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Steering through the rat’s nest that is Australian rugby will take a very special administrator. Raelene Castle should prove to be that person.
Having to herd the roomful of fighting cats that is the game across the Tasman? Too easy Campese.
This is a woman who danced on the pinhead that is cash-strapped netball in New Zealand, as the chief executive from 2007 to 2013. She rearranged the whole structure of the sport, risking the eternal wrath of traditionalists by creating five zones, some of them involving fiercely competing provinces like Waikato and Bay of Plenty, yet emerged largely unscathed.
For an administrative encore? ‘‘Ms Castle, let us introduce the Sydney Bulldogs league team of 2013 to you. You may have seen some of their Mad Monday greatest hits from October 2012 when they yelled out to Channel Nine reporter Jayne Azzopardi, ‘I want to punch you in the face’ and called her a ‘dumb dog’. How does becoming the first female CEO at the club sound to you?’’
The job at the Bulldogs went pretty well for the first few years. Coach Des Hasler took the Bulldogs into two grand finals, and in Castle’s four years as CEO they never missed the play-offs. It took little time for her to overcome the macho blokiness that’s the default setting in the NRL. In early visits to the changing shed Kiwis Sam Perrott and Greg Eastwood started calling her Aunty. ‘‘I thought they must be thinking I’m 100,’’ she’d say later. ‘‘But then I thought, actually, I am old enough to be their mother.’’
But while the Bulldogs love to call themselves a family club, like many families, dysfunction lies just below the surface.
Castle was so well respected by other chief executives at the NRL she was voted to be one of the four CEOs to negotiate a collective wage agreement with the players’ association. In May she sent an email to clubs complaining about off the book meetings she’d heard of between some club chairmen and the players’ association.
The problem? One of the back door chairmen was the chairman of the Bulldogs, Ray Dib. Oops. It was announced Castle was leaving, although she had another year to go on her contract.
So she’s no stranger to the feeling of a Sydney stiletto sliding into the lower back. She’s already been graced, before the announcement of the Australian rugby job, with a slating from former Wallabies coach Alan Jones, now a top rating radio host at 2GB in Sydney.
Jones, never a great fan of women, said: ‘‘Raelene Castle? Give me a break. You can’t be serious about handing the game over to people like this. It’s nonsense.’’
But whatever dinosaurs like Jones (briefly a great coach for Australia in the 1980s, until he eventually drove most of the players mad with his micro management and towering ego) may think, Castle has one vital attribute for success.
She loves sport. And when I say ‘‘loves sport’’ I mean loves. Not likes, or has an interest in, but loves it like Romeo loved Juliet, or Tongan league fans love their side, or Gareth Morgan hates cats.
In the 1990s, when Castle was a marketing manager at Fuji Xerox in Auckland, I was working at a radio station with one of Raelene’s closest friends, Michelle Blakely. They worked together at Xerox, shared a flat, and Raelene would be the only bridesmaid at Michelle’s wedding. Insider’s revelation? Castle is a compulsive footwear collector, who Blakely swears has ‘‘every colour of shoe that Converse has ever made’’.
The two spent a weekend at the Waihi Beach bach my wife and I then had. In 50 years working as a sports journalist I’ve never met a person with more interest in a whole range of sport than Raelene. We talked sport at breakfast time, while walking on the beach, and then while we all had drinks after dinner.
When she told a journalist in 2009 that the best thing about her job at Netball New Zealand was that ‘‘when I’m standing around the water cooler I can talk about netball and other sports without getting in trouble’’ what sounded like a joke was actually the dead set, 100 per cent truth.
With a father, Bruce, who captained the Kiwis in 1967, and a mother, Marlene, who was a Commonwealth Games silver medal winner at lawn bowls, it was probably inevitable that Raelene would embrace sport. Raelene herself was a provincial rep at netball, tennis and bowls.
That’s backed up by a business career as diverse as working as a marketer for sponsors of Rugby World Cups, the Olympics, and the America’s Cup defence in Auckland in 2000.
Add in her intelligence, innate decency, and a natural gift of persuasion, and Australian rugby, it’s easy to feel, is lucky to have her.