Trying to purge the Internet of highlight reels will be highly counterproductive in the lead-up to ’24 T20 World Cup, when a U.S. audience — mostly with zero knowledge of cricket, apart from ex-pats — are expected to suddenly acquaint themselves with the game.

Many of these overzealous copyright claims seem to make a mockery of the fair-use/fair-dealing provisions in the law. Use of short portions for news reporting, criticism and education are supposed to be exempt.

Not a good sign. The jab about “looking in your back yard” sounds like an elder statesman’s warning — if you’re an international coach, don’t be hopping aboard that sinking ship called the Wallabies, or you’ll be booed like Eddie and then randomly sacked like poor old Rennie.

You would think a guy like Deans might relish the rare opportunity for a home World Cup AND Lions series.

The truth is that our best local coaches need to be cutting their teeth abroad at national teams and European clubs, where the standards are higher. We then need to fill our own head coach positions with the best talent from abroad, so we can start to rebuild our broken coaching system around their more modern knowledge.

There are four possible solutions to avoid killing first-grade club rugby:
– One is a mid-season break for Super Rugby like you proposed. Perhaps the simplest option (and don’t forget, Currie Cup/NPC always had this problem)
– Another is the scheduling compromise used by the NFL and collegiate/school football: you agree that the club and state rep matches cannot be on the same day.
– Then come the radical options. One radical solution would be to schedule the club season in a period largely outside that of Super Rugby (i.e. an ‘A-League Solution’)
– The most radical solution is to dump Super Rugby entirely, make the club football pyramid the basis of pro competitions, and reduce state rep football to a short mid-season series

What you’re talking about is an extended Super Rugby season, in which Super Rugby AU would form the second half of the season.

You wouldn’t be expecting crowds of 2,000, but rather closer to 20,000 (i.e. the same fans keep showing up). This should be a no-brainer — the current season is so short that you are needlessly depriving yourself of gate revenue and additional television income. The Grand Final would be the biggest state rep game of the year (it smashed all TV ratings records last time, before we abolished it again), and we would actually crown a national champion every year (i.e. the Wallaby Trophy).

Once Super becomes a fully-fledged national league, higher-level development teams (sitting above the club teams) could eventually be added through an expansion of SRAU — the three states that are currently stuck in the Rugby Shield (the old Wallaby Trophy Div. II) could be promoted, for an 8-team single division.

You’ve been a great servant of our game Phil, but I’m sorry: unless you can immediately form a separate commission to manage the teams in the pro and semi-pro leagues, you’d best step aside, along with Hamish and the entire board.

We need some veteran sports executives with substantial experience in running a major pro league. The competitions are so broken that they may all need to be designed again from scratch — and that isn’t a task for random businessmen or people best known as fine ex-players.

You can be promoted to Chairman Emeritus of the Football Department Expert Advisory Committee, with continued access to the executive drinks cabinet. Limousine access will be weekends only from now on.

So why exactly is Ian Foster “not a serious option”?

Is it because he would consider the ARU to be such a raging dumpster fire that he wouldn’t entertain the idea?

Is it because a cup-winner like Jake White, Steve Hansen or even Jacques Nienaber should be first cab off the rank?

Or are the Shore old boys back to blathering on about the “Kiwi disease”, “our Australian style”, the “Randwick way” etc.? And are the offers he is getting from Japan really that much larger? He may just want something more low-pressure, but surely coaching in Japan is less exciting than getting to coach at another World Cup quarter-final AND a Lions series? (And played at home, no less!)

It’s gotten to the point now that some senior rugby figures may need to get together with Twiggy Forrest and some senior sports execs, and put together a new pro-league that will save the ARU from themselves — in the same manner that the Premier League was founded.

A revived World Series Rugby (a.k.a. Global Rapid Rugby) could form the replacement for both the ailing Super Rugby series and the defunct Wallaby Trophy/SRAU, and therefore serve as the basis for some new development pathways — including a draft and a replacement for the Club Championship. The ARU can continue to operate the national teams.

If it is “made for TV”, and staffed by an MLS-style commission of outside execs with major league experience (and thus free from ridiculous parochial politics and the Old Boys Club), the venture capitalists might not run away this time. In that scenario, they could potentially make the state unions an offer they cannot refuse.

It is quite puzzling how the A-League seemed to generate more excitement from the public in its early days. I can’t quite put my finger on why, especially since the Socceroos support base has only grown since then.

I often wonder whether putting any expansion sides into Sydney and Melbourne at all was a mistake. The product did look a lot better when those fans were all concentrated in a single ground every week.

You have to wonder if any other team will ever face such a tough run to the final as South Africa did, and somehow triumph in so many close matches. Presumably they will not be releasing the fixture so early in future editions.

I thought it was a wonderful cup overall, with some classic matches and so many dramatic moments.

Can someone remind me what Hamish’s grand plan actually is? It’s been over three years and I don’t recall them unveiling such a thing.

Super Rugby is even more broken now than it was in 2019, and all we’ve been told is that it’s “locked in” until 2030… whatever that means.

The 2023 Australian Club Championship — an event once held at venues such as the Olympic Stadium, Lang Park and the Gabba — was a barely-promoted match held at a ground with a capacity of 1,500.

The most successful state rep fixture in years, the Super Rugby AU Final, has been abolished, and the Wallaby Trophy is now gathering dust some place. The billionaire who built Australian rugby an exciting new tournament from scratch was sent packing. The other venture capitalists also ran away. And yet Alexander says “There’s nothing’s wrong with Australian rugby”!?

Remember that time when Jake White offered to replace Michael Cheika at the Wallabies?

One week ago, he again said he wished he hadn’t quit coaching at the international level.

Are we going to overlook him yet again? And will we bother talking to Ian Foster?

The AFL still doesn’t have a send-off rule, and that isn’t a bloodbath. No player is dumb enough to want to risk being banned for months on end by the tribunal because they continually engaged in egregious foul play.

We have had the ability to permanently send a player off since 1888, and if retained we should return to this being exercised only in cases of extreme malice.

A match review panel can send anything else to a tribunal. The referee already has the ability to advance a penalty by ten yards.

There are alternatives to the current card system, if the IRB will only consider them.

Sending any one off should be a rarity, and it seems that nearly everyone is tired of endless cards every week. Ruining contests with send-offs is going to start hitting the revenue of the entire game.

Everything could quite easily be dealt with using a post-match review panel and a disciplinary tribunal — the game survived up until recently with no cards at all.

If we keep the yellow card, it can be a warning only, as it still is in soccer. And if we keep the red, it should be awarded only very rarely — the 2-3 times per season it was used in the late 1980s.

Surely the ARU must try to hire him in some kind of capacity. I find it hard to believe that anything he would be doing in Japan would be quite this exciting or attractive (although money might be an issue — can we afford him?).

And if he is sick of being solely blamed for all the national union’s problems, he could work as a Wallabies assistant coach — he will likely still get to coach at the next World Cup quarter-finals, but without being constantly attacked in every single newspaper.

The SFIA study is talking about player participation, not pro pickleball. The IRB are specifically referring to the number of supporters, tracked by the Nielsen SportsDNA surveys.

Nielsen estimated that a domestic audience of 45 million enjoy watching rugby union, making the U.S. home to the largest supporter base for rugby football in the world. 70% of these supporters were first exposed to the game by watching Rugby Sevens tournaments.

The problem used to be that these people had no games to watch. At least now they can at tune in to 12 MLR teams on Fox, and go down to look at 90 collegiate rugby union programs in NCAA Divisions I-III below that.

I’m not betting on Major League Rugby to suddenly become a big player, but it’s a steadily developing pro league that seems to be well managed (there’s now a collegiate draft, and academies for the teams). It will be fascinating to see if the ’31 RWC grabs the nation’s attention, or turns out to be a total flop.

In an article for the Arizona State University GSM Journal, Wendell Barnhouse reported that a new 2018 IRB bulletin had cited statistics showing rugby union was the fastest growing sport in the United States.

Eight years earlier, the survey of the National Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association had come to the same conclusion.

Can someone give a brief outline of the two paths that a hypothetical 2023 player would take if they went from rugby league juniors to the NRL, vs. schoolboy rugby to Super Rugby?

I understand the poaching problem and the state schools problem, but I’m more interested to know how the current NRL pathway structure itself is considered superior to ours.

Although I will certainly enjoy the Vegas game as an interesting novelty match, I find it hilarious that the NRL threw actual existing franchises in Perth and Adelaide under the bus, and are now more worried about Nevada!

That said, it’s understandable that Peter V’landys sniffs an opportunity here. Rugby union is the fastest growing sport in the United States. And the 2031 Rugby World Cup will be held in the U.S.

Word is obviously getting around: I was bemused to learn that American friends of mine had somehow been convinced to play rugby union for a high school team a few years back, even though they had no real links to a traditional rugby country.

We all wish the ‘Eddie Experiment’ had ended up like the ‘Steve Borthwick Experience’, but the game would still be headed towards armageddon regardless. Like Eddie said, there will need to be a ‘Kerry Packer Revolution’ — otherwise Australian rugby union will die, and everyone else in Super Rugby will get blown up in the process.

The ARU can only dream of being where the NZRFU were in 2007.

In fact, the ARU would consider everything the NZRFU had at that time to be a near-perfect scenario:
– Strong match attendances
– Wall-to-wall media coverage
– Three provincial rep teams dominating Super Rugby throughout that WC cycle
– A sold-out domestic grand final with high television ratings
– Multiple celebrity players, known internationally
– Sufficient rep team prestige that barely any players lost to European leagues or the NRL
– No bankrupt teams
– Coaching development scheme that exports numerous coaches to top foreign clubs
– Large schoolboy system, with pathways existing even in weakest provinces

The NZRFU is actually far worse off now — most of those areas have now deteriorated to crisis levels.

The press only claimed Sir Henry’s campaign was a “disaster” because of one idiotic decision not to kick an easy winning drop-goal — it was otherwise predicted they would at least make the final!

Some readers might have seen photos of the time that Don “The Boot” Clark made some celebrated cameo appearances playing for Eastwood and Hornsby.

Another stumbling block to a White/Foster/Hansen combo is that Hansen is friends with Eddie! So an exciting prospect in theory, but maybe too many complications to actually get the deals signed.

I don’t disrespect Eddie’s overall career record, and it’s always possible that he can turn it around.

The criticisms seem to mostly relate to whether he is too far past his prime at this level — he was recently sacked by England, and now many ex-players want him sacked again for similar reasons.

If I remember correctly, Sir Graham’s ’07 campaign was mostly a success. He had a few controversial starting XV selections (fewer than Eddie?). Wasn’t it only characterized as a disaster because Sir Graham was accused of not preparing the team for a drop goal situation, closing out tight cup matches, etc?

Can we even consider keeping Jones after such a disastrous campaign? The bewildering squad selections, the confusing tactics, throwing caution to the wind even in big cup matches, high levels of basic skill errors, his record of burning out assistant coaches… would a Premier League manager survive any of this? National team coach should have an even higher bar, surely.

One possible solution is emerging, which would have seemed like a total pipedream only a year ago. Jake White, former Brumbies coach, said a few days ago that he regretted not accepting the job as Wales coach. Shag Hansen has already been consulting with the Wallabies. And now Ian Foster is available.

A Wallabies coaching staff with THREE World Cup winning head coaches? That might get even more headlines than when Eddie came back.

If Foster wins this weekend, aren’t the ARU in a position where they would be completely negligent if they didn’t attempt to hire him?

I suppose one issue is whether the board prefer him as Wallabies head coach or as an assistant, and whether Foster would only accept an offer as head coach. Or has Foster been linked with another job?

Do we have the ability to bring some of their young players to play in Australia?

I imagine many of their youngsters would jump at the chance of coming to a Super Rugby academy and escaping the crime wave. One issue is that their schoolboy system seems so far advanced compared to ours.

Isn’t the first step here some kind of boardroom clean-out?

Let’s say they get on the phone, and replace Eddie with Jake White, Ian Foster, Stuart Lancaster or Robbie Deans. Problem solved? Hardly, since every level beneath the Wallabies is still a raging dumpster fire, with no clear solution in sight. (And has anyone heard a convincing turnaround plan from this mob?)

The system is so broken and irrational that someone really needs to sit down with a clean sheet of paper and redesign the entire thing from scratch — and preferably done by an experienced sports executive from the outside, who doesn’t know or care about internal ARU politics.

But how could a new board and executive team be installed? And are the ultra-parochial good ol’ boys that run the state unions even capable of understanding any of this?