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This article from Wayne Smith in today's Australian is 100% on point, in my opinion. Well said that man.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/spor...0b73b9554c8959
WAYNE SMITH
ARU needs to be overhauled after this Super Rugby fiasco
It was my long-time former editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell who told me once that my greatest asset as a journalist was that I saw both sides of every argument; and my greatest weakness as a journalist was that I saw both sides of every argument.
Fair call. We each go with what we’ve got. So it may take me some time to arrive at conclusions that other people reached almost instantaneously.
Certainly in the case of the Australian Rugby Union’s handling of the process to dump one of its five teams from Super Rugby, I tried not to be critical. It was a hellishly difficult decision, one that called for strong, decisive leadership.
But it has been mishandled right from the start, at virtually every level, and now the ARU is utterly lost — hemmed in by *potential or actual lawsuits at every turn.
Even the men most likely to be hurt by its decision, Western Force coach Dave Wessels and Melbourne Rebels coach Tony McGahan, are appealing for an end to the agony of uncertainty. The ARU must find answers, and quickly.
How this all ends, I haven’t a clue, not now, not after everything rugby has been put through. But one thing now is inescapably clear — the ARU needs to be overhauled from top to bottom.
It starts with management. If chief executive Bill Pulver and deputy chairman Brett Robinson went to the London meeting of SANZAAR with the decision already made to drop the Force, then at least it was a defensible decision, even if not one that I or a host of people would agree with. Seemingly they told SANZAAR that the Force were now owned by the ARU and could be wrapped up with a minimum of fuss.
But details are now starting to emerge that they neglected to tell their joint-venture partners that in purchasing the licence from the Force last August, they signed an agreement that guaranteed the West Australians there would be a Super Rugby presence in Perth through to the end of 2020. It may be that the ARU didn’t think that clause would be a problem. By reducing the competition from 18 teams to 15, it may have thought that this voided the agreement, but that’s one hell of an assumption to make. And it’s also one hell of an oversight not to at least alert SANZAAR of the potential problem.
Now, the caveat here is that pretty much everything that has been done has been done in secret, so this information is sketchy and might be entirely off the mark. What information there is has come forth only in whispers and has had to be pieced together. It may be that there was a perfectly rational explanation for every action the Australian delegates took, but who would know?
What can be said with certainty is that SANZAAR sources have told The Australian they were shocked to find that there was an agreement in place between the ARU and the Force that pretty much made the club *unsackable.
What’s more, the ARU board only became aware of this same clause some time later. So presumably it was making decisions while it was not in possession of the full facts. More on this later.
Then there was the process of evaluating which club would be culled.
Initially, there was no process. It has decided on the Force and all the energy of the ARU was directed towards finding a justification that supported that conclusion. It was only when the ARU began to realise that it was about to encounter considerable opposition along the way that the search was widened to include the Melbourne Rebels and the Brumbies.
Even this was wrong. NSW and Queensland should have been thrown into the mix as well. And while they are the two heartland states and pretty much indispensable to Australian rugby, they should have been required to justify their existence.
That case might have been more awkward than it seems. The Reds could have been wound up as insolvent as recently as November; the Waratahs, meanwhile, are battling to pull a crowd in Australia’s largest city.
Nor should ARU chief operating officer Rob Clarke have been part of the process of selecting which team was culled. He is a former chief executive of both the Brumbies and the Rebels, as intimately involved with both clubs as it is possible to be, and it is understandable that Force fans feel dismayed by his involvement.
Clarke may well have felt that having Force boss Mark Sinderberry reporting directly to him also gave him a strong attachment to the Perth club but that’s not how it has been perceived. And as Clarke himself has often said, perception is reality.
And, although he hasn’t been directly involved in this process, any review of the ARU needs to take in the performance of Ben Whitaker in the high performance manager’s role. In some circles, he is widely praised, in others, not so much. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating and over the four years Whitaker has been in that role the skill levels of Australian players have fallen significantly compared to New Zealand players, while the under-20 program has descended into obscurity for a nation that prides itself on ranking in the top three globally.
As for Pulver himself, he has said that he would resign tomorrow if it would serve the good of the game. There is no doubting he had the good of rugby at heart but how will it be possible for him to lead the game after this?
It is one thing for the ARU directors to feel let down by the performance of management but if they really understood rugby, how would it have been possible for them to be misled?
It is said that virtually every ARU board meeting is consumed by finances, or rather the lack thereof.
When the game is in trouble, there is no doubt that finances are critical. But there is more to rugby than dollars and cents and somehow this has been lost at the upper levels of the game.
A lot of lip service has been paid to doing more for grassroots and there is no doubt the arguments of Brett Papworth and the Shute Shield clubs would have received a timely boost from Rebels coach McGahan’s comment overnight — that there were six forwards in his match-day squad of 23 who were not even on Super Rugby contracts. They were ring-ins from clubland — yet still they managed a draw with the Sharks.
So clubland is relevant today and can return to those bygone days when it was more relevant still.
But the game needs more than that. It needs a renaissance of its morale and spirit and vigour.
How many of the nine ARU directors are equipped to provide that?