Gregor Paul: Who's to blame for Aussie rugby mess?

Matt Hodgson of the Force makes a speech after playing his final game. Getty Images.

With Australian rugby's dirty laundry continuing to be flung out of the hamper on a daily basis, a new picture is forming about where blame lies for making this catastrophic mess.

For the last 18 months or so the players - Super Rugby through to the Wallabies - have, certainly in New Zealand, been seen to be the single biggest problem blighting the game across the Tasman.

Performance and results have been interpreted as irrefutable proof that the problems start and finish with the lack of quality being put on the field each week.

But what's emerging now is that the players are not necessarily the cause of Australian's demise but a symptom. They sit above the line, visible, easy to judge and easy to blame.

Yet it seems they can fairly argue that they are victims of a governance and administrative regime that has simply blundered from one poorly considered plan to the next.

The damage to Australian rugby, which is extensive, has been caused in the boardroom rather than the changing room.

How much money has been lost is staggering. The Rebels have cost the Australian Rugby Union $17.5 million since they were formed in 2011. The Western Force have cost $5.5 million and in the last three years, the ARU has a lost a combined $12.7 million.

At some stage in the last six years the national body has had to bail out four of its five Super Rugby teams, with the Waratahs having not needed a cash injection since taking one a decade ago.

It's hard to believe that there has been genuine adherence to a fiscally responsible growth strategy. The ARU have appeared to simply want more teams and continue to invest in them despite not having the resources to do so or any resounding business rationale.

Spend for today and ignore tomorrow. But tomorrow has arrived and some serious questions are looming about how the ARU managed to create such an unholy mess.

Or at least these questions should be coming because the somewhat uncomfortable truth in all this is that World Rugby and Sanzaar have been eager and ready to interfere in the governance of Pacific Island nations' rugby unions and freely air their concerns about the lack of expertise they have seen.

When a black hole appeared in the accounts of the Samoan Rugby Union a couple of years back, World Rugby had the auditors in quick smart, poking around. That led to changes in personnel within the Samoan Rugby Union and a definite sense that World Rugby was keen to have a direct presence there to keep an eye on things.

Talk about lack of trust and it is this which essentially remains the biggest barrier to a team from the Islands being granted Super Rugby inclusion.

Sanzaar has no concerns about the playing base, but the governance and administration has been flagged as an area that needs to be improved: an area where trust has to be gained.

And yet, funnily enough, the far more considerable problem for Sanzaar is clearly the governance and fiscal management of the heavily corporate ARU. But does anyone want to acknowledge that openly?

Does anyone within Sanzaar want to stand up and express concern that a group of well educated chaps, who have all held super important city jobs in the past have brought not just Australian rugby, but Super Rugby, to the brink of collapse?

Unlikely. Rugby, for all its claims that it is trying to embrace diversity, still finds itself held captive to a secret network mentality.

It remains much easier for those who sit around Super Rugby boardroom tables to protect themselves at all costs and divert blame elsewhere.

So here we sit with Australian rugby in ruins and arguments made that the sporting market is a tough one at the moment and everyone is feeling the squeeze, while in the same breath diminishing the prospects of a Super Rugby team being taken to Pasifika by casting aspersions on the ability of the Island unions to manage their own financial affairs.