By Wayne Smith
May 23, 2009 New South Wales chairman Ed Zemancheff spoke for every Australian rugby administrator on Friday when he said that 2011 couldn't come quickly enough.

For any number of reasons, not just financial, the game in Australia desperately needs the extra product and extended exposure that the expanded Super 15 competition will bring in 2011.

The expansion exercise, drawn out and acrimonious as it has been, has ended in triumph for ARU chief executive John O'Neill and it's not just the sustained applause from around the country that would tell him so.

He will have trawled through the overseas websites and read blog after blog from South Africans and New Zealanders berating their own rugby officials for having let that bastard Australian outwit them again. How he would have loved every word of that.
But O'Neill would know better than anyone that this is a triumph to be celebrated with no more than the twist of a stubbie screw-top. There is a lot more to be done before the champagne corks start flying.

First there is the broadcast deal to be negotiated - does more product equal more money or, at the very least, cancel out the global economic downturn? And then there is the Collective Bargaining Agreement to be hammered out with the players union, RUPA.

About a year ago, the CBA was rolled over for another 12 months to give everyone the chance to see what the rugby landscape looked like once the dust of the SANZAR battle had settled.

Since then, of course, a whole new sandstorm has blown up, the global economic crisis.

But already through the haze of settling debris it's possible to discern the fuzzy outline of a fifth Australian franchise on the not-so-distant horizon. And the ramifications of that are going to be huge.

On the face of it, one more team shouldn't make much difference. But this team, whether it's based in Melbourne, western Sydney or the Gold Coast, will be the one that pushes Australian rugby right to the brink.

Its resources, financial as well as player numbers, are about to be stretched as never before.

All of which makes a conference call on Tuesday of the chairmen of the state unions so significant. It's a shame it's all being done over the phone. Yet in a way, the conference call is a metaphor for the business at hand - how can the business of rugby be conducted more efficiently?

The last time Australian rugby went through the exercise of setting up an expansion franchise, it got it wrong in so many ways. So jealous were the east coast clubs of their own operations they refused to allow the ARU to give Western Force any help that they weren't themselves receiving.

This despite the fact they had built up their structures over more than a century, whereas the Force was starting from scratch. It was selfish and small-minded and everyone knows where it led.

But in the rush to correct the mistakes of 2004-05, the game has to make certain it doesn't now make a completely new set of mistakes at the other end of the spectrum.

The ARU wants to change the ownership structure, to run the new franchise in conjunction with private equity. Fine. But how exactly is that going to work? The ARU presumably will be the majority shareholder so what, say, will their private partners get for their 49 per cent investment?

If Australia's cut of the SANZAR broadcast agreement is, say $150 million, how much of that money is going to end up in the hands of private investors?

And what tensions will be created by having four franchises run by state bodies and one by the ARU? What happens, for example, if the ARU insists on drafting players from the other franchises to fill out the new team's playing roster?

It could all get ugly and confrontational but that's not the intention of Zemancheff and the other chairmen. Indeed, just the opposite.

Far from limiting the role of the national body, Zemancheff is advocating the ARU assume more central control.

In 2011, the number of Super rugby matches played in Australia - not counting finals - will jump from 26 to 40. That's an increased workload for every franchise.

Surely it makes sense, Zemancheff is arguing, for the ARU to centralise such things as ticketing, marketing, IT services and match-day presentations, rather than having five franchises duplicating each other.

Cutting costs and cutting services is dumb, but cutting costs to enable the unions to spend more money where it's needed just makes smart business sense.
As it is, NSW and the ARU already are dovetailing their operations in Sydney to save money.

Apparently, their computers aren't quite talking to each other yet but their officials are. It's an important start.

There is nothing like economic hardship to reshape industry and, let's face it, Australian rugby, at best, is only a $200 million-a-year industry. It needs to be lean, mean and focused.

The Super 14 football squads are already feeling the pain, being trimmed back from 33 to 31 to cut costs going into next season. Those are unsustainable player numbers once the expanded season starts but they're necessary for the moment.

And the same ruthlessness is being seen on the commercial side of operations.
On the wider front, Australian rugby might need to split into two separate streams - one board to manage the business of rugby, one to manage the game of rugby.

Right now, that distinction is hopelessly blurred and the best way to start a debate and/or a fist fight in rugby circles is to pose the question: Does the game grow from the top-down or from the bottom-up?

Club officials will argue the former, and that by the time the nutrients filter through the Wallabies, and on through New South Wales Waratahs, Brumbies, Force and Queensland Reds not a whole lot trickles out into clubland.

They will argue, too, that Australian rugby is moving further away from its traditional reliance on the Sydney, Brisbane and, to a lesser extent, Canberra club competitions and that the Wallabies of 2012 are already travelling a different and far more elitist pathway than the one their predecessors trod.

They've all been identified at school, put into Academy programs and prepared for the day when they will push up through the Reds or Waratahs or whatever into the national side.

ARU officials will point to a Ben Alexander and insist that he doesn't fit that mould, that he in fact made it into the gold jersey the old-fashioned bottom-up way. Not quite true, given that he got his big break from playing in the ill-fated Australian Rugby Championship, but that's another story.

Yet, certainly, when cutbacks are being discussed, it's only fair to ask why they weren't imposed on the ARC last year, rather than simply killing off the competition because it ran over budget.

One thing is sure, the current debate over whether Australian rugby has the depth to fill a fifth franchise wouldn't now be nearly as intense if the third-tier ARC hadn't been garrotted.

This is all too much for a phone hook-up of the state chairmen to canvass, especially since the teleconference originally was organised to present a united response to ARU chairman Peter McGrath's request to the individual states for recommendations on possible ARU constitutional reforms.

But this is the moment for Australian rugby to step back and take the big-picture approach. The Super rugby expansion has delivered just about everything Australia could have wished for; more matches, a domestic inter-provincial series woven into a wider international competition and a longer season that allows the game to at least challenge AFL and the NRL through August and September.

The game has reached its tipping point. Either it does a William Webb Ellis and picks up the ball and runs with it. Or it over-balances and falls flat on its face.




http://www.foxsports.com.au/story/0,...-23217,00.html