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Wayne Smith, Rugby Union Editor | January 12, 2008
KIERAN LONGBOTTOM yesterday unobtrusively moved to the brink of a very significant achievement, when he became the first locally produced West Australian player to be awarded a Super 14 contract with the Western Force.
No-one's forgetting one of the Force originals, John Welborn. But to make his way in rugby, Welborn was forced to leave Perth and move to Sydney where he forced his way into the Waratahs and Wallabies.
But Longbottom has done it the hard way. With the exception of one year with Queensland Uni Colts, he has played all his rugby in WA, representing the state at under-15, under-16 and schoolboy level. For the past three seasons he has been a member of the Force academy.
A 22-year-old prop will always have the bulk of his rugby education still ahead of him, but last year Longbottom was given the biggest break of his life. Well, the biggest one before yesterday, when Force coach John Mitchell nominated him as the man most likely to inherit the Super 14 contract of Angus Scott, whose career sadly has been cut short by a heel injury.
Longbottom's big break, of course, was the Australian Rugby Championship. Suddenly his education shifted into overdrive.
Instead of pulling on the Rockingham jersey and bossing the locals in the Perth premiership, he found himself packing down in five ARC games for the Perth Spirit against some of the toughest props in the country. It wasn't just what he learned that was important. More important still was what Mitchell learned, and far earlier than would have been possible without the ARC.
Every Australian Super 14 team has a Kieran Longbottom story, thanks to the ARC. The Brumbies, Waratahs and Reds used the competition to determine which of their rising young players are ready for Super 14. Following the Australian Rugby Union's decision to dump the ARC, the Longbottoms of Australian rugby will have to bide their time, if their time ever comes.
The competition was always on the endangered list, always in the crosshairs of those Sydney powerbrokers who realised it had to be shot down if they were to achieve what they really wanted, a new competition built around a select group of powerful Sydney clubs.
Certainly the ARC made it easy for them by coming in so badly over budget, but the haste with which it was killed off was still unseemly and, frankly, suspicious.
Everyone knew dramatic savings needed to be made. Queensland was well advanced with a proposal to ditch one of its two teams and to generally rework the ARC into a major capital cities competition. It didn't get a chance to table them.
Shortly after a meeting of the Super 14 chief executives with the ARU that frankly left those officials bewildered and confused, the unilateral decision to scrap the ARC was sprung on the rugby community in the holiday hiatus before Christmas.
The competition that former Wallabies coach John Connolly only months ago described as the best thing to happen to Australian rugby in decades was dead, in the very year of its birth.
The decision was a major setback to the established professional outfits, but it devastated Victoria which had dusted itself off after the disappointment of seeing the fourth Super 14 team go to Perth.
VRU dynamos Gary Gray and Ron Steiner were left speechless. What could they say, after all, to all those sponsors and fans who had rallied behind the Melbourne Rebels? Sorry, our reach exceeded our grasp? Let's all just go back to suburban footy and forget about developing the game?
The ARC needed to be reworked and refined. Everyone knew that, most especially its chief architect, dumped ARU boss Gary Flowers.
There is no denying that the ARU's cash reserves are down, but that was going to happen anyway in a World Cup year, let alone in a World Cup year in which the long-awaited third tier competition finally, belatedly was launched. This year's figures will be dramatically better. Some $8million is heading the ARU's way, Australia's cut of the IRB's World Cup pie. As well, another $3m is set to flow into the ARU coffers from the Hong Kong Test against the All Blacks in November, another initiative of the Flowers regime.
And this season, it is Australia's turn to host two of the three Bledisloe Cup Tests. If 2007 was the recession Australian rugby had to have, 2008 always shaped as its year of economic sunshine.
So it's mischievous to now dump all the sins of Australian rugby in the lap of an administration brought down by those very people with a vested interest in seeing the ARC fail.
It remains to be seen what the ARU's vision for the future might be. Let's hope, for the sake of all those other Kieran Longbottoms out there, that there is one.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...012430,00.html