‘Decent rugby man’ Rennie wants salary drop
Dave Rennie has volunteered a 30 per cent pay cut when he starts work as Wallabies coach next month.
The sacrifice equates to $75,000 over three months on Rennie’s reported $1 million a year salary and comes just days after Rugby Australia ruled out asking the New Zealander to take one.
An RA spokesman said Rennie’s representatives contacted RA interim boss Rob Clarke yesterday to offer up the cut, but it has emerged that the Super Rugbywinning former Chiefs and Glasgow coach raised the subject in a private conversation with director of rugby Scott Johnson as early as April.
‘‘Dave is a really decent rugby man and a good bloke and he understands the situation we’re facing,’’ Johnson said.
‘‘He offered to take the same pay cut as everyone else way back when all this was kicking off. He wasn’t on contract yet so I said we’d talk about it further down the track.
‘‘That’s the kind of man he is, he would never have separated himself from anyone else.’’
The percentage cut is in line with the 30 per cent taken by the organisation’s 15 senior executives, many of whom left the business in this week’s mass purge at Moore Park.
It will remain in place until the end of September, along with the union-brokered player pay deal that was negotiated in April.
The issue came to the fore this week when RA ruled out asking Rennie to take a cut, a position that ruffled feathers amongst sections of the country’s professional players cohort.
The 56-year-old leaves Scotland for New Zealand this week to serve out a quarantine period and spend time with family, before hopefully arriving on Australian soil in July.