Time to come home
LOST Wallaby Liam Gill will be on a hit list to be lured home for the cashed-up new Indo-Pacific Rugby Championship that needs big names to back up the big talk.
Yesterday’s plans for a sixteam, 10-week championship for the July-October slot next year had the buzz of all fresh, visionary ideas but with the megabucks to get this one off the ground.
There were still as many questions as answers despite billionaire mining baron Andrew Forrest’s gung-ho words and the extra detail provided by his competition architects.
Only the Western Force are locked in and the fishing for other teams has begun in Singapore, Samoa, Fiji, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, China, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and other markets.
Forrest has offered to collaborate with the Australian Rugby Union to create his IPRC and use its “significant resources” to woo Aussie stars home from abroad or stop the annual exodus.
“I would say we are prepared to go toe-to-toe with anything that is put on the table for an Australian player in Europe or Japan or the other destinations,” Forrest said in Perth.
It’s an appealing pitch but cutting through a straitjacket of contracts to get the right players home has just begun.
Flanker Gill, 25, is off-contract from French club Lyon next year and the Reds want him for a Super Rugby return in 2019 so a rich pit stop for the Singapore Slingers could clinch it.
“We are working on a concept of marquee players and six teams of 30 players,” said chief strategist Eugenie Buckley.
Buckley is a former Brisbane Roar Football Club chief executive and the “marquee” player idea has been a hit in the A-League.
ARU chairman Cameron Clyne said “the ARU is involved in collaborative discussions.”
Forrest and his IPRC overlap with the National Rugby Championship after the Super Rugby season but will be chasing many of the same players.
His tempting offer is to pay players substantial fourmonth contracts to play in his IPRC thus keeping them in Super Rugby at a huge cost saving for the ARU.