Have a listen to former Wallaby Coach Alan Jones talking to Mark Watson on yesterday afternoon's
"Veitch on Sport"
NOTE: First link should open in a dropbox audio player. If not, click on the second link and you can download an mp3
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qewv310h08qvesj/vos-alan-jones-v-watto-august-12.mp3?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qewv310h08qvesj/vos-alan-jones-v-watto-august-12.mp3?dl=1
I think he's right about
"regenerating the game at the bottom" . I think that the ARU made two crucial mistakes
1. They canned the ARC after only one season in 2007.
If they had kept that running, it would be in its 10th year now, and Australian Rugby would be starting to reap the benefits. They reivnented that comp with the NRC in 2014, but the ARU MUST stay the course now, and find the money to keep it running. New Zealand's NPC (Mitre 10 Cup) runs at a loss. It costs the NZRU a bucketload of money, but they look past the money and see it as an investment; the dividend from their investement is a conveyor belt of new talented players
2. They demanded
a fifth team in Super Rugby. What they have done is attempt to build Australian rugby from the top down, when they should be building it from the grassroots up. When they started with the Rebels, they didn't have enough quality players, so they had to get a dispensation from the ARU to import players to fill the gaps; three English players, four Japanese, two Irish, ten Kiwis two Welshmen and an American. This alone should have told them it was a mistake.
I must confess I used to agree with the first point about the NRC/ARC, but increasingly I feel that both it and Super Rugby have been bad models for Australian Rugby.
The issues in Australian Rugby are manifold, but much of the recent failures have been built on the fundamental structural weakness of Super Rugby and a misreading of where the strengths of Rugby lay in Australia.
1.
Super Rugby: Even before the recent dogs-breakfast of a competition we have now, Super Rugby was a massively handicapped competition in Australia, and its viewership numbers reflected that. 2014 in particular that highlighted just how far off the pace the game was. The Waratahs' stellar championship season saw some decent crowds, but in TV land ratings never rose to what you'd call competitive, with the 2 decade drought-breaking GF garnering only around 640k viewers and failing to sell out ANZ stadium (got 60k, which ain't bad, but when you consider they get 80k for every origin match it's disappointing)
The problem is, and has always been that Rugby's primary competitors for viewership - the NRL and AFL (soccer is played in the summer so doesn't really count) - both have 4 days of prime time TV content each, with half their games being provided free of charge via the FTA networks. What this means is that the news cycle follows both codes incessantly throughout the year, priming people to think about them. You add into that the NRL's Origin period where the media in NSW and Qld become League obsessed, and you have yourself a serious exposure problem.
Ultimately, my sense is that the ARU's initial success with Super Rugby was largely built off the turmoil Rugby League experienced following the Super League war, when many disenfranchised and disillusioned Rugby League fans were looking to other sports for their tribal fix and Rugby fit the bill for lot of them given the similarities (provided the "private school boy" issue didn't bother them). Nevertheless, this was always a weak foundation built on the hope that the NRL couldn't recover. But with half the games played in the middle of the night, and all the games being played on Foxtel - which has never exceeded 30% penetration in Aus - the fundamental structure of the competition ensured it wasn't going to be able to hold the NRL back longer term. Sadly, it's turned out that the game has probably lost even more ground to the AFL in its "heartlands" of North and Eastern Sydney, where the AFL has spent millions buying their way into all the posh schools.
2.
ARC/NRC: The way I see it, both of these competitions were born of a false assumption that the game would be better off starting with a clean slate and leaving all the old Sydney/Brisbane club identities behind. This idea was built on the experience of John O'Neil, who crafted the A-League under a similar theory. However, soccer's biggest problem in Australia was it's fans and the ethnic identities tied to the old NSL competition that made it exclusive and repellant to outsiders. This was never the case with club rugby in Australia. Indeed, the supporter base of these clubs maybe similarly small to the NSL, but they are the most passionate and hospitable fans you'll find in the country. For all the issues many of these clubs have faced financially, they still remain the backbone of development in Australia.
It's for this reason that increasingly I think the solution for Australia is to return to fundamentals and stop trying to superimpose structure from the top down like they have with both Super Rugby and the NRC/ARC. The NRC, like the ARC, has no tribal identity that either the rugby public or general public can identify with. It's transparently a development pathway and nothing more. That might work in NZ where it's played on TV, but the competitive strains the Australian market place on the model make it a bad option in my view.
3.
Proposed solution: With all this in mind, I'm actually in favour of a root and branch restructure of the elite level of game in Australia. That means both scrapping the NRC and also completely pulling out of Super Rugby. Instead, what I propose is a 12 team national competition based on promotion and relegation of clubs in the Sydney, Brisbane and other city club competitions. Essentially, it'd work like club competitions in Europe where the teams in the National League get grants and can make themselves into much more elite level outfits.
The way it would work is like this - you start with the top 6 teams from Sydney and Brisbane, then the remaining teams form the lower league. Then the 3rd division could be made of teams in the Melbourne and Perth Leagues and so on. From a developmental standpoint the city competitions would then simply be the grade sides and they could remain in that format.
What this would allow for is organic bottom up development of the game based on old and established identities. People often counter that you need the designations of sides to be broad and inclusive, but I call bullshit on that. Collingwood in the AFL is one of the biggest football clubs in the country of any code and yet it represents a suburb of Melbourne that is around 3 blocks long. The only caveat I'd have would be that universities like Sydney couldn't be included, as they are the one identity type that are fundamentally exclusive and so would have to remain bound to the feeder competitions.
On top of this there would be a state representative competition that would operate more like the old AFL State of Origin series, where the best players from NSW, Qld, Victoria and WA would play in a series together for their own origin like shield. This would operate as a straight league table like the 6 Nations, and would form preparation going into the Rugby Championship.
I know some of you will think this is all pretty drastic, but with the state of the game as it is, I honestly feel that going back to basics like this and focussing on the forgotten and increasingly disgruntled people of club land would inject much need passion and hope back into the game.
A structure like the one I've suggested would give the game a top flight national competition built on old and established identities and rivalries, whilst also tapping into state and city rivalries. Gone would be the sense of disenfranchisement created by the NRC/ARC for club fans and gone would be the confusing Super Rugby mish mash of state and city identities played at odd hours against teams from places that don't even want to attach themselves to a region.
