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KEY POINTS:
Rugby league took giant strides in expanding into a national competition in 1994 and the following year the Warriors played their first game. Opportunity aplenty for healthy growth.
But instead the game went backwards, lurching from one crisis to the next with poor management and poor decision-making scarring
the history of the New Zealand Rugby League and the Auckland-based National Rugby League club.
The Warriors have sorted their front office and now the NZRL is doing the same in a long-overdue clear-out of hangers-on and bad practices.
The first and most obvious sign of improvement after Government agency Sparc yesterday delivered its damning report on the history of games played in the board room was the thumbs-up from Warriors chief executive Wayne Scurrah.
He was one of six members of the Sparc-appointed review committee and said afterwards the club and the NZRL would in future work more closely together. The NZRL's aim was to improve development of juniors to international level and the club would benefit by picking up some of that talent, Scurrah said.
Past chairman and current president, former District Court judge Trevor Maxwell, said he had been gratified by the review after working for some years in an environment of "negativity and darkness - there was never a feeling of progress".
NZRL chairman Ray Haffenden, who picked up the reins when three directors and the previous chairman, Andrew Chalmers, resigned last year, said the Sparc report had "revealed a lot of problems within rugby league over a long period". But it was not the time to dwell on the past or point the finger at anyone, he said.
Maxwell agreed. "The skeletons are all out of the closet now, the ghosts have been laid to rest."
Sparc CEO Peter Miskimmin said the report offered league a "circuit-breaker to arrest financial decline, low playing numbers and a loss of confidence from key funding and sponsorship partners".
There will be hope aplenty at grassroots level that this will be the case.
After the excesses of the Lion Red Cup and at the Warriors when they were owned by the Auckland clubs and then Tainui, an unhealthy attitude grew in the game of "take what you can get". There was also grumbling that little support was being felt at the bottom level.
League in general will not find it easy to recover support from sponsors, trusts and other backers as well as volunteers and supporters disaffected after news of gaming frauds by big names connected with the game, plus the mismanagement and lack of direction within the NZRL that led to jobs for the boys and overspending.
Sparc hopes the political and financial problems will evaporate once proper management is in place. There will be financial requirements and structures regarding gaming money "that people can't work around".
Haffenden said the existing NZRL board would move quickly to implement Sparc's demands.
"We can't afford to take our time. Continuing to do what we have been doing is not an option."
Haffenden has provided safe and steady hands at the wheel of a ship floundering under debt accumulated by predecessors.
After the extremes of Captain Bligh of Bounty fame and then the conservative Starbuck from Moby Dick, what's needed now is bold but controlled sailing into new waters.
In a game where confidence on the field is everything in the search for victory, it is confidence in what is going on off the field that is the primary requirement for rugby league's success in 2009.
