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The Australian12:00AM May 13, 2017
WAYNE SMITH
Senior sport writerBrisbane
@WayneKeithSmit
SANZAAR met in Tokyo yesterday to work out how to ruin *people’s lives.
It was, they tell me, just a *normally scheduled meeting, one piggybacking on a World Rugby gathering for the 2019 World Cup draw. On the agenda were discussions about the new eligibility rules, the global calendar and something else that I forget. Oh, and Super Rugby. Just a normal meeting, at the end of which *SANZAAR refused to release a statement telling anyone what the hell is going on.
Make no mistake, SANZAAR is ruining people’s lives, the *Australian Rugby Union is ruining lives. For the past month now, it has been the Western Force family — and by that I mean players, coaches, support staff, their wives and children — who have been put through hell, not knowing what is to become of them. And then, *abruptly, the ARU has simply lost interest and is not hectoring them anymore. It was like having a heartless landlord hammering on the door every day demanding overdue rent and then, suddenly, he is nowhere to be seen.
Why? Because now the ARU has found a new and potentially easier tenant to evict, the Melbourne Rebels. For months now, the Rebels have been told that they were impregnable, that they had an airtight contract and, besides, the owner wouldn’t sell the franchise if it meant closing down the Melbourne team. But now someone has lifted the lid, broken the seal and they have woken to find themselves contaminated. Does the ARU think there is no cost attached to this? Grown men and women are in tears.
The ARU prefers to act in *secrecy to avoid having to tell lies. In fact, it has been both secretive and untruthful. It stated after its board meeting in February that it had not chosen “a fall guy”, a team to be axed in the event that *SANZAAR decided — as it actually did in time — to trim Super Rugby from 18 teams to 15.
But at the SANZAAR gathering in London — don’t you wonder, by the by, how SANZAAR always manages to meet in supercool cities? — Australia reassured its joint venturers that it could divest itself of a team without major dramas. That was either code for the Western Force, which the ARU owned, or it was implicitly inferred. So the ARU either lied after its board meeting or it lied after London, take your pick.
No one is suggesting that they lied for devious reasons. They feared anything they said could be misconstrued. Yet as this saga has played out over the past two months, surely the ARU must be looking back over its entire *strategy and admitting to itself — if to no one else — that it got it spectacularly wrong. The truth would have been awkward and at times painful, but surely it was the more honourable way of doing this.
That’s been disappointing but, then, there have been disappointments all the way through this. Someone from Melbourne pointed out this week that it is the Aust*ralian Rugby Union. Well, where are the displays of unity? The rest of Australian rugby has cowered in the corner through all of this, as first the Force, then the Rebels were separated from the herd.
Keep your head down, don’t *attract attention. And, hey, wouldn’t Reece Hodge look good in our backline?
And where has the Rugby Union Players Association been? They are the players’ trade union and while it is understandable that they were deliberately lying low and didn’t want to poke the bear while it seemed the ARU would be forced to stick, after all, with all five teams, that boat, to totally mix my metaphors, looks to have sailed. They need to be on the ground in Melbourne, helping their people.
One person who has been truly inspiring through all of this has been Rebels coach Tony McGahan. Though his heart is breaking, he has still been leading the charge to hold a national summit to try to get rugby moving again. Through all the turmoil, McGahan recognises that the game is in a mess on every level and is trying to do something creative to help, yet still the silent resistance from the ARU to a *summit is almost deafening.
The idea of a summit was raised in this column on Monday but that’s no reason for the ARU to shy away from it. Other people have expressed precisely the same argument. It’s not a new idea and everyone who is not involved with the ARU or closely aligned to it *believes it necessary. Hell, when even the Super Rugby coaches are coming out and saying “We need this, we want this”, how can the ARU continue to hide behind privately organised meetings that may or may not ever take place?
Everyone is saying that Aust*ralian rugby is dying. My experience is that it is just the opposite. There is tremendous energy flowing through the club system and observe how closely the Wallabies draw for the 2019 Rugby World Cup was followed so closely. People are looking for a reason to get excited.
Right now, the body that should be channelling this energy, the body that indeed exists for no other reason, is short-circuiting it. The national summit was an idea. Good or bad, we’ll probably never know. But where are the ideas coming from the ARU? One official I contacted about the national summit told me when he took office a *couple of years ago that 14 separate papers were being prepared as part of a blueprint for Australian rugby. There had been enough talkfests, he indicated to me. I was flabbergasted … 14 papers prepared on the quiet. And I knew nothing about any of them! So I asked him what he had made of them. “Oh, I haven’t seen any of them yet.”
Presumably they are yet to be written or they are gathering dust in the author’s outbox. They need to be brought out into the light to allow rugby luminaries like Bob Dwyer and Rod Macqueen and John Connolly and Rod Kafer to debate their merits. The ARU is like a stately old mansion, too long shut up. It needs fresh air and clear heads. In short, it needs a clean-out.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/spor...264ebf97382c07