelong Rugby Club now fields many more age grade teams, and seems to have higher depth at subbies level.

By covering the Northern Suburbs as well as the corridor out west (the Lara academy could conceivably attract Melbournians from Werribee, Sunshine etc.), the V.R.U. are killing two birds with one stone. Those two rural-urban corridors are some of the fastest growing areas in country — but more importantly, there is a high population of immigrants from traditional rugby nations, who are fleeing various economic crises that currently show no signs of slowing down (the Pacific Islands, New Zealand, South Africa, the U.K., Ireland etc.)

The model for a Perth Bears venture is the Sydney Swans. The Swans still have their large South Melbourne supporter base that show up to away games at the MCG and Docklands.

One to two matches per year, held somewhere in the Northern Suburbs, is a reasonable demand, due to the peculiarities of the Sydney market. In other cities, the fans might simply attend all the away matches played in the metropolis surrounding the club’s traditional home. Sydney struggles to even attract local attendances, however.

Waugh & Co. have to go. They already appeared to be incompetent, but this report proves that they are totally amateurish.

Waugh wants to start a turf war with Major League Rugby AND League One Japan; go all-in with a wild bet on California (when he still can’t figure out how Adelaide, a successful host of World Rugby Sevens and Test matches, could host Super matches); expand into the tiny Hawaiian market (but ignore the vastly larger NT-PNG market); and then allow the large urban market of Melbourne to be swallowed up by a shaky Samoa-Tonga venture! (For reasons still unknown?)

Does this sound like a good plan to anyone except Phil!?

Bear in mind that this is the same Mr. Waugh that can’t even figure out how to crown a state rep team as Australian Champions each year (even based on the round-robin!), and who runs an Australian Club Championship that is now so pitiful that the grand final — whose original venue was the Gabba — was last played at a local park with only 300 seats!

At this point the ARU needs to lock the private equity suitors and Channel Nine execs in a room, and nobody is allowed out until the blueprints for a brand new professional competition are drawn up.

Every single competition is locked in a death spiral of falling attendances, shaky revenues and disastrous TV ratings. Super Rugby, the Australian Club Championship, the Wallaby Trophy and Australian Rugby Shield, the Shute Shield, the Hospitals Cup — everything needs to be redesigned, with new investors sought and an FTA television deal covering every match.

I really hope they’re talking about more than this behind closed doors. These comments make it sound like they’re going to repeat the same mistakes that destroyed the competition in the first place.

Bringing up 1996 as a model is particularly galling, because those format changes are the root cause of the slow-motion collapse that ensued — not just suffocating Super Rugby, but nearly destroying the domestic competitions throughout SANZAR as well. It turns out that the 10-15 years of relative success that followed were really only fuelled by some remaining fumes from the glory days of the SPC, Super 6 and Super 10.

The amateurish mindset of the administrators — who still seem to regard the state rep season as an extended training run for the Wallabies — is completely out of touch with reality. It’s time to bring in experienced executives from the pro leagues of other sports — because it’s pretty obvious that they’d be making decisions that are diametric opposites to the ones made by this mob.

Surely most of the new cash has to go into fixing the professional competitions and the youth pathways.

Once there is proper television exposure and a recovery in match attendances, there will be additional revenue that can then be spent on expensive player signings, foreign coaches for clubs/states, etc.

If the format for Super Rugby and the Club Championship remain broken, nothing will change. Revenue will continue to collapse regardless of how many expensive player signings you make. Offers from private investors will get lower and lower. More and more juniors will defect to the NRL.

An Ian Foster/Joe Schmidt combo parachuting into the Wallaby gaffer’s box would be pretty impressive.

They both have the benefit of recent, extended, intimate knowledge of the two world leaders in high performance. Surely their know-how would trickle down beyond the national team and into the lower tiers.

My preference is for Head Coach is still Jake White, but I certainly wouldn’t be disappointed if those two were put in charge.

This sounds like a good place to start. It would be interesting to know how much it would cost the ARU to run a larger U17, U19 and U21 competition if the teams were not fully professional.

Bringing Super Rugby AU back is extremely important. Not only do we need gate/broadcast revenue from the Wallaby Trophy Grand Final (highest rating match of the year) and the additional matches in general, but we need to increase the number of players that receive Super Rugby exposure.

You can’t ask someone to turn down an NRL contract, and in exchange give them nothing except Shute Shield appearances. Once the finances are in better shape, you could eventually let all the states play in SRAU, greatly increasing the number of squad slots that might be offered to young players.

Peter Fitzsimons has made this point several times, and he’s dead right.

Most of the teams in the competition ended up officially changing their name to a root-less, geography-free title. This was a disaster for a competition already struggling with public name recognition in general. New viewers were forced to make sense of games between Frankenstein teams like “The Sharks” and “The Blues” — with commentators essentially banned from mentioning the actual province names whatsoever!

Queensland vs. New South Wales is perhaps the greatest rivalry in Australian sports. Clashes between W.A. vs. Victoria and S.A. vs. Victoria on the football oval also have a storied history. It should be obvious: to market the game properly, any new Super Rugby commission should force franchises to use their original geographical monikers.

But the underlying issue was the disastrous shift from Super Rugby being a champions’ cup competition with qualification, to a closed franchise league. I don’t think the administrators of the game understand that this new system was what caused the domestic leagues to end up in a state of near-collapse.

So the states are supposed to hand over the keys for their revenue generating assets to whom? Oh, the same people who decided to “fix” Super Rugby by cutting the potential television audience by 90% — and when that failed, are still willing to consider doubling down, by cannibalising the competition even further. And without ever actually fixing any of its glaring faults.

The states would be better off finding a few sports executives with actual experience running a major pro league, and jump ship to a new competition before Super Rugby implodes completely. Global Rapid Rugby was proof that this is possible. And if the Waratahs were the only ones left behind, what could anyone do to stop it?

The MCG will sell out for the final, no issues there. That would leave Stadium Australia and Lang Park for the semi-finals.

I guess the quarter-finals would then be Perth Stadium, Adelaide Oval, Stadium Australia and Lang Park.

The fact that we’re still even having these debates shows how amateurish and mismanaged SANZAR is.

SANZAR could have set up the draft decades ago, along with an AFL-style system of subsidies, and priority picks for expansion teams. Super Rugby would still be a 20-team league, the potential audience would not have crashed by 90%, and every franchise would have made it to a Grand Final by now.

The argument that Super Rugby should be deliberately uneven like the Premier League is even more ridiculous — all the features which make that model work (promotion/relegation, knockout cups, a long season) were abolished by 1996. The SR model was broken after that point, and that is the real reason why the second-tier leagues are now a perennial problem.

The root of these issues is the unprofessional mentality: Super Rugby is treated as a giant development league for the national team, when in fact it is the main product they are selling. SANZAR is apparently still run by old-boys straight out of the amateur era.

This is probably not a very popular view, but I think the rule changes of the last five decades have been a failure. Doubling down could end up making things even worse.

We have ended up making the rules far too complicated, creating too many new reasons to stop for a penalty, and actually reducing the ability to score points in several cases.

I consider the golden era for the rules of rugby union to be the early 20th century. The rulebook was still in pretty good shape in the 1950s/1960s too — still quite clean and simple.

The only variations to the pre-1950 rules I would support is the five-point try, a very short timeout for line-outs and scrums, and a long timeout for using available ball in the ruck. Even without these variations, the game was not slow at all in the 1950s.

Looks good, should be an interesting season. Rebels supporters will be especially excited.

Is there any news on when we are getting a draft system? And when do we find out who the new Super Rugby commissioner will be?

This is the same irrational theory from Mark Robinson’s Route to Growth Review, and Cameron Clyne’s assassination attempt on the Western Force. That is, the strategy that the NZRFU now claims has left the NPC on the brink of collapse (with the Shute Shield and Hospitals Cup in even worse shape).

These clowns were claiming that cutting the potential audience of Super Rugby by 90% — even throwing entire countries out of the competition — was somehow going to make it more successful. In other words, the complete opposite of what its more successful competitors are doing (the AFL, the SAPD/J-League/APD, the NRL).

Robinson went to the extreme of claiming that a tiny eight-team competition should become the centre of first-grade provincial matches — and thus abandoning any of the models that have been used by other major pro’ sports leagues for a century.

Sure, we might beat them on the odd occasion. But what about so many of our schoolboy players leaving for the NRL?

The number of players coming through the pipeline only seems to be getting worse. We hear rising complaints of insufficient skills coaching, and inferior strength & conditioning work. And financially the state rep teams are apparently teetering on the edge of collapse, which means even less available cash to compete with rugby league.

Not a good sign when the national team is only just beginning a rebuild phase!

The Adelaide Day-Night Test has proved that the Boxing Day Test need not be the only major event on the local Test Cricket schedule.

Perth Stadium was touted as the second best outdoor stadium in the country, and understandably so. The (older) MCG doesn’t require an imitation of the Old Embankment to be constructed for cricket — the event itself needs to be built up into a well-hyped date on the local social calendar.

“He’s built a very successful career outside of rugby… so the board universally felt that he was the best candidate.”

Has he ever been a senior executive in charge of operating a professional sports league?

Has he even been the CEO of a professional sports team?

If the answer to both questions is no, then what does that say about the members of the board?

I think I’d be more interested in an ‘unofficial report’ with extended remarks from people like Dick Marks, Mark Evans, Matt Hodgson, Robbie McRobbie, Steve Hansen etc.

I don’t know about everyone else, but I was happy enough with the operation of the national team when Rennie was still around.

It was everything further down in the pyramid which looked almost irreparably broken, and — despite some rising optimism during 2021 — it seems that it is becoming even more broken, with nobody spelling out what the turnaround plan is.

The contagion emanating from the dysfunctional system of pro leagues has infected the New Zealanders now also: the NZRFU now claims that the NPC is in danger of collapse, and they have their own issues with grassroots participation and poor attendances. There needs to be a big shift in strategy from both the ARU and the rest of SANZAR, and soon.

Eddie mentioned three major changes he wanted from the ARU. ‘Talent identification’, a ‘Kerry Packer revolution’, and ‘alignment’ — but not necessarily ‘centralisation’.

Does anyone really believe this will happen under the current management? Is there a reason they are taking so many years to announce any kind of plan that resembles that?

And is anyone convinced that the current management have enough experience running pro sports leagues? And enough to start new ones from scratch?

The singular obsession with centralisation is concerning. If the competitions, pathways, coaching development and broadcasting all remained broken, it wouldn’t make any difference if Australian rugby union somehow became one giant corporation (or hires a bunch of ‘gun’ coaches).

Who can pay the most? How big is that salary? And can the ARU actually match the other big players?

I suppose a certain kind of coach might even turn down a higher pay-packet, if another crack at a World Cup quarter-final is a bigger temptation.

From the perspective of the ARU board, securing such a highly experienced coach would at least give them some kind of argument for why they shouldn’t all be sacked!