O'Neill seeks NZ partnership
Wayne Smith | June 06, 2009
Article from: The Australian
ANY revived "third-tier" competition in Australian rugby could be linked with New Zealand's National Provincial Championship, according to ARU chief executive John O'Neill.
This week, O'Neill breathed new life into a major semi-professional competition to underpin the Wallabies and the four Super 14 teams when he told The Australian a modified version of the 2007 Australian Rugby Championship might be considered if the new SANZAR broadcast deal poured sufficient money into the ARU coffers.
But now he has foreshadowed the possibility of Australia and New Zealand merging their third-tier competitions to create a trans-Tasman series.
"It may be that part of the solution is a possible tie-up with the NPC," O'Neill said.
"Nothing has been formally broached with the NZRU but I certainly know that some of the shareholders within NZ rugby have raised it.
"New Zealand is in much the same position as we are. They won't know precisely what is possible until the broadcast deal is finalised and everyone has a better idea what their bottom line will be."
It is not the first time the possibility of an Australian involvement in the NPC -- or Air New Zealand Cup, to give it its formal title -- has been raised. But where in the past Australia has gone cap-in-hand seeking entry, this time both countries have compelling reasons to work together.
The existing 14-team NPC structure is teetering on the brink of financial collapse, with the NZRU planning to introduce major changes to prune it back to a more manageable size by 2011, although the new format might even be in place as early as next year if that proves possible.
A recent NZRU workshop on the competition advocated a 10-12 week window for the competition, play-offs included, and while details of the overhaul remain confidential, the proposed time frame makes it likely no more than 10 teams will be involved.
NZRU chief executive Steve Tew would not put a number on how many NZ provinces would be culled but did admit "fewer teams" would be involved.
When the NZRU recently ranked the teams in terms of their ability to comply with competition criteria, the order was Auckland, Canterbury, Wellington, North Harbour, Waikato, Hawke's Bay, Otago, Taranaki, Counties, Manawatu, Bay of Plenty, Southland, Tasman
and Northland.
Financial structures are crumbling across the competition but when the NZRU last year attempted to reduce it to just 12 teams, a groundswell of protests forced it to back down.
Nonetheless, the financial situation has continued to deteriorate, so much so that the provincial unions now are prepared to discuss such previous unmentionables as salary caps, promotion-relegation and team reductions.
O'Neill's suggestion that Australia might tie into a trans-Tasman competition raises a number of intriguing questions.
One of the main factors that killed off the ARC after just one season was the exorbitant cost of the air travel involved and almost certainly any domestic revival of the competition would involve culling Perth from the list of competing teams to reduce this element of the budget.
But unless the composite trans-Tasman third-tier competition was structured along parallel lines to the planned Super 15 expansion, where Australia, New Zealand and South Africa will play initially in separate five-team conferences on a home-and-away basis, the cost of air travel again could prove a killer.
Then there is the question of how the Australian teams would be structured. Australian opponents of the ARC argued that the eight artificially created teams cut themselves off from the tribal passions built up over a century of interclub competition in Sydney and Brisbane.
But any attempt to base Australia's entries around existing clubs could lead to serious mismatches because the New Zealand teams all represent provinces. And as the ranking list above illustrates, the most viable and successful of them are those unions that boast Super 14 teams. That could prove the model for Australia, with the existing four Super rugby teams joining with the still-to-be-decided fifth side to form the Australian component of a larger competition.
Such a structure would provide a meaningful competition for non-Wallabies Super 14 players, while also providing a pathway for those club players who can soon expect to find themselves in a backwater once the extended Super 15 season bites deeply into the current Sydney and Brisbane premierships.
Meanwhile, former Wallabies centre Michael Hawker has been appointed the new Australian Rugby Union director.
Hawker, who played 25 Tests from 1980-87, was voted on to the board at yesterday's ARU board meeting in Sydney.
He replaces Bob Dalziel as an independent director.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...015651,00.html
