Checking the pulse
Is rugby at risk of becoming irrelevant on the Aussie sports landscape?
THE woeful Wallabies’ Bledisloe Cup performance is a symptom, rather than a cause, of the parlous state of the sport in Australia.
There was a time when a Wallabies-All Blacks Test was anticipated as keenly as an Origin game such was the fervour fans had for the national side. World Cup wins in 1991 and 1999 certainly helped but it was the sustained interest in and success of the game at all levels – from club competition to Super Rugby and Test matches – that helped rugby maintain its spot as a major code in this country. The sport was a powerhouse not just on the field, but off, with strong administration and marketing that had every kid wanting to be a Wallaby. Sadly, the sport now is at an all-time low, the ARU look a rabble after the Western Force debacle and support, even for the national side, is waning. Being able to pull a rabbit out of the hat at the World Cup every four years is not good enough to sustain fans’ long-term interest. It’s a sad indictment on the game that many of those that tuned in, or turned up to watch Saturday’s Test, were lost by halftime. The fact is, though, not even a Bledisloe Test was enough of a lure to draw the interest in the first place of many that would have described themselves as fans a decade ago. Rugby is far and away the fourth football code in the country, long having been passed by soccer. Rugby’s issues will take time to fix, but it can be done with a commitment to do so. The point is, does anyone really care anymore? LIKE an offspinner in suburban cricket, this is garbage.
Rugby? Dead? You are kidding. Sure, on the surface the loss to New Zealand is embarrassing (in fact it’s that no matter how deep you dig).
Yet one win doesn’t make you Usman Khawaja and one loss doesn’t make you, metaphorically speaking, cricket’s perennial pie-chuckers.
The truth is the All Blacks are a better national side than those 15 men who wore gold and green body paint and pretended to know what they were doing on Saturday night.
Yet are we judging an entire sport on the results of those at the top? If we are then yes, we are in a world of hurt.
Not simply because of the results but because that is the most backwards-geared sporting blueprint since talk darts was bound for the Olympics.
Truth be told, rugby has the most inverted pyramid model of any sporting code, placing too much emphasis on the top and not enough on grassroots. That’s obvious.
But to say it can’t be fixed would be like buying a car wreck but refusing to fix it because the window’s dirty. It’s going to take effort – and redistributing more focus towards those at the bottom of the heap would be a good start – but if a sport was “dead” every time our elite team lost we’d have very few left. No-one can dispute the fact the Wallabies need to improve. But our Bledisloe bloodbath tells us nothing more about the health of the game than we already knew. Work needs to be done. Let’s put our energy in to that.