Time for a fix
TONY JOHNSON IS A COMMENTATOR AND PRESENTER FOR SKY TV’S RUGBY COVERAGE IN NEW ZEALAND.
IT’S BEEN SAID often enough. We need Australian rugby to be strong.
‘Not too strong’ I hear some of you say, but recent events are not doing rugby in this part of the world much good at all.
The dominance of New Zealand, Australia and South Africa at the Rugby World Cup through the professional era, and their constant presence near or at the top of the world rankings owes much to the level of intense competition in the Rugby Championship, and more than some might think to Super Rugby.
Right now both of New Zealand’s great rivals are in a bit of a mess.
South Africa, because feckless government has led to a tanking of their economy, and because rugby is now paying the price for years of short-sighted, self-serving administration.
Had Louis Luyt and co made a meaningful investment in community rugby and forced changes in the white-dominated school programme back in the 1990s, instead of just thinking they were going to pick up where they left off before isolation, the current political minefield might never have come about.
Instead they are dealing with an out of control player exodus, a shortage of competent coaches and the enforcement of unrealistic race quotas.
Rugby will survive in South Africa, but there is an almighty challenge to restore the game to its former glories.
Australia is also at risk of becoming a basket case. God willing it will never go back to the days of the mid 1970s when it was a Holden Kingswood broken down on the side of the highway with the bonnet up and a bunch of blokes in blazers standing around with little idea of how to fix it.
After the 1972 ‘Awful Aussies’ tour of New Zealand, a five-defeat trip to the Northern Hemisphere and a loss to Tonga there were fears Australia might even be wiped off the international map.
Their revival owed much to New Zealand’s willingness to help out through greater contact, not just between the Wallabies and All Blacks, but between our provincial teams. Before too long Australia was stronger than ever before, winning back the Bledisloe Cup, and claiming two World Cups playing progressive, winning rugby.
New Zealand’s loyalty through the troubled times counted for five-eighths of sod all when things blew up over the sub hosting of the 2003 Rugby World Cup, and since then the two have been frequently at odds.
Australia, let us not forget, did not support New Zealand’s bid for the 2011 Rugby World Cup. Nor did they or South Africa follow through on an apparent commitment to join New Zealand in supporting Bill Beaumont for the World Rugby leadership post RWC 2011, a decision that delayed the push towards a rationalised global programme.
In 2003 the ARU had $45 million in the bank from the World Cup, a very good team, a captive corporate audience wooed by John O’Neill and happy to jump on the bandwagon, and had made inroads into places normally obsessed with two sports played in Australia, but little elsewhere.
Some in Australian rugby didn’t seem to think they needed New Zealand any more… there were scurrilous claims in a reputable newspaper that New Zealand might be cut adrift from Sanzaar.
Fast forward 14 years, and it is a vastly different story. Despite only four years ago hosting a Lions tour, they’re pretty much broke.
Fifteen years ago they were splashing money around on rugby league drawcards, now they can’t afford to keep Will Skelton. They’ve wasted too much money trying to build the game from the top down, to the extent that they’ve had to levy the clubs, like landowners demanding taxes from the peasants.
They demanded expansion in a misplaced belief that it was somehow the responsibility of Sanzaar to grow the game in Australia, and this has truly backfired.
Their investment in a provincial championship came way too late, as did their move into the great sporting metropolis of Melbourne.
If they’d gone into Victoria while the iron was still hot from the World Cup it might have gained traction, but instead they took a soft option in Perth, banking on expatriate support and no end to the mining boom.
The ship had sailed by the time Melbourne became the fifth franchise, and it’s become clear Australia is trying to spread their butter over too much bread. The presence of so many New Zealanders who are surplus to requirements at home is ample evidence.
Internationally it’s not quite so bad. The Wallabies are still number three, but were owned by England last year and have not won the coveted Bledisloe Cup in almost 14 years, fuelling a sense of failure that expectant sports followers find impossible to tolerate.
TV numbers and crowd turnouts have dwindled, although participation numbers are still okay, despite a malicious and unscientific poll that suggested rugby was now battling alongside ballroom dancing.
Given what has gone on over the past 15 years, the chicanery and grandstanding of O’Neill in particular, it would be easy to take an unsympathetic viewpoint and let them sink, now things aren’t going so swimmingly.
There has been talk of letting South Africa go, and forming a Pacific-based competition with Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific Islands, Japan and the Americas, and it certainly has some appeal, but South Africa’s TV money, particularly that they draw from their proximity to the UK and European time zones, is too much to throw away. And besides, we have gained much from playing the South African teams, especially in their conditions.
What it might be time for is for NZR to get on the front foot, and tell them next door it’s time to stop lowering the tone of the neighbourhood, to accept that their subdivision has actually driven the prices down.
We need a return to those edgy, compelling battles of the past, and if that’s going to happen then there has to be a dose of reality, and some downsizing, and it has to happen soon, before rugby really does become less popular in Australia than ballroom dancing, and that Kingswood conks out again.