Rugby: Wallaby woes hurt game

Because Australia and New Zealand negotiate broadcasting rights together, our commercial fortunes are intertwined. A weak Australian market hurts New Zealand. Photo / Getty Images

As fun as it is to revel in the misery of the Wallabies, the chronic despair across the Tasman has the potential to hurt the game here.

New Zealand needs a strong Australia - their respective rugby fortunes, commercially at least, are intertwined.

Australia are anything but strong right now - the Wallabies have lost nine on the trot to the All Blacks and the code has seen its popularity and market reach plummet while $23 million has been blown since 2003.

All that money hasn't bought them a sausage. They have not won a significant trophy since 2002. Their Super Rugby efforts continually falter and last year not one home Wallaby test was a sell-out.

Rugby's fall from grace in Australia has been swift and spectacular and the World Cup looms as their only salvation. Win at the World Cup and the code could again capture hearts and minds. Even then, it will be a slow, painful climb to where the code sat in the Australian hierarchy at the beginning of the new millennium.

A few months before the 1999 World Cup, 107,000 people watched the Wallabies win their fourth straight test against the All Blacks with a record 28-7 victory.

The Bledisloe stayed in Australia from 1998 to 2002. The Lions were defeated. Captain John Eales was a national hero on the same scale as Mark Waugh and $45 million of profit was collected when they hosted, quite superbly, the 2003 World Cup, where the Wallabies played in the greatest final and came up 30 seconds short.

Since then, rugby's market share of the winter sports broadcast market has nearly halved from 24 per cent to 14 per cent.

It is, by a distance, the fourth winter code in Australia.

In 2001, 1.6 million people from five State capitals watched the Wallabies play the All Blacks. Last year, the equivalent match had a free-to-air audience of 513,000, boosted only slightly by the pay TV figures. Rugby is losing its grip in a country where the NRL can do no wrong, where the AFL seemingly has a bottomless pit of money and where the A-League expands its teams and reach.

If New Zealanders think they don't have to care, they are wrong. Australia and New Zealand hold hands at the broadcast table. They negotiate together and split their proceeds. A weak Australia means a commercially weak New Zealand. Australia has five times the population, therefore potentially five times the audience. These things matter - if the various Sanzar TV deals are broken down over the years, they would show Australia taking $35 million per year from the first one signed in 1995, which dropped to $25 million in 2006 and will climb to $33 million next year.

That's hardly progress, especially as the $33 million has to fund four teams and make partial payments to Melbourne, unlike the initial deal when Australia had just three Super12 teams. The concern is that with limited funds, Australia will raid New Zealand's talent pool - entice promising schoolboys and age-grade stars over the ditch.

The bigger worry is that, having stretched their players across five Super15 teams, Australia will be the weak link in the conference-based competition. They haven't had a winner since the Brumbies in 2004 and no one is betting on that changing next year.

The whole Sanzar premise is based on the Super15 being the toughest provincial competition in the world and on the Tri Nations being the toughest international competition. The Tri Nations especially needs drama, it needs rivalry and it needs for Australia to win a few more games than they have recently.

The All Blacks have won 17 of the last 20 tests against the Wallabies. Even New Zealand audiences will lose interest if the rivalry has no real edge.

Understandably, New Zealand Rugby Union chief executive Steve Tew says the critical issue is not that the Wallabies win more. He believes spectator interest will hold as long as the quality of Bledisloe tests remains high.

"The game in Christchurch had everything you'd expect from a Bledisloe encounter," he says. "They had a lot of ball and the game was on edge through the 80 minutes.

"From our perspective, we need a winning All Black team. We want intense battles with Australia where we win and then we are happy for Australia to win whenever they are not playing us.

"It is a no brainer - we want Australian rugby to be commercially strong. That Eastern seaboard is an important market."