Former Wallabie turned journalist Peter Fitzsimons speaks to the team about the state of Australian rugby.
COMMENT:
Looking across the Tasman these past six months to assess the state of rugby, there's been nothing but concern to see a giant hole in the balance sheet, huge money controversially being forked out to big names to not actually play and the next generation of talentdrift off to other football codes.
New Zealanders have seen much the same thing when they have looked back across at Australia.
The only real difference being that heads have metaphorically rolled at Rugby Australia and the blood-letting has been extreme.
And while the situation in Australia has at times appeared out of control, dangerously reckless and destructive, it may also prove to be cathartic. They have, if nothing else, paved the way for a new beginning – one where there is no one in authority left protecting previous decisions or aligned to any particular strategy that they will cling to, rightly or wrongly, purely to save their own skin.
New Zealand Rugby needs a similar purge. The game here can't expect to move forward with fans, players, coaches and media on board if no one is held culpable for the massive about-face in Super Rugby strategy.
Someone in power needs to fall on their sword, or be pushed if necessary, to prove that executives can't survive by incessantly commissioning reviews to cover up their poor decision-making.
NZ Rugby chairman Brent Impey and chief executive Mark Robinson. Photo / Photosport
The time has come for New Zealand's executives to live on the same knife-edge as players and coaches.
A player can miss a kick for touch in a major test and pay for it with his test career. Ask Stephen Donald about that one.
A coach is only ever one poor campaign from termination and yet the executive team which has destroyed Super Rugby seems to believe they can all survive if they commission a review, five years too late, to try to fix it.
Current circumstances have delivered a greater sense of unity and mutual need between the game's many stakeholders, but even in this era of Glasnost, it would be grotesquely cynical and self-serving for anyone within the halls of power to blame Covid-19 for killing Super Rugby.
No one should be allowed to hide behind the pandemic and say it alone damaged the sustainability of Super Rugby – that the consequences of its arrival suddenly rendered a cross-border competition played across four continents and 11 time zones suddenly non-viable.
The competition started cracking in 2011 when the ill-fated, convoluted conference system was first introduced and then broke in 2016 when it expanded to 18 teams.
Media who suggested the concept was flawed, doomed even, would often receive irate phone-calls from NZR executives accusing them of sabotaging Super Rugby. Of knowing nothing about the economics of the professional game and claiming that negative coverage was the reason crowds were disappearing and interest dwindling.
When the NZ Herald wrote an editorial in 2016 suggesting that a reduction of teams would have given the competition a viable future and that a a greater local focus would more likely engage fans and players, NZR chief executive at the time Steve Tew, responded by saying: "We can sit in New Zealand and play ourselves but that won't last long until we are all finished.
"When we go to the next set of broadcasting deals we have to be sure we have a footprint in South America, a footprint in Asia and possible other markets or we will go bust."
Former NZ Rugby chief executive Steve Tew. Photo / Photosport
Turns out Tew, and consultancy group Accenture, who were paid millions to come up with a global expansion strategy for Super Rugby, were horribly wrong.
Expansion brought Rugby Australia to the brink of insolvency. It left South Africa Rugby with a major financial hole and had it not been for the 2017 British and Irish Lions tour, New Zealand, too, would have been on the edge of financial collapse.
Tew has gone, but others who backed this expansion remain. NZR's board signed off on the plans to expand and they can't all now distance themselves from their past, pretend they never supported this flawed concept.
Nor can they say they have acted in time to redeem the situation. NZR agreed, just last year, to five more years of Super Rugby being played across three continents and multiple time zones.
They had the chance to be bold and visionary, to see what everyone else could that South Africa and Argentina had to be cut loose and a radical new format constructed that cut travel and costs and increased intensity and integrity.
Across the Tasman, Raelene Castle was brave enough to see that she would drag Rugby Australia under if she stayed as chief executive.
New Zealand now needs some similarly selfless acts among its executives to serve as an admission of culpability that they were wrong about Super Rugby expansion.
