In August last year, at a well-tended oval on Sydney’s affluent north shore, an undeniably significant moment for the game of rugby union came to pass. There was little fanfare, no reporters or camera teams present, yet when the Northbridge No1 Oval at the Shore School – a blue-ribbon nursery for rugby talent – was reconfigured to host Australian rules football matches, it was a sign the goalposts had, quite literally, shifted.
For many, the incursion of AFL into this rugby heartland was emblematic of the current state of the code. Battles are being lost on so many fronts, from the Wallabies all the way down to the grassroots and some believe the game in this country should start from scratch.
“We have to get a blank sheet of paper and redesign the game from the ground up,” says Brett Papworth, the former Wallabies centre and now president of Sydney club Eastwood. “How would we want it to look if we had a chance to do it again.
“I keep saying, tip it on its head, start again, you’ve got to do long-term work. And it starts with kids playing the game in schools and junior clubs and you get a critical mass playing the game. Winning certainly helps, but there is no light at the end of the tunnel on that score. You’ve got to go back to basics.”
As the legendary former Wallabies coach Rod McQueen says, it’s not rocket science.
Golden era loses its shine
The problems in Australian rugby run deep. The Wallabies have not held the Bledisloe Cup – the symbol of trans-Tasman dominance – since 2002. In the just completed June Test series Australia recorded unconvincing wins against lowly Fiji and Italy and lost to Scotland. The 13,583 crowd for the Fiji game in Melbourne was a record low attendance.
Compared to the All Blacks’ brutal and brilliant 30-15 win against the British and Irish Lions in Auckland last Saturday the trans-Tasman gap appears to be widening to canyon-like proportions.
The standard of Australia’s five Super Rugby teams has also dropped alarmingly, failing to win a single game against New Zealand opposition so far this year with the competition nearly completed. And then there is the off-field drama. Australian rugby is suffering a financial crisis and the ARU is looking to eat their own by axing one of the five Super Rugby teams, either the Western Force or Melbourne Rebels.
The posts at The Shore School No. 1 oval. Great for more boys to have the opportunity to play @AFL for their school. pic.twitter.com/hyT5wimOrb
— Andrew Pridham (@Pridhamhq) August 13, 2016
It is a far cry from Australia’s golden era from 1998 to 2001, which was marked by World Cup victories, Bledisloe Cup triumphs and Super Rugby titles. Then there was more money in the coffers than the newly-professional game had ever seen. It seemed like the champagne corks would never stop popping, but the party is over and the hangover severe.
How did it come to this? Former ARU chief-executive John O’Neill, who presided over rugby’s transition from amateurism to professionalism in the mid-1990s, provided an insight in a recent keynote address to the Australian Institute of Company Directors in Brisbane. He suggested Australian rugby had become the victim of its own success, a classic corporate dilemma.
“We needed to crystalise a vision that everyone could rally around,” O’Neill said. “The main elements of that vision were for Australia to be a real world power in rugby on an ongoing basis, rugby having a much larger mass entertainment presence in Australia and a large increase in its playing population.
“The vision covered the gamut of rugby as a whole. It guided development for the first decade or more of the professional era with success on all aspects of the vision. Eventually, Australian rugby experienced one of the problems that besets many organisations when success enables ill-discipline.”
One of the first signs of this ill-discipline came after Australia hosted the 2003 World Cup in the afterglow of the Wallabies’ golden era. The ARU received a $44m windfall from hosting the showpiece event, a treasure chest the game had never possessed before.
Australian Olympic Committee president John Coates advised O’Neill to invest the money in a future fund as he had done with the $100m windfall the AOC received from the Sydney Olympics in 2000, but the stakeholders in rugby wanted their slice of the pie. Investing the windfall would have created a financial buffer that would have protected Australian rugby in times of a downturn, but no one felt the headwinds coming.
O’Neill always regarded the Wallabies as the “rainmakers” of Australian rugby. The national team would generate the majority of the revenue which would fund the rest of the game in a kind of trickle-down economic model. But post-2003, the Wallabies were unable to recapture the success of the glory days, particularly against the All Blacks.
Embracing organised chaos
During the golden era, the Wallabies and Australia’s top Super Rugby team, the Brumbies, played a patterned style of multiphase rugby in which the field was divided into imaginary grids and players were programmed to perform according to where they were positioned.
This gave Australia’s teams a tremendous tactical advantage because the players knew in advance what they were going to do, depending where they were on the field, which meant they were always one step ahead of the opposition. But eventually the opposition worked out what the Australians were doing and their game became predictable.
Around the same time there was a seismic shift in the way the game was interpreted by referees, which adversely affected the Australian way of playing. In the first years of professionalism referees favoured the attacking team, particularly at the breakdown, but World Rugby became concerned the multiphase game was turning rugby into unlimited tackle rugby league and instructed the whistle-blowers to ensure there was competition for possession at every phase.
While Australian teams continued to play their pre-programmed style, the New Zealanders focused their attack on turnover ball and counter-attack in broken play. Initially, this type of organised chaos was dismissed as “parasitic”, but the parasites kept winning.
After establishing the A-League and steering the Socceroos to the 2006 World Cup, O’Neill returned to the ARU from 2007 to 2012, but the situation was far more challenging the second time around. He recruited the highly successful coach of New Zealand’s top team, the Crusaders, and Robbie Deans kept the Wallabies at No2 in the world for about three years. Still, he could not bring back the Bledisloe Cup or win the World Cup. Australia, O’Neill surmised, needed more than New Zealand’s best coach. They had to adopt the Kiwi model.
In New Zealand the All Blacks jersey always comes first. O’Neill decided to copy the Kiwis’ centralised system of contracting coaches and players, which he believed gave the All Blacks a competitive advantage, but his policy was rejected and he departed the ARU a second time, replaced by international business executive – and Shore old boy – Bill Pulver.
“In 2012 we could see that problems were going to start to arise,” says Matt Carroll, the former ARU deputy chief executive and current AOC chief executive. “We were going to become uncompetitive unless we made change. Part of that change was to look at the New Zealand model and start to centralise player management, coach management, to ensure the quality of the coaching standards of the Super Rugby teams and the management of our talent.
“That was put to the ARU board in 2012 and for their reasons they decided to go a different direction and made the Super Rugby teams even more autonomous. To me that’s wherein lies the problem.”
Not such a Super idea?
With the ARU’s trophy cabinet becoming barer and barer, interest in the game began to wane with falling TV ratings, crowds and sponsorship. It is believed the ARU is set to lose another two or three major sponsors this year.
A payment system focusing on leading Wallabies has also seen increasing numbers of good national and Super Rugby players heading overseas in their prime, depleting the strength in depth of Australian rugby.
The ARU strained its financial and playing resources even further by ambitiously expanding into the AFL-dominated cities of Perth (2006) and Melbourne (2011). Compared to the AFL’s clever expansion into Greater Western Sydney with a young playing list designed for long-term growth, the Force and Rebels sought instant success, went belly-up and cost the ARU a small fortune to keep them afloat.
Photograph: Mark Kolbe/Getty Images
ARU chairman Cameron Clyne recently revealed that $28m was spent propping up Super Rugby over the last four years, a staggering amount for an organisation that was already suffering financial distress. The situation was compounded by Sanzaar’s decision to increase Super Rugby from 15 to 18 teams last year, bringing in a sixth South African side as well as Argentina and Japan, to create a four-conference competition. It was confusing for fans and reduced the number of money-making local derbies.
Leading figures in the game warned the ARU the 18-team format would be detrimental to Australian rugby, but they agreed to it anyway, tempted by the lure of increased broadcast dollars, which vanished in propping up teams.
“It broke all the rules of expansion of competitions,” Carroll says. “Expanding across latitudes, disruptive time-zones, adds expense and travel to the teams, adds stress to the players and makes it difficult for broadcasters. That to me has been the fatal mistake because it took away the home and aways for our Super Rugby teams.
“That affects gate receipts, its affects sponsorship, it affects fan engagement. When you have issues around coaching and playing talent, which has been compounding itself, and then you introduce a disastrous competition structure, which didn’t allow the teams to prosper financially, it’s a perfect storm.”
Sanzaar has decided to abandon the 18-team format and go back to 15 teams next year with South Africa culling two teams and Australia one, although the ARU has run into a legal minefield and is currently in arbitration with the Force.
While the ARU poured money into failing Super Rugby franchises and created a third-tier competition, the National Rugby Championship, it stopped funding premier club rugby in Sydney and Brisbane. Not only that, a national participation levy was imposed on all club players, ranging from $11.25 for minis, $28.25 for juniors and $33.75 for seniors. The levy is similar to the GST, imposed by the national body, but distributed directly to the states.
“I wrote a letter to Bill Pulver saying it wasn’t the responsibility of the amateur game to fund the professional game,” says former Queensland and Wallabies centre Anthony Herbert, who is the chief executive of Brisbane club GPS. “It’s just fallen on deaf ears. We have moved on. We can’t sit there and whinge. We’ve just got to work.
“Premier rugby is in great shape. All the clubs are professionally administered. Everyone has got on with the job. Not relying on any funding from anybody. From the club point of view the most disappointing thing is we put in all this money and effort but we don’t get a return.”
One step forward, two steps back
When Michael Cheika guided the Wallabies to the World Cup final in 2015 there was a sense that Australia had finally turned the corner. World Rugby named Cheika coach of the year for turning the Wallabies around so quickly, but that unexpected achievement seems more and more like an aberration.
The Wallabies have won only eight of their last 18 Tests. They lost three times to both England and the All Blacks last year, and have struggled against opposition of any real quality.
To arrest the decline, Cheika has looked “across the ditch” for inspiration. He recruited the former All Blacks skills coach, Australian-born Mick Byrne, to upskill the Wallabies and has borrowed ideas from New Zealand, notably attacking from turnover ball. But all this is playing catch-up. When the Wallabies dominated world rugby in the late 1990s and early 2000s they were always one step ahead.
“We have lost a lot of our IP [intellectual property],” says the former Wallabies coach, Rod Macqueen, who guided the team through the golden era. “For whatever reason, I don’t know why, we don’t have an operational system in place that allows us to develop our IP and take it further.
“You have to have a structure that looks to the future and puts a number of instigations in place to have a form direction as to where you want to go and where you think the game is going and look to develop those skills where you think the game is going to be in four to five years’ time. That’s what we should have been doing obviously over these last four years. It’s not rocket science, it’s just business principles.”
Others are not quite so pessimistic. The Waratahs chairman, Roger Davis, thinks the doom and gloom surrounding Australian rugby needs a dose of perspective, arguing talk of a crisis in the game is an exaggeration. “I don’t think it’s broken,” Davis said. “We haven’t had a good year, but two years ago we were in the World Cup final. Three years ago we [the Waratahs] won the Super Rugby competition.
“Participation continues to grow across many forms of the game so to say the game is irreparably broken and needs to be thrown out the door based on our recent lack of success I think is perhaps over-reaching, but that’s not to say we don’t have our issues and problems. If we had 10 years of this and were ranked number 16 in the world, you could ask a different set of questions.”
Another 10 years of this, and there will be a lot more AFL goalposts dotted around Australia’s rugby union heartland.
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